Guide (they called us 'explainers') at the Exploratorium, a science museum in San Francisco. I was paid minimum wage - then about $5.50 an hour, I think.
16-ish... Meat man.
Ask HN: What was your first job?
51–60 of 77 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your first job?
#52Officially, my uncle's tobacco farm when I was 13. I was the stick shaker and I suckered and picked a bit too on my days off. Made a few grand that summer, which bought me my first guitar :)
Unofficially, before that a couple friends and I used to steal CDs and tapes from Zellers back before they had security sensors and resold them to kids in the neighbourhood at a discount. I made a couple hundred bucks that way when I was 11/12. Thankfully, I always felt bad for doing stuff like that and changed crowds when I came back from tobacco.
In high school, I figured out how to make web pages and did a few for friends' parents at about $1,000/pop, which kept me from having to work at McDonald's, or the farm. That turned into a default career move when I moved out and out of province at 18...
Re: Ask HN: What was your first job?
#53My first job was basically a part time developer for one of my school open source project - Archon. It was like half a year ago. And, my second job now is really amazing.
Re: Ask HN: What was your first job?
#54I think I was about 8 years old when I started cleaning pet's cages and fish tanks in the family pet store. I think I made about 2 guilders an hour (which will be about $0.80 I guess).
Re: Ask HN: What was your first job?
#55Unsoldering resistors, capacitors, etc from old VCR mainboards. 1 cent per part; 1.5 cents if I sorted them by spec. My family had an electronics repair shop. I think I was eight or nine. (Back then components were about the size of a large ant, not stuffed in by the billion) I've been thinking about this lately -- giving kids work gives them skills and I think people would be surprised what they can handle.
Eeek. Lead poisoning?
Re: Ask HN: What was your first job?
#5614. Construction. $15-$20/hr. Planning, wiring, roofing were pretty fun. Digging foundation trenches in clay was not.
Re: Ask HN: What was your first job?
#57My first job was a CVS cashier, for about two or three weeks, before being offered a sales job at CompUSA.
It bothers me that I made more at 17/18 then any year since (I'm currently 22). I miss commission sales.
Re: Ask HN: What was your first job?
#58My first job was at a national lab when I was 17. I was paid to write FORTRAN code to help with data mining. Not the best use of FORTRAN, let me tell you.
Re: Ask HN: What was your first job?
#59I sold my website, which I created for fun, to a company in 1998 and continued to work for them, that was the first time earned a paycheck and I was still in college. Never in my wildest dreams did I think what I made would make money with it. It wasn't a lot but it covered my expenses for most of my college (it was in India).
Re: Ask HN: What was your first job?
#6015, doing web designing/prototyping to a local software company. Got paid something like 10€/hour even I didn't care about the money that much. I was just happy to work with web and being treated as equal member of a dev team. Learned quite a lot about web dev and business back then and I think it shaped me a lot.
Sometimes wonder that if you should try some "real" job, like basic customer service or physical labor.