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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

#151

Post by rsj_hn »

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.

This is really an unhealthy and flawed understanding of what is a necessary part of life. The problem is how to find good people, and the more society downgrades objective measures of excellence, the more people need to rely on personal recommendations. It's not that people wouldn't take a stranger for a job, but when there is a lot of uncertainty, they can't absorb the risk of the stranger not being qualified. So they will always prefer someone they know is qualified over someone who they don't know is qualified but might be better.

The above is as necessary and unsurprising as rain falling to the ground. There is no other way that things can work. Thus the practical advice you can give someone is not only to learn something but to widen their professional network so that there are many people who know they've learned something.

It is the exact same thing in a big bureaucracy. You have to know how to sell yourself, which just means you need to successfully communicate your accomplishments. Too many people do great work, but they don't communicate their accomplishments, and then they are surprised that less qualified people are promoted over them, and they grow cynical or resentful when it is really their failure at communication that has caused the problem. Like many things in life, it's better to be mediocre at two necessary things rather than excellent at one and skipping the other. But no amount of righteous anger about the unfairness of life is going to change the fact that people are not omniscient and that talent is hard for strangers to evaluate.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#152

Post by devwastaken »

jerf wrote: post #65
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…

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…

Do you have a preferred template that gets past the filters? I imagine much of bad resumes comes from people using traditional ones.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#153

Post by throwaway5752 »

cmos wrote: post #64

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…

This is one of the best things that I've read here. It's awesome that you got the opportunity, figured it out, saved energy and money, and still helped out on the physical work. Unrelated, Woods Hole does great work.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#154

Post by kaybe »

mod wrote: post #119
metanonsense wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some things were also pretty hard back then (a few years later but still). When you were too young for university and your environment was not academic, getting access to information was so difficult. I remember when we made a school trip to London and I spent all my savings for programming and computer graphic books. There was no wikipedia, no scihub, no blogs, no Github. New coding or hacking e-zines were treated l…

I think I had to wait about 6 months to rent an HTML4 book from the library. It was massive. Maybe 6 inches thick. I devoured it, and later bought my own copy.

My computer spoke English. I didn't. I just had some nonsensical (for me) commands memorized. Things were indeed different back then.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#155

Post by gpm »

3pt14159 wrote: post #132
cmos wrote: post #64

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…

> saved the town millions by siphoning power from the local college at peak power demand. 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?

> Did the college have its own power source like a research reactor?

Not the person you're replying to (and never directly involved in electricity generation), but my university just had it's own small power plant: https://www.fs.utoronto.ca/utilities-and-building-operations...

I assume it was a mix of historical coincidence and a solution for less-interruptible power supply for the labs, but I'm not really sure.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#156

Post by WhompingWindows »

3pt14159 wrote: post #134
lostlogin wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never forget my roots. I hope the pun was intentional.

The classy way of handling puns is to avoid them if they're not intended and leave them unstated if they are. It's funnier to everyone who notices that way, and less distracting to people that are just there for the content.

Instead of puns, you can substitute the synonym for the word you're punning. So instead of "I never forgot my roots" you can say, "I never forgot my tree butts" or whatever word silly rephrasing you can imagine.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#157

Post by teeray »

I started working at my town’s library during the summer, putting books away. When I later started to learn about algorithms and data structures, I kept thinking back to pushing that cart of books around the stacks (sorting them ahead of time was faster), rebalancing the distribution of books among a shelf, etc. Tons and tons of CS concepts are made physical in the library.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#158

Post by ppierald »

Age 14, I worked 2 hours a day, 5 days a week at the local fish market doing clean up and end of day work. Nasty stuff. I worked the summer before college at a friend of my parent's warehouse basically relabeling overstock canned goods with a white label for use in restaurants. Hot, loud, and smelly job. During my sophomore year, I thought I wanted to drop out. My dad said he could probably get me into the plumber's union, and no disrespect to plumbers (they probably make more money than I do), but the memories of that work made me go back and give college one more shot. It all worked out in the end. I graduated, found work, and am still in the industry happily three decades later, but it all could have gone the other way if not for those hard manual work summer jobs.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#159

Post by criddell »

jfengel wrote: post #148
criddell wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's really hard for somebody to know what's going to appeal. Maybe "planning on building a hovercraft" looks great to you; maybe it looks like somebody padding their resume. Maybe "had a really cool email thread" catches your eye; maybe it looks like an irrelevant detail. A resume page isn't very long, especially presented as bullet points as expected. And especially when you have absolutely no idea who it is will b…

> I can tell you great stories about every project I've ever done, but not in a bullet point.

If you can figure out some way to distill an important project down to a point or two, it's definitely going to work in your favor. A resume is not the place for great stories but it should make me want to ask.

I agree with your last sentence, although I don't think you will find anybody wanting a long resume from you. You could always provide a link to your online CV that is complete while the one you submit is an edited down version tailored to the company and position you hope to interview for.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#160

Post by rags2riches »

brazzy wrote: post #73

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…

That's like a scene in some old TV series about a startup I only vaguely remember. It's important demo day, but a bug is threatening to ruin everything. Everybody is trying to find the bug. Somebody yells out "I found it!" and everybody rushes over. For a long moment, they all stare quietly at a big red flashing line of code on the screen. Then somebody blurts out "delete it!" and the person at the keyboard deletes the bug with a single keystroke. Everybody cheers. The startup is saved!
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