alt Hacker NewsWhen I was young I wrote to the Formula 1 team McLaren to ask if they could hire me for a student job. I didn't expect to get a reply, but I got one. The answer was negative, but I was happy. I never reflected about it until now, but maybe it learned me that asking doesn't cost anything, and that the worst thing that can happen is getting a negative answer? Not sure that was the turning point, but this is indeed my approach! :-)
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When I was probably 10 or so, one of the largest computer magazines in the country had a job for a 'junior writer'. My 10yo brain did not realize that junior meant 'just finished the relevant education' and though 'hey, I'm a junior'. So I just called them up and the guy on the other side of the line was clearly confused what to say to me not to disappoint me too much and mumbled something like "the person responsible for hiring is not around". In hindsight, it's pretty ballsy for a kid to just call, if I had to do it ten/fifteen years later I'd have been pretty nervous.
I'm a bit sad that we lose that innocent, carefree attitude later in life.
I think this is one of the ways in which the internet is dangerous for children.
Gen X kids were starving for any adult not their parents to acknowledge their existence. Which made us targets for predators. But now we’ve overcorrected and acknowledgement is routine. That dopamine hit is practically free.
>The answer was negative, but I was happy.
For sure it was a nice experience, I would have done the same, imagine that kid you wrote back gets inspired, goes to study engineering then they come work for you instead of the competition. But nowadays is getting super rare to get human written rejection emails anymore, let alone to kids.
>but maybe it learned me that asking doesn't cost anything, and that the worst thing that can happen is getting a negative answer?
Yeah, but what do you think happens when every kid from the UK asks McLaren for a student job? What happens when everyone from India asks McLaren for a student job?
A kid every couple of months asking you for a job is cute and adorable, 5000 kids asking you for a job per month is a nuisance.
The truth is that this attitude of "it doesn't hurt to ask" only works in high trust societies where people exercise self restraint and all inquiries are done only in good faith, but doesn't scale at all when everyone on the planet starts doing "spray-and-pray" crap shoots and it just quickly becomes spam and overwhelms their capacity to actually read and reply to messages of people who might be genuinely qualified, so we get the issue I mentioned at the start where all messages from applications now first go through ATS and AI bots instead of actual humans.