I kind of feel ashamed of it, but my very first job was a game tester for online flash games, made $8/hr back around 1998.
Ask HN: What was your first job?
31–40 of 77 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your first job?
#32Cashier at ShopKo when I was 16 - pay was a little over minimum wage. First interesting job was teaching horseback riding at a youth camp for $8-9/hr.
Re: Ask HN: What was your first job?
#33[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What was your first job?
#34Other than helping my dad at work getting paid under the table, my first job was as a movie theater employee (vendor and usher).
We had a process called "counts", which was just the daily inventory, that everyone hated except for us few math-minded folks. The fun part of this was that all the vending terminals were old pentium 75-100MHz running software that ran on DOS (not even on windows).
My geek project was to build an app for assisting the "Counts" process with a custom GUI (YEAH EGA!) on the DOS terminals, and a backend portion that ran on the back office in Windows. They even paid me for my hours (which was awesome at the time, since it was my first time getting paid for programming). That software was run for a while even after I had quit, and because I was friends with everyone that worked there, I provided free tech support (which amounted to answering a question once every few months).
For that, I won the official "Trailblazer Award" from the company!
That bit was definitely a highlight of that year.
That's my "first job" story.
Re: Ask HN: What was your first job?
#35Foot Locker, age 16 ... the striped nylon shirt was itchy ...
Re: Ask HN: What was your first job?
#36newspaper route at age 10.
Re: Ask HN: What was your first job?
#3714, at The Fish Cove, a tiny fried fish joint. Summer, 6 deep fryers and no AC. And I had to "clean the trap" of the drain, which had rotten fish guts in it. On the ride home, dad made me sit in the back seat. The smell didn't wash off for 2 days.
Every job since has been better than the last, starting from that low point. Taught me the value of a dollar, though.
Re: Ask HN: What was your first job?
#38My ancient experiences with the underclasses (summer jobs) and the first out of school job:
Flagman, turning a stop/yield sign around to let traffic through a construction area. Boring as hell.
Graduated to: laborer, basically using a giant heavy metal rod to tamp down earth around power poles we'd just dug a hole for and inserted. Even with gloves, turned my hands to mush.
Graduated to: instrument man, because I was doing math in university, started doing surveying for previously mentioned power poles (and eventually metal towers).
Graduated to: surveyor for the construction of a large container pier. Job involved sitting in a rowboat, and dropping a chain into the water, and measuring the depth, telling people "more fill here," and repeat. The real perk here was that sitting in a rowboat all day gave me an awesome tan.
Graduated to: a graduate in CS. Went to work for a small (tiny) oceanographic firm as sysadmin/developer/data entry/anything that was required. They put what was at time a state of the art Unix system on my desk (Motorola 68020 processor, with I think 2 mb of RAM) and it was my baby.
That job, the first full time one, actually paid less than the previous summer job.
Re: Ask HN: What was your first job?
#39A summer job as code janitor at FORTH, Inc., age 16, $5/hour (80s dollars). While this was after Chuck Moore had left, it was still kind of educational.
Re: Ask HN: What was your first job?
#40In my senior year in high school I earned $20 an evening twice a week helping someone I met in a COBOL course write DEC BASIC programs to compute ACRS depreciation schedules.