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A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

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Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#71

Post by bluedino »

yabones wrote: post #50
bluedino wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Bob was reading through a local Linux User Group (LUG) mailing list and he saw a name he recognised: mine. I had the opposite happen. I took a job doing some programming, some Linux administration, some helpdesk. I came across a convoluted database setup, nobody in their right mind would run multiple servers on the same machine this way... After researching the issue, I found that it was totally unnecessary, and l…

When I was younger, I inherited a lot of old PC hardware from my father. One particular motherboard had a massive gouge through the heatsink for the southbridge, and I could never figure out why. One day, I was trying to get Mac OSX to run on this particular system, and on page six of google search I finally found a guide to configuring the BIOS for this board that actually worked! It was one of the very first boards…

Sounds right up there with filed-down cards or connectors that had longer grooves cut in them!

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#73

Post by brazzy »

Apparently this is the "story time" thread, so here's mine, of how I hacked the Linux kernel without ever having written more than maybe 50 lines of C code.

This was in early 2001, I was an exchange student in Japan, and I'd bought a really cool gadget in Akihabara that almost nobody had heard about: a hardware MP3 player. For storage, it used MMCs (precursor of SD cards), affordable ones held 32MB. To get music onto those cards, I also bought a USB card reader.

And there I ran into problems: the PC in my dormitory room was a used Pentium Pro desktop I'd gotten very cheaply without an OS, and I'd installed Linux on it. But at that time, USB support on Linux was still rather spotty, and while the card reader was in principle supported as a mass storage device, the USB driver would reproducibly freeze up after a short time accessing it.

As mentioned above, my C skills were basically non-existing, but compiling your own kernel was at that time still a pretty common thing for Linux users to do, so I had some experience with that. And I was motivated. I enabled kernel debug output, and discovered that just before freezing up, the driver would report that it had received an event with a certain ID. I found the code that handled events, and I found the code that handled the problematic event. I looked at it and realized that I was many months of learning away from being able to fix it.

So instead, I deleted it. I simply made the driver ignore that type of event.

It worked. I could use the card reader to put MP3 files on the MMCs and listen to them on the player.

I felt a strange mixture of achievement and embarassment.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#74

Post by Pasorrijer »

jerf wrote: post #65
movedx wrote: 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 & e…

This. This is why I always encourage people who I mentor to have a skills section.

My first job I got the interview because at the time I was attempting to turn a snowmobile into a hovercraft. I had plans and everything.

I put this on the resume.

The first question in the interview? "Look, if nothing else we had to bring you in to ask. How the hell are you planning on turning a snowmobile into a hovercraft?!?"

The project never went anywhere, but it got me the job.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#75

Post by ed25519FUUU »

cmos wrote: post #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 g…

Such a fun story. I’m glad you and Al still hung out.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#76

Post by vidarh »

kindall wrote: post #69
bluGill wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 In…

It depends a lot on your network and pure luck.

Here's an example of how much it can matter:

* I co-founded my first company with people I met at university.

* We got our first investor thanks to a chance encounter between said investor and one of my co-founders at a bar.

* When we exited that company, our investors lawyer arranged a meeting for us with another of his clients, who hired us.

* One of the execs at that company hired me for his next startup, and introduced me to his brothers, so I could work part-time for them until he got funding.

* One of my co-workers at that company was one of my co-founders at my next company, and our other co-founders were friends of that person. One of them had worked for the VCs who invested in our first round.

* [I went to Yahoo for a couple of years -- no connections there.]

* The general counsel at my last pre-Yahoo startup pulled me into my next startup.

* [I then went to a web dev agency, no connections there]

* The co-founder of the company I worked at before the web-dev agency contacted me about some contracting, and I ended up joining full time (my current job)

So Yahoo and the web dev agency are the only places I've worked over the last 26 years where my resume has mattered. Even then, at the web-dev agency I name-dropped one of people who'd hired me previously, and it impressed them, so who knows how much my resume really mattered there either.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#77

Post by stuff4ben »

jmmcd wrote: post #2

Key quote which shows that this young person was a problem-solver, even if his computer skills weren't elite: > I created a “good” BASIC file from scratch [...] Then I compared it to one of the “bad” ones.

it reminds me of the time I "hacked" a strip poker game on my C64. I noticed some files on disk had a number after them and assumed they were images. I just reversed the numbers and voila, I started out with a naked lady that gradually got clothed. I didn't really care to learn poker anymore after that.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#78

Post by vidarh »

jerf wrote: post #65
movedx wrote: 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 & e…

Second this. And especially the "I participated in" bit - that almost immediately makes me heavily discount the value of that experience because it tells me nothing and it's exactly what someone who has had only peripheral involvements but wants to play up their importance would say.

If they get through to an interview, fine, they'll get a chance to be specific, but failing to be specific might well get them filtered out before that.

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