A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work • Hacker News Board

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#221

Post by jpm_sd » Thu, May 20, 2021, 12:43 PM UTC

ggambetta wrote: post #41

What a nice story :) Reminds me of how I got my first job! It was 1994 or 1995, I was probably 14, I had outgrown the ZX Spectrum and had a 486 at home. My dad and I were in a computer parts shop, and near us was this guy my dad's age having trouble with his own computer. He was having random crashes, and nobody at the shop seemed to figure out what it was. My dad suggested I offer my help. We approached the guy, an…

The real question is, are they still using your "abomination" every day at that small business? I wouldn't be surprised if they are!

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#222

Post by beh9540 » Thu, May 20, 2021, 12:50 PM UTC

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 student worker knew a ton about the controls system, and I got moved there. They had an issue that they wanted to know the forecasted weather, so we could get the central plant going before demand started kicking in, and the vendor kept telling them custom development was coming in a couple of years. I ended up writing a server for BacNET/C that did it for them, and it ran under the desk for years.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#223

Post by fasteo » Thu, May 20, 2021, 1:12 PM UTC

>>> And my mother as always was there to help

This sums up pretty nicely the memories I have from my mum. She passed away way too early at 54 and reading this sentence brought her back to my mind.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#224

Post by myspy » Thu, May 20, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

Superb story :)

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#225

Post by 8bitsrule » Thu, May 20, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

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…

Damn. Sometimes the world works with a chuckle.

If interviews worked, then Bob would not have not needed two slaps upside the head to get it right.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#226

Post by thathndude » Thu, May 20, 2021, 1:28 PM UTC

xuki wrote: post #16

thathndude wrote: post #5

Loved this one. When I was mid-20’s I found myself in a “how much” situation as well. Thankfully I had the gumption to “go for it.” I had found a solution to save the business 100k+ when another contractor charged 10k+ and failed to complete a job because the business couldn’t pay them any more. The thing is, once I started digging into it, the other contractor had done 95% of the work; It just needed a nudge to get…

You saved the business 100k+ and you charged 3k? Next time call yourself a consultant and add another zero.

The business was pretty strapped for cash (they had to pay me $3k over two payments).

But yeah, it was a 100k problem. All or nothing. Either it was fixed or not. The previous contractor had completed 97% of the work, had billed $10k, and then left when the company wouldn't pay any more.

I swooped in, finished the last 3%, got all the glory, and charged 3k. The business thought I was a miracle worker.

To be clear, the previous contractor did a crap job communicating with the business to explain how things were progressing and made it look like this would be a black hole the business was throwing money into. Had the previous contractor said "we're really close, we just need a little bit more money" the whole thing likely would have resolved without my intervention. But communication matters, I suppose.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#227

Post by jerf » Thu, May 20, 2021, 1:37 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #148

criddell wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you are involved in hiring, it's surprising just how bad most resumes are. Have a single page of highlights that are going to make me want to talk to you. The interview is the time to go deep on details, if that's how the conversation goes.

It's really hard for somebody to know what's going to appeal. Maybe "planning on building a hovercraft" looks great to you; maybe it looks like somebody padding their resume. Maybe "had a really cool email thread" catches your eye; maybe it looks like an irrelevant detail. A resume page isn't very long, especially presented as bullet points as expected. And especially when you have absolutely no idea who it is will b…

Yup. That's life. But if you make a resume like everyone else's, you're going to get everyone else's results. That's life too. I don't have a magic solution that will guarantee you a resume so awesome that literally every hiring manager in the world will break down in tears and hire you on nothing more than your resume.

You can turn this to your advantage, which I alluded to in my original. If you want to work with people who thing making hovercraft out of snowmobiles is awesome, put it on there. If you want to work with people who think that is a strange distracting thing to put on a resume, by all means leave it off. I'm sure HN is largely biased towards the first, so let me say I'm not being snarky at all about the second and I'm totally serious; if you are interested in a banking or government job you may well have those sorts of external interests yet find it a bad idea to put it directly on your resume.

Really my main message here is, take advantage of the fact that the resume is free form and don't just thoughtlessly put your name, work and educational experience, and three one-word bullet points about your hobbies or something on your resume, and then stop, because "that's what a resume is". Put whatever will get you hired. If there isn't a standard category/heading for whatever that is, make one.

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#228

Post by MayeulC » Thu, May 20, 2021, 1:40 PM UTC

NamTaf wrote: post #85

For me, the key take-away from this story is right at the end, where he contemplates whether he short-changed himself. If you look at it on a per-hour basis, he got paid decently ($100 for a few hours work in the 80s? Incredible!). However, if you look at it from the perspective of the business value he delivered to Jim in that transaction, it was a bargain for Jim ($100 once-off to fix a problem taht was costing man…

On the other hand, I'm not sure the author would have been offered a job had he named a higher price, so that could be seen as some kind of investment too!

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#229

Post by bserge » Thu, May 20, 2021, 1:46 PM UTC

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…

Ha, reminds me of overclocking the Tegra 2 in some Toshiba tablet. People were saying it's impossible, with various modified files linked by people saying it should work but it doesn't, must be something hardware related.

Being a naive dumbass, that did not stop me, I looked through the source files and thought "why not just edit the voltage/frequency tables in all of the files?"

And it worked. Could've easily bricked the device, but it didn't. I believe I had the same feeling as you. Yay for ignorance, I guess :D

Re: A teenager's guide to avoiding actual work

#230

Post by alternatetwo » Thu, May 20, 2021, 1:50 PM UTC

eggsome wrote: post #211

alternatetwo wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I don't think I ever shared it outside of personal acquaintances.

Diffing the game.dat we use vs an "untouched" cracked one there are a few more differences than I expected (I at one point fixed the random version number and the 3:30 auto defeat if the game thinks you copied the game illegaly).

If you send me a mail to the email in my profile, I'll send you the binary!