Interesting Reflections of an 18 year old Programmer | Hacker News Reader

Interesting Reflections of an 18 year old Programmer

wakecodesleep.com

88 pointsOoTheNigerian16 comments

Sounds very similar to my story, also left home and started work immediately, only doing my degree in late 20s.

Now 30, I've worked in 8 countries, developed on Linux, OS X, Windows & iPhone, for web, desktop and mobile.

First salary was $200/month (in South Africa) :) Happily, that has improved by a few orders of magnitude.

It really is a great experience to have had, though sometimes I wish I had gone down the academic route and aimed for some place like MIT/Stanford.

But fuck it, one life.

What are you doing now that earns $200000/month?

I wondered the same. Or it may be a case of not knowing what "orders of magnitude" means.

Going from 200/month to 20,000/month is not terribly unrealistic, _and_ "a few orders of magnitude" more.

Being a programmer one might like to think in base-2 orders :)

And as a physicist or mathematician, he would probably do base-e orders.

Or "few". Maybe he meant "couple"?

I think it's worth pointing out that "high school" in the UK finishes at 16, so he didn't so much as drop out of school as decide to not go to sixth-form/college (which is optional - and is usually two years and fits between high school and university).

Still it was a brave decision, and it obviously was the right one for him - it's a very impressive story! Congrats!

Yeah, it was the choice between skipping further education or going straight in to work that was my dilemma rather than "dropping out" of education as it would be in the US, etc.

When I first saw the headline for this story my immediate thought was "What does an 18 year old know!"

but it turned out to be a very interesting monologue about this guys experiences in the trade. It also highlights the how fragile web companies can be

After about 2 weeks (seriously!) in the job the new employee just got up and left, never to be seen again. On the day he quit we were actually in a team meeting and once it was over, the employee collected his things, called a taxi and got a train back home to his parent’s house. The only reason Greg and I were told as to why he decided to quit was apparently because “he’d rather play video games than work”. No lie.

Excuse my ignorance, but just how exactly do these types of people get hired? Nepotism?

I believe our boss was pretty desperate to hire another developer asap (I'm not exactly sure why..) and we had known the guy for several months/year prior to offering him the job (so yeah, he sort of got the job as he was close to being a friend). We did interview him though and he was actually a fairly good PHP coder just a bit socially awkward at times (which wasn't an issue). Oh and he was also willing to work on a very low wage (something like £9k p/a) so that was a big bonus for our boss. Thinking back, I'm not that surprised he quit so soon considering he was only on £9k, lol. Thanks for reading the post though by the way :-)

I read through the whole article, and I must say I'm really impressed with what Simon's done in the few years after graduatiion. Question, though: (Simon, if you're reading this) are you planning to go to university, say in a year or two?

I'd imagine it'll be worth the experience!

If I'm not where I want to be in 2 years time then I'll most definitely consider going to college/university to get a degree/qualification of some sort :)

Really appreciate the post. Shows what it takes to take on something on your own. And he's still a teenager!! Here in India people finish school when they are 18 and go directly to college!

As crazy as this time feels right now, it gets worse/better over time. Whatever you're doing now, it will be more in 5 years time. You will look back and ask yourself, "how could I have been so naive?" But at the same time, you couldn't imagine what more you could have known. And this continues, it develops and expands. If you take it for what it is, it's incredibly exciting, because it means the best days are still to come.

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