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…
A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
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Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
#62Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
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#64Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
#65I 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…
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
#66Earlier 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…
Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
#67Same 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…
Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
#68Same 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
#69Earlier 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.
Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
#70Same 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.