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 a nearby network hardware repair place. They needed someone to look after their Cisco kit and about 30 Debian Linux systems. I was attracted to the mix of responsibilities so I applied, sending in me not-so-good CV. I was eventually asked to come in to have a chat after waiting about a week to hear back from the place.
At the end of the interview, Bob (let's call him), said I was more knowledgeable than the RHCEs that were coming through his door. This was nice to hear, but then he said something that really made me smile...
Apparently my CV was worse than I thought. It was so bad, that Bob literally put it in the bin under his desk. About four days later, Bob was reading through a local Linux User Group (LUG) mailing list and he saw a name he recognised: mine. So he opens the email and reads the thread in which I helped another LUG member compile a sound driver for their kernel. The instructions I gave worked.
Bob was impressed but he couldn't quite remember where he had seen the name. At this point the business owner, John (heh...), was standing besides Bob's desk and noticed my CV in the bin. He pulls it out and reads my name across the top. The penny drops for Bob and I get the call to come in and have a chat.
>> 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 likely a holdover from an earlier (like 15 years earlier) version of the software, because now it was natively support.
During my searching, on a mailing list I found a message from my now-boss. Asking how to do the exact thing they were still doing. And a couple messages from developers of the software basically saying, "If you did it this way, it would in theory work, but it won't ever be supported"
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."...
Ha! My first job was effectively through a LUG as well. In the early 2000's, I moved to a new city and joined the LUG there. A few months go by and I'm chatting with someone in the room and they ask what I do. I replied that I was going to college but also looking for part-time work. The next day, another LUG member who owned a small consulting company called me up and said he overheard what I said and pretty much just offered me the job right over the phone.
In fact, looking back at my employment history, only one of my jobs was a direct result of someone seeing my resume before they even met me.
As someone currently wading through resumes and kinda worried about missing some one like this, here's a tip to anyone else like you: The purpose of a resume is to get you hired. If you have something like an incredible technical sound driver support email chain like that... put a link to it in your resume. Yeah, your resume has standard fields, and those are indeed sorted on by HR, so don't leave out the skills & experience... but otherwise, the resume is free form. Generally not prose exactly, but free form. Link to ANYTHING you think will help you get the job.
And don't just say "I participate in some LUG"... that can mean you show up to the meetings once every couple of months to eat the free food. Show your helpfulness in an email chain. Show a project that you did with them with a link that explicitly says you did a big portion of it. If no such link exists, get one created!
By no means do I promise wonders if you do this. HR filters may still eat your resume. But if you do get through to a real human, they may look at those things, and the ones who will understand what this means are the ones you want to work for anyhow.
If you've got the skills to pay the bills but your resume looks like any other high school dropout's, I can tell you, from the other side of the desk, you've given me no way to tell any different. It may stink that all we have are resumes in the initial process... but at least that resume is under your control. (Mostly. Sometimes it gets chewed on. But speaking for myself, I'm looking at raw resumes straight from the candidate and that's not uncommon.) Don't be afraid to use it, and don't be afraid to toot your own horn, that's the whole point of this particular document.
(Similarly, to the extent possible without lying, don't say "I participated in some project" as your work experience. Write something you did in the project. Don't say "I participated in a billing system upgrade", say how you rewrote the UI in React to conform to accessibility standards and made it run 10 times faster than before and customers uniformly loved it and paid lots more money or whatever. "Participation" could be "I had my hand held for every bug as I struggled to keep up" and it could be "I stepped up and took more responsibility than anyone expected and almost single-handedly completed the project, freeing up the other developers" or anything in between. Unfortunately, based on experience, I kinda have to assume the worst because it's usually right. If "the worst" interpretation of that phrase isn't right, don't leave it open to me!)
Believe me, if you're doing Linux support on a mailing list, or anything even remotely like that, you stand out, at least to the right people. Do whatever it takes to work that on to the resume somehow. The "standard resume form" is a skeleton to be fleshed out, not a straightjacket of form.
I have seen some awful resumes, including for people with PhDs and long records of accomplishments. Even people who have been through resume writing seminars at job search organizations.
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 got boring and so I wandered into the main office where people were huddled over a computer. They were doing a mail-merge with quick basic to inform customers that their power would be out, and it wasn't working.
I looked over their shoulders and it was exactly what I had been doing to send out mailings to companies for free stuff as I had read in Radio-Electonics magazine.
I fix the problem, and the Chief Engineer said 'come with me' and takes me to the (air conditioned!) sub-station and into an even colder computer room where they had just setup the SCADA system to control the towns breakers and monitor the power.
Nobody knew how to program it, so he pointed to a 3' pile of manuals and said this was my new job. By the end of the summer we saved the town millions by siphoning power from the local college at peak power demand. I still hung out with Al, and helped him in the mornings. The linesmen still made fun of me, even more so when I accidentally turned off half the towns power for 15 minutes.
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.
> 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?
This is one of the best things that I've read here. It's awesome that you got the opportunity, figured it out, saved energy and money, and still helped out on the physical work. Unrelated, Woods Hole does great work.
I have a kind of similar story when I started studying in the late 2000s years. There was a company that had a specialized and really expensive measurement device. But the vendor went out of service. They changed part of their system but kept the measurement device only to find out it could not talk to the new system because the file system of the data was proprietary to the measurement device.
I got a student job at that company and one of my first tasks (and that of several students before me) was to open measurement results on the device and type them into excel spreadsheets. I did this for an hour or so until I became totally bored so I started to tinker around. The measurement device had it's own PC that booted Windows (I think it was 95 or 98) and autostarted their software in full screen/some sort of . This was easy to bypass via the task manager and running explorer.exe. I found out that the proprietary file format was simplay an MS Access file with a different extension. I tried to open it, but the file was password protected.
At this time I had little to none experience with programming or anything else that was "low level" computer stuff, but I occasionally stumbled about writeups about hacks and exploits and skimmed over them. So I was pretty sure that there had to be a hardcoded password somewhere. I started to open every file I could in a text editor with no luck. Then I got a hex editor and opened the binaries and finally, in a dll there was a password.
The next few days at this job I spent teaching myself enough Python to read the Access files and write the contents into an Excel file.
This worked and I used the free time to study/eat/sleep while getting paid for it but then one of my supervisors found out that I wasn't doing anything but still got results and wondered how I did it. He immediately put me onto another problem they had, thus starting my career as a software engineer.
Its weird how luck plays a part in all this - I remember as a Student temping for the giant Audit firm, Arthur Andersen (become accenture eventually). I was doing something like typing from one system to another. I think I found VBA and demonstrated how I could do a weeks work in a lunch hour.
My boss took one look, freaked out and I was back at the Temping agency.
We are still very far from a Software Literate society.
This is super similar to my start. I was hired at 17 one summer to do data entry for a surveying company, by putting timesheets created in Excel into a central system for billing clients. That got boring after a day, so I figured out how to use VBA (Excel on Macintosh System 8!) and wrote a macro that I linked to a button and put on the spreadsheet template, hidden off in the corner somewhere. When I got the next set of sheets back I hit the buttons and my job was done.
I showed the bosses, and was immediately put to work on some much more interesting stuff linking Lotus Notes with SQL Server for reporting and dashboarding, and then I was off to the races.
(The previous year I'd spent the summer making concrete garden ornaments with a group of ex-cons in a shed in the back of a farm - an experience which certainly made me appreciate the comforts of doing spreadsheets in an air-conditioned office, though my muscles were never quite as good.)
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 those cards, I also bought a USB card reader.
And there I ran into problems: the PC in my dormitory room was a used Pentium Pro desktop I'd gotten very cheaply without an OS, and I'd installed Linux on it. But at that time, USB support on Linux was still rather spotty, and while the card reader was in principle supported as a mass storage device, the USB driver would reproducibly freeze up after a short time accessing it.
As mentioned above, my C skills were basically non-existing,
but compiling your own kernel was at that time still a pretty common thing for Linux users to do, so I had some experience with that. And I was motivated. I enabled kernel debug output, and discovered that just before freezing up, the driver would report that it had received an event with a certain ID. I found the code that handled events, and I found the code that handled the problematic event. I looked at it and realized that I was many months of learning away from being able to fix it.
So instead, I deleted it. I simply made the driver ignore that type of event.
It worked. I could use the card reader to put MP3 files on the MMCs and listen to them on the player.
I felt a strange mixture of achievement and embarassment.
This story I believe, largely because there's no money or fame involved, and because it's the software equivalent of "hit it with a hammer until it works again."
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
That's like a scene in some old TV series about a startup I only vaguely remember. It's important demo day, but a bug is threatening to ruin everything. Everybody is trying to find the bug. Somebody yells out "I found it!" and everybody rushes over. For a long moment, they all stare quietly at a big red flashing line of code on the screen. Then somebody blurts out "delete it!" and the person at the keyboard deletes the bug with a single keystroke. Everybody cheers. The startup is saved!
Brings back the days of my youth in about the same era. We had a recession on in my country at the time that made student jobs in the tech industry scarce and I ended up working in landscaping during the summer to try to meet the tuition bills. One of our jobs was at the site of a rapidly expanding local tech firm (the telecom monopoly had just been forced to open the market to allow competition and the industry was beginning to boom). I remember digging holes for planting trees and looking through the tinted glass windows at a couple of guys in their white shirts and ties sitting at a terminal and thinking "some day I'll be on that side of the glass". Sure enough, after 40 years, I work for a company with offices that overlook that same building. The trees I planted are large and mature, I managed to eventually pay for my education, and I never forget my roots as I sit down at a terminal window.
Same here, thanks Ned, this really touched me. I was 9 yo on a hot Italian summer day of 1985 when my dad bought his first computer for the bag-handcrafting company he still has with mom. I had my C64 since 1983 and I was also quite fluent in Basic at that point, so I was super curious to see the new IBM XT 8088D in action.
The sales agent from this "big" Italian company arrived, unboxed the PC, and started to explain to my dad the default MS-DOS commands. I was sitting there sneaking the prompt commands he was typing when, while installing the accounting software (which was the selling reason) the installation utility failed with an error twice and the sales guy was in a panic. A new version of the software was shipped early that week, and this was the first live installation of it. He tried some commands, started to screw up turning the PC OFF and ON, and at the end, he was completely clueless.
That's when I've stepped in - I've gently asked him permission to touch the keyboard and once got access, I started to play with MS-DOS and found the batch file that was responsible for the installation. The guy was looking at me with an expression that mixed surprise and hope when I've found out this file was a script that was similar to Basic and I've found a way to edit it. After poking for 1 hour in tests and trials, I've finally fixed a bug on a conditional that was bringing the data loading to a dead disk path.
The guy talked with his department the same day, and a manager from the company called me to understand what I did. They were so thankful! Nobody paid me a cent for this but after that phone call, I realized my passion could also be my future job and life, and 36 years later is still true. Thanks again!
I love this. When I was 17 my dad got me a summer job on the plant he worked at. 40 hours a week in the parts shop, ordering parts, getting parts, and running around to different places to pickup parts. Actually I didn't mind it, but it was hot and dirty and my dad was my boss.
They had a computer system there to keep the inventory, running dBase III and hooked up to a NetWare network.
First day: No reports could be printed. Reloaded the various drivers, re-ran the reports.
Second day: They told me about a bug that caused the counts to be off so after checking things in, I had to manually add the right answers to the totals. Fixed the bug in dBase app.
Third day: The pull me to the front office, I'm working in the IT department and somebody's else kid is working in the parts shop.
I have a story similar to many of the others here. Mine was in the mid 90s when a kid could make good money developing websites. The hardest part was the client interactions, which is not something a 14 year old is particularly good at.
But the real take-away is that this era of computing was a true green field for the kids growing up in it. My cousins, who are over 10 years younger than me, grew up in a totally different world and, despite having used computers their whole life, have no idea how they work or how to build stuff with them.
A childhood spent writing batch files in order to run DOS X-Wing is very different than one spent loading a CD into the 1st gen Xbox.
I feel bad for my own kids, who are surrounded by technology that is walled off and inaccessible. Even 'View Source' on web pages is virtually useless now-a-days. It's a lot harder to get into the internals of systems than it used to be.
I had a long conversation about this a week ago. My worry is that "hacking" things — in the sense of "finding a way to use a program in a way that the developer didn't directly intend" — is getting harder every year and that this may have implications for the next generations of developers and indeed power users.
"View source" is not only virtually useless on many pages, but also unreasonably difficult to access in the first place (if not completely impossible) on systems like iOS.
UX, generally, seems so rigid now that, especially if it's on a more locked-down platform or a web-app, it seems there's often almost no way to use an app in any way other than the developer intended. The barrier to entry for hacking seems incredibly high now.
I don't know when the concepts of batch processing and scripting — or even keyboard shortcuts — came to be seen as a hindrance to UX, but I have a feeling it developed in parallel with touchscreens and the ever-increasing incentive to make apps addictive. In that respect it seems like we haven't really evolved in the last 10 years (at least), but actually regressed to some pre-computer, pre-automation age.
Perhaps everything I've just written is a load of rambling nostalgia. These thoughts come to me almost on a daily basis though.
Absolutely. I want to make products that are accessible under the hood. It‘s not for computers any more, but then there are many other objects we’re adding computing to.
In the meantime, I’ll start the kids on my old Apple ][e if I can smuggle it by my spouse.
Again we see similar issues that motivated RMS to create the free software movement. The buy bought a program but did not had the ability to read or edit it, today you will get a DRM on top of the program and some TOS that would say it is illegal to even attempt to get pass the DRM. Video game crackers show this DRMs will eventually get broken so the industry switch to services instead, now you are really screwed , you can't flip a bit to fix an issue or you can wake up and the software is now updated with nice new bugs or pointless UX changes.
Under questions you’re unprepared for, years ago at a Wall Street job a couple of weeks after a re-org my new boss calls me into his office and asks me what sort of bonus I was expecting. Caught completely off guard I quoted him the real number I had been expecting.
He smiled and said great, which let me know I had absolutely left money in the table. A trusted colleague then told me if that situation ever came up again, take your real, reasonable expectation, double it and add 20. The situation has never come up again.
Probably you meant 20%. So that's X * 2 * 1.2. Or X * 2.4. Or make it easier and say 2.5. And 2.5 is 10 /4. So another way to say this is "take your reasonable expectation, multiply it by 10 to become really unreasonable then make it reasonable again by divide it with 4".
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 finished. But As far as the business was concerned, it was 0% done because it was an all-or-nothing situation (either it worked or didn’t).
I did the final 5% and charged $3,000. I presented it as “I can fix the problem for 3k.” Was that completely fair to them I sometimes wonder? I don’t lose any sleep over it — they had a problem and I fixed it. I think it was wrong for the first contractor not to finish the work up and deal with a final invoice rather than insisting on pay in advance and abandoning them that close to the finish lone.
As far as the business was concerned I was a very cheap solution, and I made an hourly rate of about $2k per hour.
That's just economics. It's just like Apple or Samsung "magically" deciding that the price to fix your broken screen is just slightly under what it costs to buy the same phone used.
It's crazy sometimes the gap between an appropriate hourly pay and the monetary value of the output. I'm sure OP would have come up with something in between as well, but being put on the spot and caught completely off guard like that for the first time I think the $100 was a fine deal.
I had two jobs in high school and learned a lot from them.
In the first, I was a temp worker for a P&G re-packaging facility. This means some temp agency was paid $12/hour and they passed on $9/hour to me. The job was backbreaking, in intense heat, and with very strict management rules (e.g. no lunch break, sitting down for even a moment was grounds for being fired).
In the second, I did lawn mowing for individual families for $20/hour. I found them by referrals and networking, and could control my schedule for when I went to do jobs.
This taught me that being creative to find good jobs was super important.
In college, I found a series of high-pay, flexible or comfortable jobs. A few examples:
$1000 for one week's work to hand out 2 pallets worth of coke zero to college students. I was allowed to keep the extras and ended up with a 1 year supply of coke zero for myself and all my friends. Oh, they also gave me coupon for 1,000 free burritos and despite a very diligent effort to hand out as many as humanly possible was left with ~300 burritos and told to just keep them. Qdoba was my primary diet for quite some time.
A job selling cameras on eBay for a camera shot that went out of business. They paid me a 25% commission and had one of the largest private collections of highly collectable cameras (I sold one for $8,000). I only did it for a summer, and probably should have taken a semester off college to just do this full time and could have made enough money to significantly reduce my college loans.
A freelance role, for a German re-insurance company to write white papers for $50/hour and could create my own agenda for what I needed to write, and work whenever I wanted.
>> should have taken a semester off college to just do this full time
This is very adjacent to what you're saying, but every time I hear this idea, I can only think that it's really taking an entire year off. Most of my courses were structured in a way that if you took a term out of the normal hierarchy, you'd have to wait until that course came around again at the same time the next year.
My first job was at a local computer shop. I literally got out the phone book and called them all in order. The one that finally hired me was called ZAM.
1. Would this still be possible today? It's a certain timeframe (for software) where this was possible. Today it's things like SAP, integrated systems and DMCA on top of it (or Excel).
2. I did the menial route and am still happy for it. Flipping burgers, cleaning dishes, repairing truck tires and cleaning office buildings. It's a different sort of grit and stamina than the one that gets you far in your office career, but I still look back fondly on the lessons about hard work. It was also an introduction into diversity. I've met people on those jobs the 16-year old me never met before, and since. For me the lesson is: whatever my kids will do in jobs on the side, it pleases somebody enough to give them money and them enough to do the job it's a worthwhile lesson.
I beg to differ.
Using a rare and specialized skill to fix critical business software is "actual work". The example in this story created a fantastic amount of value. It was also probably the model for the author's entire professional life.
Maybe a more accurate headline would be
"Deciding not to take a job filling potholes was a good move"
"Show up and be being willing to try to fix difficult problems"
Other things of note: Character matters. If he'd lied to his mom about the outcome of the highway department job she wouldn't have known to connect him to the used car shop. She helped make a safe place for him to tell the truth. He made good by admitting a difficult thing.
Gaining skills and learning to solve problems pays off.
Being poised to take an opportunity that arises is probably a sound life strategy.
$100 was actually a reasonable number. It recognizes that computer work is not equivalent to minimum wage labor, is a significant discount off of professional software work and gives the client room to make a compelling offer for continued engagement.
People ask if we'll ever run out of software jobs. My answer is, "will we ever run out of business problems to solve? Opportunities for efficiency, laborious tasks to automate?" Not in any future I can imagine. Maybe when AI learns to code. But at that point the world as we know it is over anyway.
Here's mine. I'd just coming to take my GCSE's and decided to audit the school's website which was a Frontpage '97 powered site. I found the passwd file in the _vti_cnf dir (iirc) and ran it through a brute forcer. Found the password quite easily but instead of defacing decided to inform the webmaster. They were impressed and ended up getting me some paid work experience at ICL for the summer, working on an NT4 rollout (those were the days). If I'd defaced the site or done something a teenager would have perhaps done to impress his peers then I wouldn't have had that experience which definitely helped to get another job. It's funny how so much of life can pivot on quick, seemingly insignificant choices.
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 many multiples of that each month? Hell yes!).
And therein lies a fantastic reminder that if you can frame tthe cost of your work in terms of the value you will provide to your customer, rather than a flat labour rate for your time, you stand to earn a lot more.
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!
Reading this reminded me of a humorous Onion video titled "Report: 95% Of Grandfathers Got Job By Walking Right Up And Just Asking" [0].
Scrolling around the comments, I'm not seeing any stories newer than the 90's. Given the layers of HR rules, proprietary software shenanigans, and corporate management, I expect similar stories are rare today.
Depends on the size of a firm. If you rock up to a small firm and talk to the owner, you could well get a job, they don't have HR rules and corporate management.
One day, when I was 18 or 19, I was invited to a Mercedes dealership to try and fix a problem they were having with their site. I went there with the same mindset as the OP: I'll investigate for free, but a solution would cost money.
Unfortunately I didn't have the experience or perseverance to actually work my way through a highly custom CMS, one that seemed to be forced on most dealerships. I went in thinking there'd be a blob of PHP somewhere, or some code to look into. There was none, only an endless series of silver-tinted forms.
I gave up, said this was way out of my depth, and despite their insistence refused to bill them for the time. It was enough for me, as a young whippersnapper, to say that I worked for Mercedes (for a day).
Good to see OP had a similar-ish run-in but managed to see it through.
[+] [-] movedx|4 years ago|reply
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 a nearby network hardware repair place. They needed someone to look after their Cisco kit and about 30 Debian Linux systems. I was attracted to the mix of responsibilities so I applied, sending in me not-so-good CV. I was eventually asked to come in to have a chat after waiting about a week to hear back from the place.
At the end of the interview, Bob (let's call him), said I was more knowledgeable than the RHCEs that were coming through his door. This was nice to hear, but then he said something that really made me smile...
Apparently my CV was worse than I thought. It was so bad, that Bob literally put it in the bin under his desk. About four days later, Bob was reading through a local Linux User Group (LUG) mailing list and he saw a name he recognised: mine. So he opens the email and reads the thread in which I helped another LUG member compile a sound driver for their kernel. The instructions I gave worked.
Bob was impressed but he couldn't quite remember where he had seen the name. At this point the business owner, John (heh...), was standing besides Bob's desk and noticed my CV in the bin. He pulls it out and reads my name across the top. The penny drops for Bob and I get the call to come in and have a chat.
I got the job.
[+] [-] bluedino|4 years ago|reply
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 likely a holdover from an earlier (like 15 years earlier) version of the software, because now it was natively support.
During my searching, on a mailing list I found a message from my now-boss. Asking how to do the exact thing they were still doing. And a couple messages from developers of the software basically saying, "If you did it this way, it would in theory work, but it won't ever be supported"
[+] [-] pulse7|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27112542
[+] [-] bityard|4 years ago|reply
In fact, looking back at my employment history, only one of my jobs was a direct result of someone seeing my resume before they even met me.
[+] [-] jerf|4 years ago|reply
And don't just say "I participate in some LUG"... that can mean you show up to the meetings once every couple of months to eat the free food. Show your helpfulness in an email chain. Show a project that you did with them with a link that explicitly says you did a big portion of it. If no such link exists, get one created!
By no means do I promise wonders if you do this. HR filters may still eat your resume. But if you do get through to a real human, they may look at those things, and the ones who will understand what this means are the ones you want to work for anyhow.
If you've got the skills to pay the bills but your resume looks like any other high school dropout's, I can tell you, from the other side of the desk, you've given me no way to tell any different. It may stink that all we have are resumes in the initial process... but at least that resume is under your control. (Mostly. Sometimes it gets chewed on. But speaking for myself, I'm looking at raw resumes straight from the candidate and that's not uncommon.) Don't be afraid to use it, and don't be afraid to toot your own horn, that's the whole point of this particular document.
(Similarly, to the extent possible without lying, don't say "I participated in some project" as your work experience. Write something you did in the project. Don't say "I participated in a billing system upgrade", say how you rewrote the UI in React to conform to accessibility standards and made it run 10 times faster than before and customers uniformly loved it and paid lots more money or whatever. "Participation" could be "I had my hand held for every bug as I struggled to keep up" and it could be "I stepped up and took more responsibility than anyone expected and almost single-handedly completed the project, freeing up the other developers" or anything in between. Unfortunately, based on experience, I kinda have to assume the worst because it's usually right. If "the worst" interpretation of that phrase isn't right, don't leave it open to me!)
Believe me, if you're doing Linux support on a mailing list, or anything even remotely like that, you stand out, at least to the right people. Do whatever it takes to work that on to the resume somehow. The "standard resume form" is a skeleton to be fleshed out, not a straightjacket of form.
[+] [-] JJMcJ|4 years ago|reply
I have seen some awful resumes, including for people with PhDs and long records of accomplishments. Even people who have been through resume writing seminars at job search organizations.
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|4 years ago|reply
If interviews worked, then Bob would not have not needed two slaps upside the head to get it right.
[+] [-] cmos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beh9540|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 3pt14159|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] throwaway5752|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ed25519FUUU|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ergot_vacation|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] zwog|4 years ago|reply
I got a student job at that company and one of my first tasks (and that of several students before me) was to open measurement results on the device and type them into excel spreadsheets. I did this for an hour or so until I became totally bored so I started to tinker around. The measurement device had it's own PC that booted Windows (I think it was 95 or 98) and autostarted their software in full screen/some sort of . This was easy to bypass via the task manager and running explorer.exe. I found out that the proprietary file format was simplay an MS Access file with a different extension. I tried to open it, but the file was password protected. At this time I had little to none experience with programming or anything else that was "low level" computer stuff, but I occasionally stumbled about writeups about hacks and exploits and skimmed over them. So I was pretty sure that there had to be a hardcoded password somewhere. I started to open every file I could in a text editor with no luck. Then I got a hex editor and opened the binaries and finally, in a dll there was a password. The next few days at this job I spent teaching myself enough Python to read the Access files and write the contents into an Excel file.
This worked and I used the free time to study/eat/sleep while getting paid for it but then one of my supervisors found out that I wasn't doing anything but still got results and wondered how I did it. He immediately put me onto another problem they had, thus starting my career as a software engineer.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|4 years ago|reply
My boss took one look, freaked out and I was back at the Temping agency.
We are still very far from a Software Literate society.
[+] [-] scrumper|4 years ago|reply
I showed the bosses, and was immediately put to work on some much more interesting stuff linking Lotus Notes with SQL Server for reporting and dashboarding, and then I was off to the races.
(The previous year I'd spent the summer making concrete garden ornaments with a group of ex-cons in a shed in the back of a farm - an experience which certainly made me appreciate the comforts of doing spreadsheets in an air-conditioned office, though my muscles were never quite as good.)
[+] [-] brazzy|4 years ago|reply
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 those cards, I also bought a USB card reader.
And there I ran into problems: the PC in my dormitory room was a used Pentium Pro desktop I'd gotten very cheaply without an OS, and I'd installed Linux on it. But at that time, USB support on Linux was still rather spotty, and while the card reader was in principle supported as a mass storage device, the USB driver would reproducibly freeze up after a short time accessing it.
As mentioned above, my C skills were basically non-existing, but compiling your own kernel was at that time still a pretty common thing for Linux users to do, so I had some experience with that. And I was motivated. I enabled kernel debug output, and discovered that just before freezing up, the driver would report that it had received an event with a certain ID. I found the code that handled events, and I found the code that handled the problematic event. I looked at it and realized that I was many months of learning away from being able to fix it.
So instead, I deleted it. I simply made the driver ignore that type of event.
It worked. I could use the card reader to put MP3 files on the MMCs and listen to them on the player.
I felt a strange mixture of achievement and embarassment.
[+] [-] ergot_vacation|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bserge|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] rags2riches|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bregma|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ninive|4 years ago|reply
The sales agent from this "big" Italian company arrived, unboxed the PC, and started to explain to my dad the default MS-DOS commands. I was sitting there sneaking the prompt commands he was typing when, while installing the accounting software (which was the selling reason) the installation utility failed with an error twice and the sales guy was in a panic. A new version of the software was shipped early that week, and this was the first live installation of it. He tried some commands, started to screw up turning the PC OFF and ON, and at the end, he was completely clueless.
That's when I've stepped in - I've gently asked him permission to touch the keyboard and once got access, I started to play with MS-DOS and found the batch file that was responsible for the installation. The guy was looking at me with an expression that mixed surprise and hope when I've found out this file was a script that was similar to Basic and I've found a way to edit it. After poking for 1 hour in tests and trials, I've finally fixed a bug on a conditional that was bringing the data loading to a dead disk path.
The guy talked with his department the same day, and a manager from the company called me to understand what I did. They were so thankful! Nobody paid me a cent for this but after that phone call, I realized my passion could also be my future job and life, and 36 years later is still true. Thanks again!
[+] [-] eb0la|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkovach|4 years ago|reply
They had a computer system there to keep the inventory, running dBase III and hooked up to a NetWare network.
First day: No reports could be printed. Reloaded the various drivers, re-ran the reports.
Second day: They told me about a bug that caused the counts to be off so after checking things in, I had to manually add the right answers to the totals. Fixed the bug in dBase app.
Third day: The pull me to the front office, I'm working in the IT department and somebody's else kid is working in the parts shop.
[+] [-] jugg1es|4 years ago|reply
But the real take-away is that this era of computing was a true green field for the kids growing up in it. My cousins, who are over 10 years younger than me, grew up in a totally different world and, despite having used computers their whole life, have no idea how they work or how to build stuff with them.
A childhood spent writing batch files in order to run DOS X-Wing is very different than one spent loading a CD into the 1st gen Xbox.
I feel bad for my own kids, who are surrounded by technology that is walled off and inaccessible. Even 'View Source' on web pages is virtually useless now-a-days. It's a lot harder to get into the internals of systems than it used to be.
[+] [-] realaether|4 years ago|reply
"View source" is not only virtually useless on many pages, but also unreasonably difficult to access in the first place (if not completely impossible) on systems like iOS.
UX, generally, seems so rigid now that, especially if it's on a more locked-down platform or a web-app, it seems there's often almost no way to use an app in any way other than the developer intended. The barrier to entry for hacking seems incredibly high now.
I don't know when the concepts of batch processing and scripting — or even keyboard shortcuts — came to be seen as a hindrance to UX, but I have a feeling it developed in parallel with touchscreens and the ever-increasing incentive to make apps addictive. In that respect it seems like we haven't really evolved in the last 10 years (at least), but actually regressed to some pre-computer, pre-automation age.
Perhaps everything I've just written is a load of rambling nostalgia. These thoughts come to me almost on a daily basis though.
[+] [-] jkestner|4 years ago|reply
In the meantime, I’ll start the kids on my old Apple ][e if I can smuggle it by my spouse.
[+] [-] simion314|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JackFr|4 years ago|reply
He smiled and said great, which let me know I had absolutely left money in the table. A trusted colleague then told me if that situation ever came up again, take your real, reasonable expectation, double it and add 20. The situation has never come up again.
[+] [-] unnouinceput|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thathndude|4 years ago|reply
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 finished. But As far as the business was concerned, it was 0% done because it was an all-or-nothing situation (either it worked or didn’t).
I did the final 5% and charged $3,000. I presented it as “I can fix the problem for 3k.” Was that completely fair to them I sometimes wonder? I don’t lose any sleep over it — they had a problem and I fixed it. I think it was wrong for the first contractor not to finish the work up and deal with a final invoice rather than insisting on pay in advance and abandoning them that close to the finish lone.
As far as the business was concerned I was a very cheap solution, and I made an hourly rate of about $2k per hour.
[+] [-] StavrosK|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xuki|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] somedude895|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjparrott|4 years ago|reply
In the first, I was a temp worker for a P&G re-packaging facility. This means some temp agency was paid $12/hour and they passed on $9/hour to me. The job was backbreaking, in intense heat, and with very strict management rules (e.g. no lunch break, sitting down for even a moment was grounds for being fired).
In the second, I did lawn mowing for individual families for $20/hour. I found them by referrals and networking, and could control my schedule for when I went to do jobs.
This taught me that being creative to find good jobs was super important.
In college, I found a series of high-pay, flexible or comfortable jobs. A few examples:
$1000 for one week's work to hand out 2 pallets worth of coke zero to college students. I was allowed to keep the extras and ended up with a 1 year supply of coke zero for myself and all my friends. Oh, they also gave me coupon for 1,000 free burritos and despite a very diligent effort to hand out as many as humanly possible was left with ~300 burritos and told to just keep them. Qdoba was my primary diet for quite some time.
A job selling cameras on eBay for a camera shot that went out of business. They paid me a 25% commission and had one of the largest private collections of highly collectable cameras (I sold one for $8,000). I only did it for a summer, and probably should have taken a semester off college to just do this full time and could have made enough money to significantly reduce my college loans.
A freelance role, for a German re-insurance company to write white papers for $50/hour and could create my own agenda for what I needed to write, and work whenever I wanted.
[+] [-] sircastor|4 years ago|reply
This is very adjacent to what you're saying, but every time I hear this idea, I can only think that it's really taking an entire year off. Most of my courses were structured in a way that if you took a term out of the normal hierarchy, you'd have to wait until that course came around again at the same time the next year.
[+] [-] tester756|4 years ago|reply
that's pros or con? :P
[+] [-] foreigner|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wjnc|4 years ago|reply
1. Would this still be possible today? It's a certain timeframe (for software) where this was possible. Today it's things like SAP, integrated systems and DMCA on top of it (or Excel).
2. I did the menial route and am still happy for it. Flipping burgers, cleaning dishes, repairing truck tires and cleaning office buildings. It's a different sort of grit and stamina than the one that gets you far in your office career, but I still look back fondly on the lessons about hard work. It was also an introduction into diversity. I've met people on those jobs the 16-year old me never met before, and since. For me the lesson is: whatever my kids will do in jobs on the side, it pleases somebody enough to give them money and them enough to do the job it's a worthwhile lesson.
[+] [-] more_corn|4 years ago|reply
Maybe a more accurate headline would be "Deciding not to take a job filling potholes was a good move" "Show up and be being willing to try to fix difficult problems"
Other things of note: Character matters. If he'd lied to his mom about the outcome of the highway department job she wouldn't have known to connect him to the used car shop. She helped make a safe place for him to tell the truth. He made good by admitting a difficult thing. Gaining skills and learning to solve problems pays off. Being poised to take an opportunity that arises is probably a sound life strategy. $100 was actually a reasonable number. It recognizes that computer work is not equivalent to minimum wage labor, is a significant discount off of professional software work and gives the client room to make a compelling offer for continued engagement.
People ask if we'll ever run out of software jobs. My answer is, "will we ever run out of business problems to solve? Opportunities for efficiency, laborious tasks to automate?" Not in any future I can imagine. Maybe when AI learns to code. But at that point the world as we know it is over anyway.
[+] [-] _joel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NamTaf|4 years ago|reply
And therein lies a fantastic reminder that if you can frame tthe cost of your work in terms of the value you will provide to your customer, rather than a flat labour rate for your time, you stand to earn a lot more.
[+] [-] MayeulC|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmmcd|4 years ago|reply
> I created a “good” BASIC file from scratch [...] Then I compared it to one of the “bad” ones.
[+] [-] tomkat0789|4 years ago|reply
Scrolling around the comments, I'm not seeing any stories newer than the 90's. Given the layers of HR rules, proprietary software shenanigans, and corporate management, I expect similar stories are rare today.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV_6RYVbNaw
[+] [-] iso1631|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ljm|4 years ago|reply
Unfortunately I didn't have the experience or perseverance to actually work my way through a highly custom CMS, one that seemed to be forced on most dealerships. I went in thinking there'd be a blob of PHP somewhere, or some code to look into. There was none, only an endless series of silver-tinted forms.
I gave up, said this was way out of my depth, and despite their insistence refused to bill them for the time. It was enough for me, as a young whippersnapper, to say that I worked for Mercedes (for a day).
Good to see OP had a similar-ish run-in but managed to see it through.