Ask HN: Job prospect at my dream company, but I'm not 18 yet.

[young-throwaway]

Using a throwaway account because I don't want to be identified. I am in a very new situation and confused.

I am 17 years old, turning 18 early next year. I currently study at a highly academic selective entry high school in Australia and formally taking first year undegrad uni as part of my final year program.

I have been working on an ambitious "mod" (it's actually an alternative version) for a game run by a huge company, similar to Valve. I found a bunch of exploits in the protocol and their game and reported it to one of their engineers. A few days later I received an email from a "Senior Recruiter" about a potential position at the company, referred by the guy I reported the exploits to. It sounded like the recruiter expected me to be a 25+ year old engineer with a degree in CS, not a high school student. He also wanted to talk about my "academic background/professional experience".

I replied but avoided talking about my age and education - I said that I was interested in the position and that while I didn't have formal education, I had the affinity for solving big problems, that I was passionate about the game and had experience in CS and SE (which I do). I got a reply within 20 minutes where he asked me for an updated resume and to arrange a call with him to discuss this further - he said had 5 calls that day, would be away for the weekend, so we would be able to continue this on Monday.

Continued at http://pastebin.com/MxHkVSdD because I hit the 2k character limit (barely).

I really really appreciate any help and advice you can give to me. This opportunity means so much to me.

I can also be reached at youngthrowaway@gmail.com.

[logn]

Maybe instead of approaching the HR guy with your carefully crafted resume and explanation, reach out to the engineer you contacted and ask for his advice. These guys are often far enough removed from bureaucracy and HR they might give you some honest advice. But be tactful with him too. You don't want him running to the HR guy like "nevermind he's a high school punk"

Above all, you're young, so do whatever you can to strike some sort of relationship with them as you mature. Keep yourself in their mind. Attend company events, submit more patches, ask for an internship or freelance work. You have your foot in the door already, just keep it going.

[thaumaturgy]

Well, there are a few different ways this can go for you. (Quick background: my first tech job was in the I.T. department for my school district, before I was 18. So, I've been in your position.)

You're essentially going to be entering into a negotiation with them. They are clearly interested in your talents, but might try to convince you that you're too young, so you have to do your best to improve your position. One of the first things you have to do is be straightforward about your age: "I'm 17 and still in high school, but..." You want to come across as mature as possible.

Even better is to reverse that a little bit. Companies love enthusiastic people. (Well, smart companies do, anyway.) They love to have people that want to be there. Those people can bring a lot of new life into a business. And, best of all (for the company), they tend to be cheap. So, how about: "I'm familiar with your company, it would be my dream job to work there, but I'm 17 and still in high school."

Describe your previous work even if you can't provide references. Try really really hard to come up with some kind of references, though. There's nothing wrong with very briefly telling a bit about yourself; at what age did you start doing this kind of work, how much time do you spend on it?

At this point it'll proceed from one of two scenarios: they'll say yes (but maybe with some restrictions, like, "contact us after you graduate"), or they'll say no. If they say no, what you have to do next is immediately offer a counter-proposal: ask about an internship, offer to contact them again as soon as you've graduated, offer to discuss it on the phone. The goal of your counter-proposal should be to leave an opening for them that they will like.

If all else fails with the recruiter, send a brief email back to the engineer. Thank him for contacting the recruiter on your behalf, and tell him that you'd love to work there one day but you're 17 and still in high school. (Don't ask for his help; you're sending him a thank you note. You're just also letting him know how it went with the recruiter, but only in one sentence.)

That engineer might see an opportunity within the company for you that the recruiter doesn't.

Even after all this, it still might not work out for you. The usual adage is that if the company doesn't see how valuable you are, or doesn't want to try to make something work with you, then it's probably not the right place for you anyway. From the sounds of things, you've got lots of talent and you'll have no trouble working at some great places later on, so don't let it get you down.

[sgentle]

For what it's worth, I don't think you should see being 17 as a negative. There are a lot of people out there with CS degrees but without that sense of passion or autonomy that leads them to write mods and report exploits in their free time. You can get an education - that's just a matter of time and effort. What's harder to acquire is the right mindset and the ambition to do awesome work.

As thaumaturgy said, it's a negotiation. Don't go in thinking of yourself as a high-school kid who they're taking a chance on; that sounds like a liability. You want to sell the version of yourself that's a precocious young developer so good he's half a decade ahead of everyone else. That person is an investment; a good deal for them as well as you.

If I were interviewing you my concerns about your age/experience would be: 1. Are you mature enough to handle working in a big company? You can code, sure, but can you work with others? Can you deal with conflict? Can you take responsibility for mistakes? Can you work with business requirements as well as just code? 2. Without a formal CS background, are you going to be able to think and work at a high level of abstraction? What if you're asked to dive into a codebase full of Visitors, Observers or Singletons? What if you're asked to work on collision detection or auth code? Are you going to implement something half-arsed and hacky because you've never heard of octrees or SRP? It's not so much needing to know every algorithm off by heart, but having the perspective needed to think about the right way to do things and seek them out rather than throwing together whatever works.

Those might not be the concerns of your interviewer - if he's good he'll make sure you know what those are, but be prepared for something similar. An easy mistake to make is not to listen enough to what's being asked. Your interviewer will, guaranteed, have a checklist or question sheet with selection criteria on it. If you listen, you'll get an idea of what they want to know. Make sure you ask questions, too - at the very least ask what the work environment is like and what sort of work you might be doing. Interviewing them a little will make the conversation more equal (and is a good idea anyway).

As far as resume goes, the standard is basically 1 page. Pretend you're writing a movie review for a guy with a five second attention span. Generally you want: contact details, bio (who you are, what you want and why they should care), education and skills, work history. The bio should be a few sentences. Everything else should be bullets. Skills is a laundry list of every programming language/technology you know how to use (recruiters aren't always familiar with technical details, and have been known to insta-bin people without the right keywords). Don't include hobbies or interests.

For the work history, you want reverse-chronological order: most recent at the top. Feel free to include paid work and personal projects like your mod; anything that's relevant. For each one, you want to explain what you did, when you did it and how it achieved results for the business/project. Look up "STAR statements". Quantify things if you can: "ahead of schedule" is so much less interesting than "6 weeks ahead of schedule", "active userbase" sounds like noise compared to "5k active users".

As far as references, I'd never include anything on a resume but "references available on request" unless you've been specifically asked otherwise. (In fact, I've heard that most people now just leave it out entirely). If they want to follow up with references they'll let you know, and you never want people calling your referees by surprise. When you say you don't have any references, do you mean you haven't asked them? I've found the people I've contracted with generally fairly receptive to being referees even a long time after the project finished.

Make sure your resume looks decent. If you've got a friend with any design experience, get them to give it a once-over. Try not to pick an ugly font. The Pages templates are nice if you've got a Mac. If not, I've heard the newer versions of Office come with some nice looking ones too. Or you can go with LaTeX if you want to be hardcore and blow the rest of your weekend. Rule of thumb is the more white space the better. Save that sucker as a pdf. Get someone else to check it for spelling and grammar.

Lastly, go watch Randy Pausch's Last Lecture. If you've already seen it, just watch the bit where he talks about brick walls again. If this is truly the thing you want, don't stop at no. This particular recruiter might not be interested, but if it's a big company there are bound to be other ways in. In the end it all boils down to getting through to the right people, and you've already impressed one of their engineers enough to pass on your details. He didn't do that because emailing people is fun; you have something to offer them, and as long as that's true it's just a matter of getting your name in front of someone who can make the decision.