

Tell HN: I'll work for you for free this summer - jwb119

I'm an honors law student w/ a background in finance looking for some interesting (read: not corporate drone) work this summer.  I love startups and I've taught myself some very basic coding over the past year or so.  Looking to dive into any legal or business areas that you might not have the time or energy to explore.  Send me a link and I can shoot you a full resume.<p>My basic qualifications: 4 years at a major i-bank (2 in banking and 2 in bond sales).  1 year of law school (good grades).  passionate about startups.<p>Contact:  My HN username at gmail
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tptacek
Want to learn software security? We'll _pay_ you to do interesting work over
the summer. We're weird like that.

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bioweek
I just finished reading "Gray Hat Python". It was pretty interesting talking
about fuzzers, and injection stuff. Is that what you guys do?

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tptacek
Very yes. (We're working on "Grey Hat Ruby", though I don't know if we're
going to publish it on dead trees).

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bioweek
So dumb question. How do you make money doing that? Is it that software
companies want their security tested so they hire you? (I wouldn't think most
companies would be so proactive.)

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tptacek
Every fiscal quarter, tens of products ship (often after millions invested)
for every one practitioner that can competantly write a fuzzer. That estimate
may actually be conservative by an order of magnitude.

We work for vendors and enterprises (ie, normal companies). Vendors bring us
in to beat stuff up before they ship it. Enterprises bring us in to reverse
things and beat them up before they get deployed.

Yes, many companies aren't that proactive. But the industry is slowly getting
dragged into security; key verticals like financial services and health care
are starting to require documentation of penetration testing for anything that
gets deployed, and Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple, and IBM all have
religion about software security process.

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dschobel
maybe a general internship thread is called for in addition to the traditional
HN "who's hiring?" with summer around the corner?

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shawnps
I'd like this, as I've begun searching for a 6 month internship to start in
July for my third co-op.

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ivankirigin
Why would you work for free?

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gphil
If you have the financial wherewithal, I'd imagine taking an unpaid internship
opens up a lot of great options that wouldn't exist otherwise.

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barry-cotter
This.

Before the crash I-Banking bonuses for first year Analysts at Big 4 firms were
on the order of $80-100K each year. Assume you bank all of that each year and
to be conservative, that it was 80K each year, you now have 320K. This will
pay for all three years of Yale Law ($142.5K) and leave you enough to live on
all through Law School. Presumably less selective schools cost less, so that's
an upper limit.

As a 1L your internship oportunities are pretty limited, and I'm guessing that
interning at a lower market firm doesn't really help that much for the
internships you really want in 2L and mid-market firms won't trust you if you
lie and say you're really enthusiastic about working for them because of blah.

Interns aren't all that productive because they have no experience with the
law as it's practiced. First year associates aren't that hot, so internships
are basically a hiring expense and it doesn't really pay until they're
productive in second or third year.

An interesting internship, like with a startup could really help if you want
to get into a firm in that space like Wilson Sonsini. Outside of that it could
be positively harmful as a sign of outside interests and a life, not conducive
to running up 2,000 billable hours a year. Most firms probably can't afford to
be that selective though because most lawyers quit corporate law and go in-
house counsel or something less soul crushing when they pay off their Law
School loans and maybe build up a nest egg.

jwb119 probably isn't going to Law School for the money afterwards so much of
that probably doesn't apply, but the how he can afford to make this offer
does.

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jwb119
thats pretty much dead on, including the fact that i'm not in law school for
the money.

the only thing you are overestimating is how much of that bonus is take home.
NYC taxes and even a modest % into your 401k means you are looking at
somewhere around 40% of your bonus number actually winding up in your bank
account.

what i'm really looking to get out of this whole thing is an interesting
project to throw myself into.

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DenisM
There is an interesting project you can take on and make a difference: non-
evil assignment of inventions agreement.

Typical AoI assigns all rights to the company, so a developer can not even
take a script not related to the core business with him when he moves. The
company itself ends up not using the script but not letting the developer use
it either - it's a huge waste.

A better arrangement would be to give equal ownership rights to both employee
and employer for all work except work that is company's competitive advantage.
Determining the latter is super tricky, but if you can come up with workable
definition you will make a huge impact to both concept of employment and the
software industry (not unlike the open-source idea).

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RiderOfGiraffes
Country?

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profquail
His twitter account says Pittsburgh, PA.

