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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

#201

Post by gridspy »

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…

You make an interesting point. I was a teenager during that critical period myself, or perhaps just after.

However, those who love tinkering with computers and technology of their own accord have far more opportunities and resources than we did when we grew up.

If you love tech, you've been teaching yourself for years -- it will shine through during those first interviews and through all the years of your career.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#202

Post by [deleted] »

3pt14159 wrote: post #130
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…

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 an…

[deleted]

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#203

Post by atoav »

bluedino wrote: post #45
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…

>> 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 once happened to me that I had a really hairy issue with a sound card driver. After half an hour of web search I found a conclusive answer, written by none other than myself, but four years prior.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#204

Post by atoav »

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.

I think the issue is rather that many people have a hard time of communicating the skills they have in a way the other side actually gets the level you are at via simple text.

If they already know you, you can skip that step and the risks involved. Depending on your personality and flaws however it might also be a negative thing if people know you : )

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#205

Post by mr_toad »

rsj_hn wrote: post #151
bluGill wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> their failure at communication

So much to unpick in that statement.

The potential for communication differences in culture, gender, and personality to outweigh job performance.

That communication is a two way street, but poor communication is often attributed to one party.

The tendency for the promotion process to favour “upward focused” communication and communicators.

The fact that objective performance measurement, which could ameliorate some of these problems, is a joke.

It’s true that communication skills are essential, but laying the blame on poor performers just perpetuates problems.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#208

Post by theshrike79 »

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've got exactly zero jobs without networking. =)

My first summer jobs were with people my dad knew. The first actual programming job I got because I happened to be tagging along with my friend who had a job interview.

From there on in I got jobs mostly because I had a friend inside vouching for my talents.

This also goes the other way, I wouldn't join a company where I don't have inside information on how shit actually gets done.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#209

Post by kwyjobojoe »

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…

I have a rule that helps me be a decent human being. Automate to make my jobs easy, never automate someone else's job. Too many hot shot software developers think that putting someone out of a job is a good thing

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#210

Post by ratww »

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…

Great point.

HR might not even understand what the link is about, but if they see something technical they don't understand but is related to the job, they will ask some technical person.

I got a call when I was younger because I was the maintainer of a package with several million downloads on RubyGems. It wasn't even a Ruby job, but the HR person's rationale was that "at least he's making stuff people are using".

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