131–140 of 265 posts
Brings back the days of my youth in about the same era. We had a recession on in my country at the time that made student jobs in the tech industry scarce and I ended up working in landscaping during the summer to try to meet the tuition bills. One of our jobs was at the site of a rapidly expanding local tech firm (the telecom monopoly had just been forced to open the market to allow competition and the industry was…
I hope the pun was intentional.
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…
I'd like to hear more about the details of how this worked. Did the college have its own power source like a research reactor? Was this technically legal or in some part of a grey area?
When I was a sophomore, I applied for and got a summer job at Kodak. My father said to not be disappointed if it was driving a fork lift because that's usually what they are. But I showed up and was directed into an accounting office where on desks, next to stacks of IBM punch cards, were some brand new IBM PCs. I spent the summer hacking Lotus 1-2-3. They had seen on my application that I was familiar with computers.
Brings back the days of my youth in about the same era. We had a recession on in my country at the time that made student jobs in the tech industry scarce and I ended up working in landscaping during the summer to try to meet the tuition bills. One of our jobs was at the site of a rapidly expanding local tech firm (the telecom monopoly had just been forced to open the market to allow competition and the industry was…
> I never forget my roots. I hope the pun was intentional.
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
1) You turn it off and then on.
2) You look at one that works.
Loved this one. When I was mid-20’s I found myself in a “how much” situation as well. Thankfully I had the gumption to “go for it.” I had found a solution to save the business 100k+ when another contractor charged 10k+ and failed to complete a job because the business couldn’t pay them any more. The thing is, once I started digging into it, the other contractor had done 95% of the work; It just needed a nudge to get…
You saved the business 100k+ and you charged 3k? Next time call yourself a consultant and add another zero.
Who are these people who write software locks. Can anyone here justify it for me? It's seems to be just plain evil. But maybe i'm attacking a straw man. I don't know.
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…
This is very adjacent to what you're saying, but every time I hear this idea, I can only think that it's really taking an entire year off. Most of my courses were structured in a way that if you took a term out of the normal hierarchy, you'd have to wait until that course came around again at the same time the next year.
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 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…
>> 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…
It becomes uncannily relevant, even to the point of familiar IP addresses or pathnames in the blog, at which point I realize it was written by my predecessor.
The obscure parameters are usually obsolete, and were required because they were running the very latest versions of the software before the defaults matured. The blog was something like documentation at the time.