The comments here are full of delight. So many people who had others over a barrel and could have charged so much money but didn’t! And it actually still seemed to have worked out great in the long run.
A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
81–90 of 265 posts
Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
#82I 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…
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
Last time a headhunter managed snatch me was weird. I wasn't really active before deadline because I was on a holiday trip and the headhunter said "it's okay, let's call after your holidays". I wasn't actually looking for a new job but couple of the buzzwords sounded promising so I ended up having calling one of those chitchat calls with the headhunter which then led to a chitchat with the company guys.
When I was meeting the company guys, I'd updated and printed my puny resume in case they would've wanted it but realised they had "my resume" already. Basically the headhunter had copy pasted my puny LinkedIn profile data into their some sort of resume template and the guys were thinking I was actively looking for a new job.
Weird coincidences but ended up taking the job and haven't regretted after 2,5 years.
Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
#83Earlier 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…
Many people do get hired cold, but it is the last choice of anyone hiring. If you know the right person you skip to the front of the line with no competition.
Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
#84I filled potholes and fixed roads for 4 summers and it's one of my fondest memories.
Fucking A, man.
Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
#85For me, the key take-away from this story is right at the end, where he contemplates whether he short-changed himself. If you look at it on a per-hour basis, he got paid decently ($100 for a few hours work in the 80s? Incredible!). However, if you look at it from the perspective of the business value he delivered to Jim in that transaction, it was a bargain for Jim ($100 once-off to fix a problem taht was costing many multiples of that each month? Hell yes!).
And therein lies a fantastic reminder that if you can frame tthe cost of your work in terms of the value you will provide to your customer, rather than a flat labour rate for your time, you stand to earn a lot more.
Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
#86I love this. When I was 17 my dad got me a summer job on the plant he worked at. 40 hours a week in the parts shop, ordering parts, getting parts, and running around to different places to pickup parts. Actually I didn't mind it, but it was hot and dirty and my dad was my boss.
They had a computer system there to keep the inventory, running dBase III and hooked up to a NetWare network.
First day: No reports could be printed. Reloaded the various drivers, re-ran the reports.
Second day: They told me about a bug that caused the counts to be off so after checking things in, I had to manually add the right answers to the totals. Fixed the bug in dBase app.
Third day: The pull me to the front office, I'm working in the IT department and somebody's else kid is working in the parts shop.
Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
#87I have a kind of similar story when I started studying in the late 2000s years. There was a company that had a specialized and really expensive measurement device. But the vendor went out of service. They changed part of their system but kept the measurement device only to find out it could not talk to the new system because the file system of the data was proprietary to the measurement device. I got a student job at…
This is super similar to my start. I was hired at 17 one summer to do data entry for a surveying company, by putting timesheets created in Excel into a central system for billing clients. That got boring after a day, so I figured out how to use VBA (Excel on Macintosh System 8!) and wrote a macro that I linked to a button and put on the spreadsheet template, hidden off in the corner somewhere. When I got the next set of sheets back I hit the buttons and my job was done.
I showed the bosses, and was immediately put to work on some much more interesting stuff linking Lotus Notes with SQL Server for reporting and dashboarding, and then I was off to the races.
(The previous year I'd spent the summer making concrete garden ornaments with a group of ex-cons in a shed in the back of a farm - an experience which certainly made me appreciate the comforts of doing spreadsheets in an air-conditioned office, though my muscles were never quite as good.)
Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
#88I’d be curious to hear opinions on how much he should have asked for—what could he have gotten away with and still landed the job? Would $1,000 (in 1982 money) have been too much?
$100 in 1982 is about $275 today. $1k ($2.75k today) feels high to me because of the combination of unknown teenager and the fact that programmer pay was relatively lower in 1982. And if you scale that up to $4k per week that’s $11k per week in today’s money which feels pretty crazy for a teenager. $400 per week in 1982 is a salary of like $60k in today’s money. At 20 hours per week that sounds like a good deal.
> And if you scale that up to $4k per week that’s $11k per week in today’s money which feels pretty crazy for a teenager.
Maybe that's because minimum wage did not scale to match inflation since 1982. If it had, I don't think $11k would sound as crazy.
Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pr…
When you are involved in hiring, it's surprising just how bad most resumes are. Have a single page of highlights that are going to make me want to talk to you. The interview is the time to go deep on details, if that's how the conversation goes.
Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work
#90Great story, and that approach to troubleshooting ought to be familiar to anyone that worked in IT and seemed to "magically" figure out problems (at least to anyone observing them). One note on editing - you use the phrase "to be honest" in two consecutive sentences in the first paragraph.
Honestly honest, honest!