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A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

madned.substack.com

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Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#91

Post by vitaflo »

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…

>People always say that, but only one of the full-time jobs I've had in my thirty-year career has come from networking.

Funny, only one of the gigs I've gotten in my 30 year career has come from not networking...my first one. Every job after that has come about because of people I know recommending me for the job.

This has been super helpful over the past 15 years as I've been an independent consultant. In fact, I went indie because I had a network.

I don't need to look for gigs anymore, people come to me. I turn down way more gigs than I can take. And I haven't had to have an actual interview for a job in over 20 years.

I'm sure this isn't the norm, but it certainly makes work life a lot easier.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#92

Post by [deleted] »

doix wrote: post #43
mxcrossr wrote: post #29

Ok but… why? Does anyone have enough knowledge to speculate why that bit would prevent you from reading the code?

The fact that it's a single bit confuses me. If it was a full null byte (0x00) it would be easier to explain. C strings are null terminated, so you could assume the editor stopped reading when it hit "the end of a string" but BASIC still executed it? Or if it was some unreadable ASCII character, maybe it worked like an EOF in the editor? But the fact that he switched it from an F to an E gives me no clues. This stuff…

[deleted]

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#93

Post by JJMcJ »

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…

> Apparently my CV was worse than I thought.

I have seen some awful resumes, including for people with PhDs and long records of accomplishments. Even people who have been through resume writing seminars at job search organizations.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#94

Post by irrational »

bluGill wrote: post #51
pulse7 wrote: 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.

I think that is often true, but I work for a Fortune 500 company and did not know anyone who worked there before getting hired. In the 20 years I’ve worked there I’ve been involved in tons of interviewing potential hires. Every single one got their foot in based on their resume. I’ve never seen anyone hired because they knew someone at the company. I’m sure it happens, I’ve just never met anyone it has happened to.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#95

Post by jugg1es »

I have a story similar to many of the others here. Mine was in the mid 90s when a kid could make good money developing websites. The hardest part was the client interactions, which is not something a 14 year old is particularly good at.

But the real take-away is that this era of computing was a true green field for the kids growing up in it. My cousins, who are over 10 years younger than me, grew up in a totally different world and, despite having used computers their whole life, have no idea how they work or how to build stuff with them.

A childhood spent writing batch files in order to run DOS X-Wing is very different than one spent loading a CD into the 1st gen Xbox.

I feel bad for my own kids, who are surrounded by technology that is walled off and inaccessible. Even 'View Source' on web pages is virtually useless now-a-days. It's a lot harder to get into the internals of systems than it used to be.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#97

Post by mad_ned »

jmuguy wrote: post #33

Great 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.

whups. i really need to hire an editor, with all that crazy substack money :-)

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#98

Post by tomkat0789 »

Reading this reminded me of a humorous Onion video titled "Report: 95% Of Grandfathers Got Job By Walking Right Up And Just Asking" [0].

Scrolling around the comments, I'm not seeing any stories newer than the 90's. Given the layers of HR rules, proprietary software shenanigans, and corporate management, I expect similar stories are rare today.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV_6RYVbNaw

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#99

Post by lifeisstillgood »

zwog wrote: post #38

I 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…

Its weird how luck plays a part in all this - I remember as a Student temping for the giant Audit firm, Arthur Andersen (become accenture eventually). I was doing something like typing from one system to another. I think I found VBA and demonstrated how I could do a weeks work in a lunch hour.

My boss took one look, freaked out and I was back at the Temping agency.

We are still very far from a Software Literate society.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#100

Post by devnull255 »

I love this story because the story has a an unwritten and deeper title "Do what you love and love what you do". True, while the unwritten title may not have grabbed most of those here who really appreciated it (myself included), it underlies what arguably really motivates a lot of teens to work any job, which is working a job doing what they like.

I was "tricked" or "crimped" into my first job the day before my 16th birthday. I accompanied my dad on a shopping trip, and he asked the manager there if he was hiring, gesturing to me. I didn't have a chance to express my own point of view in the course of this conversation. And by the time we left the store, I was supposed to show up the next day to be hired.

I wasn't thrilled to work there, but the first paycheck I received motivated me to continue working. It funded my evenings out and my sci-fi and comic book collecting, and let me save for my first car, a '71 red Buick Skylark with powerful V8.

But I would have liked it better if the story of my first job was more like this story.

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