101–110 of 265 posts
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…
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 diff…
In the meantime, I’ll start the kids on my old Apple ][e if I can smuggle it by my spouse.
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.
I’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.
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 socie…
Got reamed because "there's no way that is accurate and it might mess something up".
They where renaming the file based on the date of review, and the creators name.... Both of which were in the damn metadata.
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 socie…
Then a few days later, I happened to talk to someone from the accounting side about this experience. She mentioned that they were actually also tracking these same numbers and apparently had an automated system already. The production floor just knew nothing of it and had been doing the same task by hand forever. I guess the realization how inefficient organizations can be was probably the greater learning experience for me there.
Unfortunately I didn't have the experience or perseverance to actually work my way through a highly custom CMS, one that seemed to be forced on most dealerships. I went in thinking there'd be a blob of PHP somewhere, or some code to look into. There was none, only an endless series of silver-tinted forms.
I gave up, said this was way out of my depth, and despite their insistence refused to bill them for the time. It was enough for me, as a young whippersnapper, to say that I worked for Mercedes (for a day).
Good to see OP had a similar-ish run-in but managed to see it through.
The most interesting thing is probably that in 1982 or whatever you could find a nice summer gig, work 20h/week for the summer, and pay a full academic year and a computer.
Also $400/week in 1982 was fantastic money for an 18 year old. So a normal school-kid could not, in fact, replicate this.
For starters, this was largely a phenomenon confined to a narrow strip of time from the late eighties to the late 00s. Before that, computers were too expensive and restricted for most teens to have access to, even fairly well-off ones. After that, smartphones hit, people moved away from desktops and local computing/admin to phones and consolidation in the cloud(SaaS etc), and a generation that didn't grow up with computers was replaced with a generation that did. So the days of "Hey, I know how to do that computer stuff!" "Great! Get in here!" are largely over.
Second, even in that time period, most teens that knew their way around a system never managed to hook up with one of these sweet deals. You'd (begrudgingly) provide support for friends and family for free, and maybe make a few bucks off some extended work for a friend of a friend, but nothing large or ongoing. It's like hitting sports really hard in high school and college: some will go pro. Most will not.
I'm not trying to be a downer with any of this. But the story of the wiz kid who makes it big by accident has essentially become an archetypal story by now in some circles, and it's important to remember it's more mythology than reality. Most teenage nerds who liked messing with computers as a hobby didn't spin it up into an explosive career overnight. Some decided to get more formal training, and gradually built a career in the traditional way. For many more, it never became anything more than a hobby, in part because the labor demand for people who are just "pretty good" with computers is actually fairly small, and has shrunk dramatically over the past two decades due to consolidations (SaaS again), offshoring and outsourcing.