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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

#161

Post by taneq »

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.

That’s how the saying goes but what really matters isn’t who you know, but who knows you (and was impressed by your work).

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#162

Post by taneq »

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…

Interesting... Only two of my jobs have not.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#163

Post by jackson1442 »

ergot_vacation wrote: post #110

These stories are are always fun to read, and this one was especially well-written, so I'm glad it was posted. At the same time, there's a fair bit of survivorship bias and mythology in the "wiz kid teen helps out a clueless adult and starts a great career in tech!" story. 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…

I don't think this phenomenon is quite "over," nor do I think it will ever be. I actually got my current job because of a similar situation:

During high school, I worked two summers as a lifeguard and didn't really care for it. It was boring, hot, and didn't pay particularly well, especially for what we had to put up with (read: incompetent management and being sorely understaffed). There were days where we had so few staff that we had to get untrained gate staff/food&bev to run slide dispatch since that didn't require a lifeguard license, but I digress...

My senior year, I decided to do something different– tutor online for computer science and math. Pay was much better and I definitely enjoyed the work more. One of my returning clients was working on his Master's and was taking a class that was central to his major involving python scripting. He didn't know much Python, but found me online and I taught him the basics and we had a good relationship going.

After he finished his course, he was very happy with the work I had done, and he actually offered me a job! I've been working for his company for several months now and just recently converted into full time for the summer.

So, yes, the era of "wiz kids" might be over, but getting jobs that you might not technically be "qualified" on paper for through strange connections absolutely still happens.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#164

Post by irrational »

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?

The university I attended had large smoke stacks that old maps said belonged to the power plant. I never saw anything come out of them, so I assume by the 90s they had switched to using city power, but I wonder now if it was common for universities in the old days to have their own power plants?

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#165

Post by robocat »

trm42 wrote: post #82
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

Last time a headhunter managed snatch me was weird. I wasn't really active before deadline because I was on a holiday trip and the headhunter said "it's okay, let's call after your holidays". I wasn't actually looking for a new job but couple of the buzzwords sounded promising so I ended up having calling one of those chitchat calls with the headhunter which then led to a chitchat with the company guys. When I was me…

I wonder if the headhunter used a geek code[0] to resume generator?

Alternatively I wonder if a modern version of geekcode could be created with a service that automatically compresses a submitted resume into a comprehensible string of Unicode characters?

[0] https://www.geekcode.xyz/geek.html

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#166

Post by Cerium »

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…

I have the opposite experience. I have never landed a job that I didn't already have a good contact and recommendation for, of course that is probably because I have never tried.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#167

Post by eointierney »

robocat wrote: post #165
trm42 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time a headhunter managed snatch me was weird. I wasn't really active before deadline because I was on a holiday trip and the headhunter said "it's okay, let's call after your holidays". I wasn't actually looking for a new job but couple of the buzzwords sounded promising so I ended up having calling one of those chitchat calls with the headhunter which then led to a chitchat with the company guys. When I was me…

I wonder if the headhunter used a geek code[0] to resume generator? Alternatively I wonder if a modern version of geekcode could be created with a service that automatically compresses a submitted resume into a comprehensible string of Unicode characters? [0] https://www.geekcode.xyz/geek.html

A geek code based on distributed peer review (no blockchain) could be very elegant. A kind of shared CV encompassing gitlogs, third party reviews, customer satisfaction, and actual "thinking when it matters" ability recognition.

Where are the semioticians when we need them? Syntax, grammar, pragmatics, all develop at a rate of knots, but we still use a subset of ASCII for the vast majority of our symbolic computation. Could we do better than a joke from the nineties?

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#169

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

>> And in reviewing this one, it comes off to me as a little elitist. Like it is about how this guy, using his great hacker skills, avoided the ‘menial labor of the commoners’ or something. I hope that is not the impression it gives - it is not my intention, anyway.

No, it's fine. It doesn't come across as bragging about your awesome hax0034 skilz0 and I was even kind of surprised about how little it brags at all. I would have bragged more.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#170

Post by Ensorceled »

Symbiote wrote: post #144
flaubere wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author said in a postscript that he was worried about seeming elitist. I didn't think it was elitist at all, and I completely understand why it was a good choice for him to write BASIC code. However, I also did manual labour in the summer when I was ~20. There was nothing wrong with it. I would certainly recommend a brief stint of it to a young person, especially if you are training towards a sitting down/talking…

My parents made a similar deal with me, when I was 18. "Manual work" for all but 3 weeks of the summer was indoors for me, in factories -- mostly cleaning and assembling. There was a good range of jobs, from boring, tough work more-or-less alone, to a place where everyone seemed to chat while they worked slowly as the summer was usually a quiet period. In the final job, I took a half-day off to collect my exam result…

Did you ever get a "Hey, don't be using twenty dollar words in a twenty-five cent conversation." That was a wake up call.
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