
Ask HN: What was your first job? - pj
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?<p>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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uuilly
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.

------
tjmc
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.

------
Shooter
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%.

~~~
chriskelley
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.

------
aristus
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.

~~~
jonah
Eeek. Lead poisoning?

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

------
chops
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.

------
patio11
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.

------
ojbyrne
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.

------
wglb
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.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
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.

------
SwellJoe
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.

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

I was 4 at the time.

------
bemmu
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".

------
pjhyett
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.

------
ericb
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.

------
lux
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...

------
cmars232
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.

------
mallipeddi
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).

------
enra
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.

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

~~~
jasonkester
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).

------
emontero1
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.

------
saturdayplace
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.

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

------
bobochan
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.

------
siong1987
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.

------
tallanvor
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.

------
jamesbritt
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.

------
TechWriter
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.

~~~
darkxanthos
16-ish... Meat man.

------
abecedarius
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.

------
jk4930
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...

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sid
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 :)

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gambling8nt
13; personal tutor for another student at $20/hour.

------
mwbuksas
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.

------
newy
18, bussing at Thai restaraunt. $2 something and tips. Learned then that tips
_made up_ part of the minimum wage.

------
jackowayed
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.

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

------
matth2
delivering papers, $0.04 a paper, up at 5am 6 days a week.

~~~
matth2
someone gave me a sympathy vote! I just realized it wasn't quit this bad - it
was more on Saturdays ( $0.06 a paper! )

------
sneakums
Data entry. Ten hour shifts. At night.

------
travisjeffery
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.

------
bkrausz
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.

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

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

~~~
aminuit
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?

------
jhaddon
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.

------
grandalf
newspaper route at age 10.

------
Huppie
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).

------
abyssknight
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.

:)

------
bayareaguy
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.

------
richesh
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)

------
vollmond
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.

------
walesmd
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).

------
jonnycoder
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quit that job to become an asp developer :(

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

------
dmillar
Paperboy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
noodle
16, martial arts instructor.

------
haseman
Lifeguard, 16

------
electronslave
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.

------
sarvesh
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).

