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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

#121

Post by Pasorrijer »

tolbish wrote: post #116
Pasorrijer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm guess your resume was still otherwise impressive

It wasn't awful. I was a new grad though, so I had a grocery store job, some volunteer experience and then fluffed up with whatever skills were on the job posting.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#122

Post by tester756 »

arrozconcosas wrote: post #120

I had two jobs in high school and learned a lot from them. In the first, I was a temp worker for a P&G re-packaging facility. This means some temp agency was paid $12/hour and they passed on $9/hour to me. The job was backbreaking, in intense heat, and with very strict management rules (e.g. no lunch break, sitting down for even a moment was grounds for being fired). In the second, I did lawn mowing for individual fa…

> was allowed to keep the extras and ended up with a 1 year supply of coke zero for myself and all my friends.

that's pros or con? :P

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#123

Post by andai »

ergot_vacation wrote: post #112
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your story is probably the more common one by far. Most employers and managers (especially for starter/entry-level jobs) are incredibly insecure, and any sign of intellect or creativity scares them. I've learned the hard way to never ruffle feathers by trying to think or solve problems at full power on a job. Just do what's expected and move on.

> I've learned the hard way to never ruffle feathers by trying to think or solve problems at full power on a job. Just do what's expected and move on.

This might be the saddest thing I've read recently.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#124

Post by arduinomancer »

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.

That scenario happens so often as a programmer.

You could read the docs or find the right person to talk to but its just faster to poke the black box and watch it's behavior.

Aka the scientific method of debugging

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#125

Post by citizenpaul »

Stories like this make me sad and depressed.

Basically some greedy jerk didn't want to pay living wages to some programmers. Due to his position of already being rather well off he was able to put off (through even more cheap labor) until he found a naive sucker to do the work basically for free. In this case a college kid.

Its the reason I really want to get out of tech. Its a goldmine for spineless knowledge workers to get "put over the barrel" as the story says for a fraction of what they are worth. Then those of us that know what we are worth have to navigate

I don't see a heroic story here. I see someone that took off their armor and walked into battle to be slaughtered.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#126

Post by jpm_sd »

ergot_vacation wrote: post #117
stuff4ben wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"A strip poker game on my c64." I can only imagine what this must have looked like.

Wonder no more! https://archive.org/details/C64Gamevideoarchive109-StripPoke...

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#128

Post by ggarnhart »

citizenpaul wrote: post #125

Stories like this make me sad and depressed. Basically some greedy jerk didn't want to pay living wages to some programmers. Due to his position of already being rather well off he was able to put off (through even more cheap labor) until he found a naive sucker to do the work basically for free. In this case a college kid. Its the reason I really want to get out of tech. Its a goldmine for spineless knowledge worker…

This is an interesting take — I don't disagree that these sorts of things happen, but in this case, the author clearly felt his work was paid for fairly.

I think one's own perspective is a pretty key regulator of what's fair and what's not. Perhaps not in the macro level, but on a case by case basis. Is the author's point of view incorrect in your eyes? Who else should be able to decide that, other than the person who experienced it?

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#129

Post by iso1631 »

tomkat0789 wrote: post #98

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

Depends on the size of a firm. If you rock up to a small firm and talk to the owner, you could well get a job, they don't have HR rules and corporate management.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#130

Post by 3pt14159 »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #99
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 socie…

My dad did this for someone's whole team as a favour because he overheard what they were doing over lunch or something like that. Later, he met the manager of the team he'd done it for and asked if they were going to transfer any of the employees that got freed up for the work and she said "no, there's still lots of work to do and the speedup, while helpful, wasn't major."

Went to her retirement party a year later and got the truth: Her pension was tied to her salary as a manager as an average of her last three years, and her salary as a manager was directly tied to her number of reports. If she'd have given up half the team as she could have, she would have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars over the rest of her life.

There was a lot of that type of stuff going on when computers first came in and hackers here and there started optimizing things. Individual interest and politics doesn't disappear.

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