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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

#251

Post by jimmaswell »

dhosek wrote: post #198
jimmaswell wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Parking lights are a lot older than the 90s. In Riverside, IL, they have "historical" streetlights that inadequately illuminate the streets (or at least did in the 70s). As a result, it was required if you were parking on the street in Riverside after dark that you left your parking lights on.

Apparently the light setting I always skip past is parking lights and I never knew. I always found the headlights/reverse lamps adequate in the dark though.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#252

Post by coinductor »

Undergraduate shenanigans in the 1980s: The IBM PC was underclocked at 4.77MHz (as I recall) but rated at 8.00MHz, thus the "turbo" switch on many clones. Our little company had secret early-access IBM AT to develop software on as part of IBM's Scientific Software Suite. IBM paid to have a security system installed in our rented suite, and required that the machine be in my windowless office in a larger windowless back room. Was the AT also underclocked? The system frequency was controlled by a two-legged crystal soldered in, so I purchased a number of such from an electronics surplus outfit, soldered and unsoldered until I reached the maximum stable speed. It was quite a boost (I seem to recall that it was the video subsystem that was the ultimate bottleneck). When the AT eventually went public I made a few bucks hot-rodding them. Oh, and when IBM wanted their loaner back I did put the original crystal back in--only one coworker knew about this, and certainly not my bosses.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#253

Post by Symbiote »

Ensorceled wrote: post #170
Symbiote wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds fairly confrontational to me.

I only had phrases like "look at you with your fancy words", which (in Britain, depending on tone) can mean something from "I'm impressed you remember words like that", to "I don't understand you" and "you seem to think you're better than me".

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#254

Post by ScottBurson »

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.

In none of the last four jobs I've gotten was there anyone there who knew me. What I knew seems to have been the important factor.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#255

Post by hnbad »

citizenpaul wrote: post #125

Stories like this make me sad and depressed. Basically some greedy jerk didn't want to pay living wages to some programmers. Due to his position of already being rather well off he was able to put off (through even more cheap labor) until he found a naive sucker to do the work basically for free. In this case a college kid. Its the reason I really want to get out of tech. Its a goldmine for spineless knowledge worker…

I'll let you in on a secret: understanding what you understand there, go back and take a look at hacker culture fan favorites like _Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution_.

All the stories are like this. Either adults taking advantage of some naïve rich kids who don't understand what money is worth, or the same rich kids using their status-induced naïveté to get away with computer fraud without consequences. A lot of the "wholesome" tall tales of those rich white kids would have ended very differently for poor Black "youths" but we don't talk about that here.

And it's the same for most "success" stories you hear about where the punchline isn't simply another "rags to FAANG employee" non-miracle: all the billionaire wonderboys already started out wealthy and with access to the right social circles. Even the ones that will tell you they came from poverty.

We need to kill our heroes (figuratively speaking) and realize that programming is just a job like any other. Collectivize and develop solidarity with your peers, don't chase dreams of becoming the next tech billionaire (unless you're already in the right spot, in which case, just don't be as much of a jerk as the last guy, okay?). It's okay to love what you do but that doesn't mean it's okay for you to be exploited, even if you personally are doing well enough not to have to care about the exact size of your paycheck.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#257

Post by canadianfella »

samatman wrote: post #184
3pt14159 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

A lot of universities have their own power plants, especially of a certain age. The U of M in Ann Arbor has a plant and uses the waste heat to keep the relevant sidewalks free of ice and snow in the winter.

What is an irrelevant sidewalk?

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#258

Post by citizenpaul »

ggarnhart wrote: post #128
citizenpaul wrote: post #125

Stories like this make me sad and depressed. Basically some greedy jerk didn't want to pay living wages to some programmers. Due to his position of already being rather well off he was able to put off (through even more cheap labor) until he found a naive sucker to do the work basically for free. In this case a college kid. Its the reason I really want to get out of tech. Its a goldmine for spineless knowledge worker…

This is an interesting take — I don't disagree that these sorts of things happen, but in this case, the author clearly felt his work was paid for fairly. I think one's own perspective is a pretty key regulator of what's fair and what's not. Perhaps not in the macro level, but on a case by case basis. Is the author's point of view incorrect in your eyes? Who else should be able to decide that, other than the person wh…

The very story tells upfront that he only needs money to pay college living expenses. This kid was almost certainly taken advantage of and used as a "weapon" against whatever company was making this software.

The company that made the software obviously felt that whatever they charged was the correct price for them to afford to live and continue doing business and pay their employees. This was more money than what this guy charged him, though its not stated exactly how much(that by the way is a clue). Also that they guy didn't offer him money but made him "choose" his price because he knows a young college kid is going to choose some random round number $100,$1000 ect. Which is less than a company needs to stay in business.

I've done plenty of tech business over the years and while I cannot prove it I know from experience this kid screwed over this company that was almost certainly getting nickle-and-dime'd by this man from the story. The writer says he was exactly stereotypical of a car sales guy, would you trust a car salesman?. They probably already did work he never paid for(again knowledge from past experiences). This guys description fits that behavior to a "T"

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#259

Post by citizenpaul »

hnbad wrote: post #255
citizenpaul wrote: post #125

Stories like this make me sad and depressed. Basically some greedy jerk didn't want to pay living wages to some programmers. Due to his position of already being rather well off he was able to put off (through even more cheap labor) until he found a naive sucker to do the work basically for free. In this case a college kid. Its the reason I really want to get out of tech. Its a goldmine for spineless knowledge worker…

I'll let you in on a secret: understanding what you understand there, go back and take a look at hacker culture fan favorites like _Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution_. All the stories are like this. Either adults taking advantage of some naïve rich kids who don't understand what money is worth, or the same rich kids using their status-induced naïveté to get away with computer fraud without consequences. A lo…

>wholesome" tall tales of those rich white kids would have ended very differently for poor Black "youths"

That was pretty much my point. This kid undermined someones livelihood by doing what he did. The only reason he was able to do that was coming from a place of privilege and depressing naivety. He was weaponized in a battle of these two companies for a pittance.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#260

Post by StrictDabbler »

beh9540 wrote: post #222
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 pretty much exactly how I got my first job programming. The only student job I could get at college was working for the HVAC department: organizing filters in warehouses around campus, taking out the trash, etc. I got a very similar "go hide somewhere" from one of my bosses at the time, and so I started reading about the control system(s) HVAC used. Eventually word got out to the controls department that some…

This is a fantastic story. Your capitalization of BACnet and your use of /C confuse me. BACnet IP? BACnet MS/TP?

I assume you didn't write a BACnet stack from scratch so I'm very interested in what the "server" was running.

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