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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

#211

Post by eggsome »

alternatetwo wrote: post #195
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…

This reminds me of something, too. My siblings and me often play a (now) old RTS - Battle for Middle Earth II - against AI. When these matches go on a while, sometimes it crashes when defeating an AI. Well I looked at where it crashes, and simply nopped out the code where it crashes (it was a null pointer access I think) ... and we haven't noticed any weird effects of that so far ... one of these days I'll get around…

Is your hack shared anywhere? I think I hit this bug last time played with my brother.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#212

Post by fho »

jimmaswell wrote: post #181
WalterBright wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a parking light burn out on my car. Went to the car store, and a replacement bulb was $$. Perused the lamps on tags in the aisles, and found one that looked the same but had different "ears" on the side. Bought it, and filed off the ears so it would fit in my car's socket. Worked perfectly, for a small fraction of the price. Of course, my car is full of aftermarket parts, so I am used to making "adjustments" to…

I had to look up what a parking light is. It sounds totally unnecessary to me, but I'd say that about a lot of things put in cars after the 90s. Probably not important in this case since it's just a light for parking, but lights for cars cost more due to having to meet exacting DOT standards/testing. I wouldn't do this with a brake light or real headlight.

> a lot of things put in cars after the 90s

True ... we just moved on from a car build in 1999 to one build in 2011 ... got the "non-extra" version which was half the price.

We still got an AC and bluetooth connectivity.

What we did not get was a multimedia center, a panorama roof, seat heaters and fancy front lights.

I can see that you quickly get used to that ... but tbh I think that most of these are just to justify a higher price because the actual service, getting you from A to B, has not changed in 30 years.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#213

Post by jmmcd »

lostlogin wrote: post #135
arduinomancer wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think this method skips step one. 1) You turn it off and then on. 2) You look at one that works.

Nobody ever taught me step 2, and I learned step 1 from the IT Crowd (ok, not really).

Seriously though: are there are any other steps that everyone knows?

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#214

Post by viraptor »

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…

> the more society downgrades objective measures of excellence

I'd really rather go with "the more society discovers that we don't know how to obtain objective measures of excellence". We really don't have good tests that can fit in the interview slot for a lot of software engineering jobs.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#216

Post by dolmen »

atoav wrote: post #203
bluedino wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

The best answers on StackOverflow are those I wrote myself, because they match exactly my own question.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#217

Post by lukeh »

I had a similar story. A search for internet access in high school (which wasn't common in mid-1990s Australia) led me to working for a ISP, then working for a company that ported bits of NEXTSTEP to other Unices, then interning at Apple, then starting my own company. I was cheap labour but I was surrounded by great people who were happy to answer my endless questions. I hope I can do that for someone else someday.

Amusing anecdote from first ISP job: you only ever rm -rf the root filesystem on your employer's sole server (with no backup) once in your life. Fortunately it ate had only chewed through most of the operating system before I called them in a panic, and we were able to power the machine down. They were very understanding and I spent the next day or two (in the middle of final year of high school) cleaning up the mess. They did buy a tape drive after that! (The cause was a Perl script that concatenated two strings which owing to a typo happened to be empty.)

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#218

Post by TulliusCicero »

mod wrote: post #109
znpy wrote: post #104

The most interesting thing is probably that in 1982 or whatever you could find a nice summer gig, work 20h/week for the summer, and pay a full academic year and a computer.

He specifically noted that his tuition was paid for. He was paying for supplies & incidentals. Also $400/week in 1982 was fantastic money for an 18 year old. So a normal school-kid could not, in fact, replicate this.

Inflation calculator says $400 then would be $1100 now. So essentially equivalent to a currently 55k/year job. Not bad for a summer job.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#219

Post by microtherion »

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…

> this was largely a phenomenon confined to a narrow strip of time from the late eighties to the late 00s.

OP dates from 1982. I actually had a comparable experience in 1982 as well, with a Commodore PET-like. There are similar stories dating back earlier, with minicomputers. And I don't think it has stopped, if you know where to look for it. The days of BASIC may be over, but there are more business critical spreadsheet macros around than ever.

> So the days of "Hey, I know how to do that computer stuff!" "Great! Get in here!" are largely over.

I'd say there are more low grade computer problems out there waiting to be fixed than ever. You could probably ring a random person's door and they'd have a dozen issues with their computer / smartphone / WiFi / Universal Remote bugging them.

> Most teenage nerds who liked messing with computers as a hobby didn't spin it up into an explosive career overnight.

And I don't think the story was about that, in the sense of turning that job into a business as such. It was more about the insight that there was gold in them thar hills.

My 1982 experience was that an acquaintance of my parents got kicked off his mainframe account, and needed a different way to process the responses to a questionnaire he needed for his work. His program was written in some "real" programming language like PL/I or Fortran that was not readily available on the CBM machines that were available at school, so I wrote a replacement in BASIC for him. No exciting or sophisticated technical details, I'm afraid.

Details of payment were not worked out in advance, so I was quite pleasantly surprised to earn a multiple of the hourly wage I had made in a factory vacation job earlier. It was then I realized that this might be the right profession for me.

That acquaintance with the questionnaire happened to be a school guidance counselor, so he actually found me a career without even trying to do so…

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