Live data from Hacker News

A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

madned.substack.com

61–70 of 265 posts

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#61

The luck and the postscript really resonated with me. For more than 30 years now, I've been telling people I hit the jackpot: Computer programming is something I'm really good at, that I enjoy doing and that pays really well. Very few people get all three. I had to work summer jobs though, starting at 15: road crew, pounding spikes on the railway, lumberjack. I'm not sure I would have been better off for not having t…

The author said in a postscript that he was worried about seeming elitist. I didn't think it was elitist at all, and I completely understand why it was a good choice for him to write BASIC code. However, I also did manual labour in the summer when I was ~20. There was nothing wrong with it. I would certainly recommend a brief stint of it to a young person, especially if you are training towards a sitting down/talking…

Part of why it didn’t come off as elitist for me is that everyone had their own story; his dad was relatable, his mother supportive and he wanted to not disappoint them. The car dealer guy sounded awesome and not at all like someone he looked down on.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#62
Here's mine. I'd just coming to take my GCSE's and decided to audit the school's website which was a Frontpage '97 powered site. I found the passwd file in the _vti_cnf dir (iirc) and ran it through a brute forcer. Found the password quite easily but instead of defacing decided to inform the webmaster. They were impressed and ended up getting me some paid work experience at ICL for the summer, working on an NT4 rollout (those were the days). If I'd defaced the site or done something a teenager would have perhaps done to impress his peers then I wouldn't have had that experience which definitely helped to get another job. It's funny how so much of life can pivot on quick, seemingly insignificant choices.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#64
It was 1992 and I was a high school senior. My teacher got me a job at the local DPW in the electical department. I was to work in the warehouse under a guy named Al who was an old timer and lost his hand in a forklift accident 30 years prior. My job was to clean the warehouse, and when I was done Al told me to 'go hide somewhere' which I did, at the top of the shelves 20' in the air, which I had also cleaned. This got boring and so I wandered into the main office where people were huddled over a computer. They were doing a mail-merge with quick basic to inform customers that their power would be out, and it wasn't working. I looked over their shoulders and it was exactly what I had been doing to send out mailings to companies for free stuff as I had read in Radio-Electonics magazine. I fix the problem, and the Chief Engineer said 'come with me' and takes me to the (air conditioned!) sub-station and into an even colder computer room where they had just setup the SCADA system to control the towns breakers and monitor the power. Nobody knew how to program it, so he pointed to a 3' pile of manuals and said this was my new job. By the end of the summer we saved the town millions by siphoning power from the local college at peak power demand. I still hung out with Al, and helped him in the mornings. The linesmen still made fun of me, even more so when I accidentally turned off half the towns power for 15 minutes.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#65
post #23

I love stories like this. I have one of my own, actually. When I was first getting into IT I started sending out CVs. Mine was terrible. I had been working in call centres for years at this point and all my "experience" was basically self-taught, so not really experience at all. As a result my CV was void of any actual content a hiring manager in IT would want to read, thus it was binned a lot. I applied for a job at…

As someone currently wading through resumes and kinda worried about missing some one like this, here's a tip to anyone else like you: The purpose of a resume is to get you hired. If you have something like an incredible technical sound driver support email chain like that... put a link to it in your resume. Yeah, your resume has standard fields, and those are indeed sorted on by HR, so don't leave out the skills & experience... but otherwise, the resume is free form. Generally not prose exactly, but free form. Link to ANYTHING you think will help you get the job.

And don't just say "I participate in some LUG"... that can mean you show up to the meetings once every couple of months to eat the free food. Show your helpfulness in an email chain. Show a project that you did with them with a link that explicitly says you did a big portion of it. If no such link exists, get one created!

By no means do I promise wonders if you do this. HR filters may still eat your resume. But if you do get through to a real human, they may look at those things, and the ones who will understand what this means are the ones you want to work for anyhow.

If you've got the skills to pay the bills but your resume looks like any other high school dropout's, I can tell you, from the other side of the desk, you've given me no way to tell any different. It may stink that all we have are resumes in the initial process... but at least that resume is under your control. (Mostly. Sometimes it gets chewed on. But speaking for myself, I'm looking at raw resumes straight from the candidate and that's not uncommon.) Don't be afraid to use it, and don't be afraid to toot your own horn, that's the whole point of this particular document.

(Similarly, to the extent possible without lying, don't say "I participated in some project" as your work experience. Write something you did in the project. Don't say "I participated in a billing system upgrade", say how you rewrote the UI in React to conform to accessibility standards and made it run 10 times faster than before and customers uniformly loved it and paid lots more money or whatever. "Participation" could be "I had my hand held for every bug as I struggled to keep up" and it could be "I stepped up and took more responsibility than anyone expected and almost single-handedly completed the project, freeing up the other developers" or anything in between. Unfortunately, based on experience, I kinda have to assume the worst because it's usually right. If "the worst" interpretation of that phrase isn't right, don't leave it open to me!)

Believe me, if you're doing Linux support on a mailing list, or anything even remotely like that, you stand out, at least to the right people. Do whatever it takes to work that on to the resume somehow. The "standard resume form" is a skeleton to be fleshed out, not a straightjacket of form.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the providers of the software also provided the editor, it was just to silo you in.

No, that doesn't sound right. Probably more like: " The RDOS file system provided means for protecting files by setting attributes. Because RDOS, not being a multi-user system, had no notion of file ownership, attributes applied to all programs that accessed a file. The sense of the attribute bits was, in most cases, the opposite of that in Unix; if the bit was set, the operation was prohibited. Files were by default…

thanks for this! I've always wondered what the deal was, and teen me did not do any research on why the hack worked- once I got the files visible I just moved on. It was almost certainly this RDOS attribute stuff you show here I was playing with (also I took some artistic license in the post, not really sure it was 'F' vs. 'E'.)

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#67
post #55

Same here, thanks Ned, this really touched me. I was 9 yo on a hot Italian summer day of 1985 when my dad bought his first computer for the bag-handcrafting company he still has with mom. I had my C64 since 1983 and I was also quite fluent in Basic at that point, so I was super curious to see the new IBM XT 8088D in action. The sales agent from this "big" Italian company arrived, unboxed the PC, and started to explai…

I wonder if with this "big" Italian company you mean Olivetti. They had their own 8088 PC and if I remember well they also sold IBM back in the 80s.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#68
post #67
post #55

Same here, thanks Ned, this really touched me. I was 9 yo on a hot Italian summer day of 1985 when my dad bought his first computer for the bag-handcrafting company he still has with mom. I had my C64 since 1983 and I was also quite fluent in Basic at that point, so I was super curious to see the new IBM XT 8088D in action. The sales agent from this "big" Italian company arrived, unboxed the PC, and started to explai…

I wonder if with this "big" Italian company you mean Olivetti. They had their own 8088 PC and if I remember well they also sold IBM back in the 80s.

Same here. The machines were really good looking too.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#69
post #51
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a thread on HN a week ago [1] about "How to write a resume that converts" and the most voted comment starts with a sentence "The importance of resumes has been overstated for many years now, and I look forward to the day they are phased out entirely."... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27112542

It is, and always been: who you know more is more important than what you know.

People always say that, but only one of the full-time jobs I've had in my thirty-year career has come from networking. In one other situation I was the guy who got several former co-workers hired, all at once, a frankly freak occurrence I still don't quite believe actually happened. My current job, I was contacted out of the blue by the team's manager on LinkedIn. Most of my jobs have come from being active on the Internet, or else from applying cold.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#70
post #67
post #55

Same here, thanks Ned, this really touched me. I was 9 yo on a hot Italian summer day of 1985 when my dad bought his first computer for the bag-handcrafting company he still has with mom. I had my C64 since 1983 and I was also quite fluent in Basic at that point, so I was super curious to see the new IBM XT 8088D in action. The sales agent from this "big" Italian company arrived, unboxed the PC, and started to explai…

I wonder if with this "big" Italian company you mean Olivetti. They had their own 8088 PC and if I remember well they also sold IBM back in the 80s.

Thanks, yep I think you are right about Olivetti, but in this case the company was Buffetti, a national-wide office supplier company that moved into software in the '80s to surf the PC era, cooperating with IBM for the hardware. I think at that point that was the first version of their software, and the department didn't last a long time.
Post reply on HN