Ask HN: What was your first job? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What was your first job?

32 pointspj75 comments

The end of retirement article made me wonder about this. What was your first job, how old were you, and how much were you paid?

My first job was stacking bricks from an old building they tore down behind my house. I was about 10 years old and got paid a dollar or two, can't remember exactly, for a stack of 1,000 bricks, 10 by 10 by 10.

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Bike Messenger in DC.

Made great money for a HS student. Got to ride bikes all day and use my middle finger a lot. And my boss was just a voice on a walkie talkie. It was one of the best jobs I've ever had.

Almost everyone I worked with was an ex-con. Crack, stealing assault you name it. I worked for one company where the boss hired me for the summer on the condition that I found him a replacement in the fall. "If you leave without finding one," he yelled, "I'll see you in the street and run you over!" He was quite serious.

I'm a white guy and I worked for an all black company for a summer. My card said, "A black owned and operated company." During my interview there my future boss said, "I'll be damned. I'll be damned! You must be the ONLY white Willy in Washington."

The job was all about having a reliable bike and knowing the micro optimizations. You gained more speed by deftly navigating the buildings than the road. Knowing which buildings had service entrances, which doors had guards who didn't make you sign in and which elevators were fast all saved time and made money. I also got to know the mini subway system that runs between the capital and the senate and house office buildings.

But the government was the best for money. They took so long to do anything that you could charge them a dollar a minute for wait time. I feel like they should rate efficiency of institutions based on how long it takes for them to get a package in the hand of the person they called to pick it up. Like gigaflops for bureaucracies.

In four summers I got hit by about 12 cars. I was never seriously hurt but I did do some substantial damage to cars and went through a few bikes. If you ever get hit, ditch your bike and jump ON the car if you can. If you're flying through the air twist so you roll like a hotdog when you land.

One time I got decked by an SUV on a double rush (guaranteed 20 min delivery = $100 for the customer) to CNN in Rosalyn, VA. I was carrying a reel for the nightly news. It fell out and rolled through the traffic amazingly landing unharmed. I showed up to CNN on time and covered in road rash and blood. The receptionist grabbed the movie reel and didn't even ask me if I was OK.

Such sweaty, gritty, speedy good times.

I worked as a carny at the Perth Royal Show for 2 weeks when I was 15. Pay was peanuts, but part of the job involved wearing a horror mask and jumping out at people from the dark with a pitchfork, scaring them senseless.

Not sure I've ever achieved the same level of job satisfaction.

Baling hay and detassling corn for about $4.50/hr. I think I was about 12. The bales of hay were heavier than I was, so I had to use leverage to stack them and always ended up completely covered in debris. The cornfield job was easy...but it was really hot, so most of my peers quit. That's the first time I realized that different people could have dramatically different work ethics. Some people spent more time and effort figuring out how to cheat and goof off than it would've taken to just do the job properly.

I worked before that, chopping wood and the like, but just "to earn my keep" and not for payment. Around 15, I started giving lessons at the YMCA (swim lessons, horseback riding lessons, guitar lessons, and martial arts lessons) and cutting grass for elderly neighbors. Cutting grass I averaged $5-7 an hour, and giving lessons I averaged between $15-20 an hour, which taught me the benefits of 'specialized' knowledge and skills.

The first time I had any idea about a business model was in middle school. Most middle school kids couldn't go into our high school without getting into trouble, but I could because I was the editor of the newspaper and yearbook. Economic moat ;-) I used my "special hall privileges" to buy candy from the high school, which had a concession/vending stand, and resell them to the middle school kids, who had no junk food outlet of their own. I usually marked things up between 25-100%.

My first was 4:30am, dragging a giant basket down rows of sweetcorn, hand-picking at age 10. Got paid with a bag of sweetcorn and what I was told was "character".

Ahh, the innocence of being a stereotypical Iowan. In hindsight, the character built was worth every bead of sweat.

Unsoldering 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?

Eh. We rode around in an equipment van with no seats, much less seatbelts, and which burned lots of juicy leaded gas. Different times.

Other 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.

My first real job was cleaning electronic and pipe components, typically of the sort which were used underwater for delivering oil. This was a somewhat under-the-table employment, probably because the owner of the company didn't want to deal with OSHA. As I recall I was 16 and the pay was an impressive $6.75 an hour.

After a summer of drama he became incensed that one of my pipes, which I had been cleaning of oil residue by means of scrubbing with a solvent and a toothbrush (it is exactly as fun as it sounds), was insufficiently clean. He attempted to demonstrate his displeasure by throwing the ~20 pound pipe at me. It passed close enough to my ear that I felt the breeze.

Thus ended my involvement in the informal labor market.

My 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.

My first job was picking rocks out of the wheat field when I was 11 on our wheat farm. At 12, I was pretty much doing all the work for the dryland part of the farm. But being the family farm, that didn't directly pay.

After senior year of high school I worked on a wheat farm owned by a friend of my Dad and was paid $1.25/hr.

Lots of long days, hours wise. Carried that into computer profession.

However, at the end of the summer, farming was done. In this business, it is never done and there is no natural downtime.

1974: I was 12 rising 13 and my dad was fired (later it turned out that his boss was embezzling and was worried that dad would find out.)

My sister got a Saturday job in a corner store, and I got a paper round. 6 days a week, 05:15 start, 120 papers delivered before 07:00. I don't remember the pay, but it provided pocket money as my parents struggled to start their own business.

I learned a lot from watching them deal with cash-flow, customers, orders, invoices, manufacturing, deliveries, and having no money to spend.

I had two:

I helped my mom load and unload furniture. She owned an antiques, used furniture and collectibles shop, and I would go to garage sales and flea markets on the weekend with her to help with the big stuff.

Consequently, I had the opportunity to buy a lot of old computer junk for cheap at said garage sales and flea markets. I bought and rebuilt Commodore 64, Apple IIe, TI 99/4a, etc. machines for resale at $40-$100 (depending on disk drives, printer, etc.). One time I found an Apple Lisa, with original receipts and in perfectly working order for about 25 bucks. I was stunned that the 10MB hard disk had cost something like $5495, and the 5MB one $3495. The Lisa itself was, I think, $9995.

Picking dandelions, $0.01 for each stem, $0.02 if it included the root.

I was 4 at the time.

I noticed that there was a nice discount for large bundles of pencils, so I bought one and then went door to door selling them. Not sure how old I was, but this was during elementary school. I think one pencil cost 2 cents, and I would sell them for 16 cents. Then a friend came along, and I hired him to join me for 8 cents a pencil. My father was later telling me I shouldn't have paid him so much, so I got discouraged and didn't continue the "business".

Imagine Caddyshack minus all of the hilarity and sex, just the dragging golf clubs around for rich people part.

Pay always depended on how well the golfer did (better score, better tip) but it was normally around $25 for about 4 hours of work. I did that for a couple of years starting around 14.

It was a good job for developing a solid work ethic and realizing that computers were worth pursuing.

14, 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.

Officially, 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...

Washing dishes at a steakhouse/buffet family trough at 16. Got in a knife fight one time with a mentally challenged but belligerent coworker. Avoid these places, but if you can't, avoid the bread pudding & ranch dressing. You really don't wanna know.

19, wrote some Javascript for a travel search engine, $1000/mo (I grew up in India - there were no summer jobs worth doing because you can't compete with the cheap labour in India).

15, 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.

Bagger at Albertsons ("courtesy clerk") at $5.15/hr, during high school. I've never had so much financial freedom in my life.

Bagger at Safeway ("courtesy clerk") at $3.26 an hour, during high school. Management considered this above-average pay, since it was above minumum wage (which was $3.25/hr).

I'm not sure if this would qualify as my first job, but here I go: I used to run errands for my cousin at his car shop when I was 10-11 years old. I did a bit of everything: cleaning, moving/relocating car parts, and even painting at times. I used to get a tad more than $1 dollar a day, sometimes even less.

My first (second?) "real" job, however, was vastly more suitable for what would later become my passion in life: non-linear editor (yes, that was the official title). I was 18 when I landed the position. I was basically editing the news for a local TV channel in Dominican Republic. I was using a digital, Leitch editing panel attached to a PC running Windows NT. The paid was roughly $100 dollars a month. I've never wanted to work in anything that does not involve a computer ever since.

16, doing Telephone surveys. Lasted for 2.5 years through high-school. Minimum wage, but I was pretty good so I could get the volume bonuses a lot of time. Hated the work. Loved the schedule.

18, selling knives for CUTCO, commission only. And I freakin loved it.

Scraping and painting a greenhouse at a farm for $3.50 an hour when I was 16. It was actually a great job, except when we were painting the inside. Once my back was hurting from painting some trim and I stood up too quickly and put by head right through one of the panes of glass. Fortunately not even a scratch, but it scared the heck out of me.

That was my first "real" job if you don't include all the standard stuff like paper routes, shoveling driveways and mowing lawns.

My 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.

My 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.

During my high school years I delivered dry cleaning in my neighborhood in upper Manhattan. Great exercise. :)

I learned a few things about business, also learned how to use a steam presser for assorted fabrics. (Watch out for silk!)

Tried to learn some Chinese from the owner, but I failed big time. :(

I got to listen to assorted Chinese music when pressing clothes or working the counter. It was interesting, but it never really grew on me as something pleasurable.

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.

A 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.

My real first paid job with contract and stuff was as a cashier for a grocery chain. That was in 1995 (I was 17) and I financed with this job my first trip to an island in Northern Germany. Then my first real independent thing with license and stuff was selling soft drinks at the Berlin Love Parade in 1996. I made on this one day four times what I got for working as a teller. That was convincing enough...

this is fun ! let me think

I had a job as a cleaner at a shopping centre which i did at night times, i had a friend who was doing that full time and he asked me if i wanted to help, pay was good cause i was 13 so any money was good :P I first used those scissor sweeps, then i did some of the mopping then finally i got to use the buffing machine.

Then i worked in dominos pizza. I was making pizza's and chopping and boxing them, never did counters for some reason.

Then i worked at a call center as one of those annoying people that call you in the middle of the day to sell you phone plans and phone deals. Wasnt to bad a pay. This was during uni summer holidays between 1st year uni and 2nd year uni.

Finally between 2nd and 3rd year of uni i got a job as a developer coding perl cgi's. I was coding online shopping carts and delivering dynamic content for this small shutters company ....

Once i graduated then it was real world work ... consulting firms, systems engineering, realtime stuff, architect etc etc, been like that for the past 6 years and now hoping to graduate from this 9-5 cycle to the one finally owning the company :)

13; personal tutor for another student at $20/hour.

Cleaning horse stables. Must have been about 10. Not sure what I was paid, probably a few bucks an hour. Worst part was in the winter when you had to carry a screwdriver to break the ice off the water bucket.

The radio in one barn was going all the time on the top 40 station. There are still songs that bring back the smell of horse manure and sawdust whenever I hear them.

18, bussing at Thai restaraunt. $2 something and tips. Learned then that tips made up part of the minimum wage.

Am I the only one who started with a realish job?

Other than a 1-time thing here and there, probably less than 10 times in my life, my first job is right now. I'm coding for a small Rails company in Seattle for a realish salary (bad for coding, great for being 16). We do some consulting work and some of our own products.

Helped write mapping software for the US Army Corps of Engineers. Yeah, I guess I've never had a real job.

delivering papers, $0.04 a paper, up at 5am 6 days a week.

someone gave me a sympathy vote! I just realized it wasn't quit this bad - it was more on Saturdays ( $0.06 a paper! )

Data entry. Ten hour shifts. At night.

I grew up on a farm to a lot chores that I were things that other would consider jobs.

But I would consider hard wood flooring my first job. Hard as f--- work, and the employer I worked for was known for being one of the hardest working men in his profession around, him being my dad.

15, working at Burger King. I remember getting my first web development job a few months later that paid less than my job at BK.

No, my initials had nothing to do with my choice to work there...they were the only ones who would hire a 15 year old.

My first real job was a BK too :) 16 years old, and I think I made 5.25/hr

17, I worked for a local family owned ice cream shop of course! $6.75/hr.

16 and I worked for at an ice cream shop too! Corporate chain type though. $5.25/hr (1998 dollars).

edit: birthday paradox in action?

My 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.

newspaper route at age 10.

I 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).

I was a sophomore in college. I took a job at a small web development company writing PHP. I made minimum wage, about $7.25 at the time.

Not the greatest story to tell, but those roots got me where I am today.

In 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.

Unpaid intern at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and at the same time worked Drive-Thru at a McDonald's (High School)

Application Developer at Cingular Wireless (College)

Cashier 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.

Cook at Hardee's - it wasn't that bad, lots of free food. Definitely didn't do anything to contribute to my current career (Sr. Developer).

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.

14. Construction. $15-$20/hr. Planning, wiring, roofing were pretty fun. Digging foundation trenches in clay was not.

13 in 1994, packing up groceries at the local supermarket. Tips only, made about $2/hour (yea, it was a bad deal)

Around 9 years old, I was weighing people for money (~5 cents converted to USD in that time) on local markets.

17, Digitizing printed circuit board designs. It was basically tracing with a computerized drafting table.

High school (16 or so): McDonalds College (18-20 or so): summer internships at Johnson and Johnson

16, Dominos pizza, taking orders and making them at $4.75 per hour.

Quit that job to become an asp developer :(

16, autocad drafting and tech guy for a small surveying company in town. $8/hr

Paperboy.

My first real job was as a telemarketer/telephone salesman at age 16.

A summertime gig doing FoxPro database programming for $17.50/hour.

14. Farmers market... about $50/week. 3am on a Saturday is early.

Foot Locker, age 16 ... the striped nylon shirt was itchy ...

15 y.o., life guard at a pool. Minimum wage @ $5.00/hr. Ouch!

16, SAT instructor at Kaplan. I hated my life that summer.

16, martial arts instructor.

Lifeguard, 16

First "job"? Hmm, probably one of those phone book delivery schemes at the age of 13 in rural Virginia. Paid $7/hr, all said. I split the take with a few car-owning friends and paid them less of the commission than I got ($5/hr, maybe?)

First business venture was selling polished salt crystals (that I'd found at the beaches of Dubrovnik pre-war, say 1990) to the parents of my classmates at a craft fair. I was 8 or so, and used an overhead projector covered with hole-punched mylar to illuminate them. Made a few Austrian Schilling that way.

First Real Job was at 17 as a programmer/security analyst for a sleazy pay-per-click search engine in Thousand Oaks, CA. I got a $70k/yr salary and stock options, which I was slightly amused with at the time (having prefigured the dot-com phenomenon for a crash) and parlayed my low-paying position into a neat title.

Of course, this did nothing to stop me from squandering the majority of my 20s on sex, drugs and very loud music.

I 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).

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