15 ms·

Who took a chance on you?

128 points by nikunjk 14y ago

kosei 14y ago
I'm thankful that a manager at Xbox took a big chance on me and helped me to get my foot in the door in video games when I only had a college degree and a boatload of passion. But I'm just as thankful that when I first moved to Seattle, there were a few companies that didn't take a chance on me, because if they had, I never would have even applied for that job in video games - now doing something that I never dreamed I'd be able to do: designing video games for a living. Just as important to getting the opportunities is taking advantage of them. If Bijan had never agreed to take part in Spark, this may never have happened. So kudos to him for taking the bull by its horns.
oinksoft 14y ago
When I was about to graduate high school, I knew one thing: I couldn't be an adult and live with my folks (who are wonderful), or depend on them, period. Just the way I'm wired, I guess. I knew HTML and CSS really well (this was when A List Apart was huge), but that was about it. I had no right to a web designer/frontend developer job, let alone a leading one. But there I was in Fairfax at my first real interview just a handful of days before graduation, nervous as hell. The business was document management and tax preparation web applications. My portfolio consisted of a single website I created to accompany my resume a week before this interview, with some made-up content about Herndon, deployed to a free webhost. I talked a good game about <table>-less CSS-driven layouts, accessibility, all the stuff his departing designer had been pushing for (thanks again, ALA). The guy thought I was sharp and took a chance on me. He offered a small salary that seemed like a pot of gold to 18-year old me, and it was enough to be able to get my own place, not even with roommates. I was ecstatic, and I'll never forget the excitement of that summer. In the rare event that you read Hacker News, thanks Arnold :^) ... Who knows where I'd be today if you hadn't taken that risk.
- kibwen 14y ago
  Similar story here. I spent a year out of college unemployed, listlessly sending out job applications in an awful market and stewing in depression. When I finally got a break it was at a company full of old-hand COBOL and RPG-IV programmers... and they wanted to hire me to lead a huge web-based modernization effort! Me, a scraggly-looking kid, decades younger than the rest of the team, with no real evidence of my talents or experience. And likewise the pay was a pittance compared to what the programmers in SV were allegedly making. But the degree of freedom to do basically whatever I wanted, however I wanted, more than made up for it. To this day they're delighted with the work that I produce, and it's done absolute wonders for my self-confidence. And even though I could strike out for greener pastures at this point, the fact that they took such a chance on me is the reason that I stick by them.
Mahn 14y ago
Personally I'm thankful my first employers/managers didn't fire me for being consistently late at work. Took me a while to figure out that being punctual is actually perceived as a big deal.
- bearmf 14y ago
  Which is completely arbitrary. Most software engineers do not need to be present at the office at a set time.
  - Mahn 14y ago
    Sure, but not everyone realizes this. People can be rather conservative here in Europe.
muglug 14y ago
Chris Phillips. He was the first person to see promise in me beyond my own ambition, which was a big deal to a somewhat immature 18-year-old. He died in a freak climbing accident before I could ever properly thank him.
fumar 14y ago
It is great to hear people's success stories. For a while I applied to jobs left and right. I have very little professional experience(marketing). I hoped for similar story; someone willing to give me a shot. It never happened. Instead, I changed my focus to growing my girlfriend's dog treat business(startup). In the end, I gave myself a shot.
habosa 14y ago
I'm still in college so I don't have a ton to look back on, but I am very grateful that hackNY took a chance on me last summer. I certainly wasn't as qualified as many of the fellows and the program changed the direction I plan to take my life over the next few years. I was a Bioengineering Major dabbling in programming and now I'm goingfull-steam-ahead with CS and couldn't be more excited for where programming will take me over the next few years. I now know someone at dozens of cool companies and I got a chance to meet some industry legends, all because whoever read my application thought an Android app or two was enough experience to write production code for pay at an incredible startup (SecondMarket). Best summer of my life and only good things ahead, thanks hackNY.
starpilot 14y ago
Someone on Craigslist paid me $50 to fix his CSS in the late 1990s. I was a teenager in Virginia looking at CL for the first time (not knowing it only served the Bay Area) when I saw the post in "gigs." I told him he could pay me half the original amount since I didn't totally solve his second of two problems, but he said, "I don't underpay my contractors," and the full amount was in my PayPal shortly thereafter. As a teenager who'd never held a job I was pretty stoked about getting paid for something fun. Later I'd be the only non-CS major hired by my university as a summer student PHP programmer. I never took the plunge to do programming full time, but I'm slowly working it into my job as a mechanical engineer.
mchaver 14y ago
I am thankful for my last boss. I had just got my Masters degree in Computer Science, but because I was so busy I never really had time to put together a portfolio. He found me on Reddit and asked if I could code in Python. I said yes, he hired me right away without asking any other questions and said if he was satisfied after two weeks I could stay. I was quite nervous at first but I was never fired, and I learned a lot working for them. Unfortunately 8 months later they ran out of funding, but I will always remember the benefit of the doubt that he gave me. Now I need to find someone else to take a chance on me!
abstractbill 14y ago
Honestly, very few individuals have ever taken a chance on me, but the British government certainly did in a very life-changing way: I was lucky enough to go to university when a full student grant would still pay for tuition and all basic living expenses. I got a BSc and then a PhD, which was a giant leg-up (from a working-class background).
dpweb 14y ago
Really great recruiter in NYC in 1997. Told me exactly what to say for the interview and I got the job, with zero experience and a 2 yr gap after college. Even got me $33k when I asked for $27k. Thought I was the luckiest kid at the time!
jmathai 14y ago
My parents[1], The Shuttleworth Foundation[2] and my parents[3]. [1] http://jmathai.trovebox.com/p/5bk/tags-mathew,mary http://jmathai.trovebox.com/p/5bk/tags-mathew,mary [2] http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellows/jaisen-mathai/ http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellows/jaisen-mathai/ [3] http://jmathai.trovebox.com/p/38f/tags-mathew,mary http://jmathai.trovebox.com/p/38f/tags-mathew,mary
trafficlight 14y ago
There were two different instances. 1. In 1998, I was hired by the editor of the local newspaper to help maintain their new website. I was 14 at the time and my resume consisted of a couple of websites dedicated to Age of Empires. 2. In beginnig 2000, at the age of 15, I was hired on by a small dialup ISP for a tech support role. I was the first employee the founding group had hired. At first it was just an after-school job, but it turned into a full-time job a few years later. I can't even begin to describe how much I learned there over the years.
ruswick 14y ago
This is a testament to how much weight luck holds in achieving a successful career, and how one's life is largely governed by people's whims and general arbitrariness. (This is true not only due to people taking chances on others, but because people are born into situations that govern their capacity for success. Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates this wonderfully in Outliers, a book that has had a large impact on me and which I recommend to everyone I can. But I digress.) It's actually somewhat disconcerting to consider.
- bearmf 14y ago
  Very true. Most "took a chance on me" stories are also biased towards people at the start of their careers. Many older unemployed people desperately need someone to take a chance on them.
- redschell 14y ago
  It's definitely a bit disconcerting, but perhaps not in the way you mean. I'm not so worried about failing to achieve my dreams because I didn't get lucky. I'm worried I'll fail and never know if I failed because I was unlucky, or because I just wasn't good enough. That's what makes me uncomfortable. I get over it pretty quickly, but it's still unsettling, if only for a moment.
- sayemm 14y ago
  Well, then, like anything else, you maximize your chances of success and having a few lucky breaks by: (a) having a long time horizon, developing expertise, and sticking with it, (b) simply going up to bat more and taking more and more chances (e.g. "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take"), and (c) learning from failure/mistakes and rebounding from it. At first glance, his post reads like he had one lucky break after another after another, but I'm sure the road felt very shaky and uncertain along the way, and he doesn't mention any of his mistakes/failures and I'm sure he made several (it just wasn't the point of the post). Max Levchin endured 3 failures early on, and then he had this chance encounter with Peter Thiel before founding PayPal: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1022 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1022
thetabyte 14y ago
The list is practically innumerable, but a particularly relevant pair: Trace Wax and Obie Fernandez. They took on a 17 year old intern with no web development experience outside of HTML/CSS, who could only work remotely, from out of state, for about 8 hours a week, trained him in Ruby on Rails through hours of pairing and paid for his trip to NYC to try working on site. That experience has equipped me with what I've needed to land another internship, start freelance consulting work, win a major hackathon, and get accepted into a brilliant program. All because they took a chance on me. I'm watching a brilliant, college age friend struggle through that initial "getting started" process in web development, and all I can think is: Thanks Trace, thanks Obie! Edit: Also, thanks HN, for being the forum by which I found them! Though I'm still not sure that was the correct use of an AskHN thread (and I'm afraid to recommend the tactic to friends) it definitely helped me!
hydralist 14y ago
Paul Graham in my 2013 summer application /future
bearmf 14y ago
Why is it that people are so grateful to their first employers? These guys did nothing special, they just hired you. It is normal to hire inexperienced people and train them. One should be reasonably grateful for that but understand that employer also benefits from it (hi Captain Obvious). If a person is reasonably smart he/she will be able to produce useful work after a month of poking around. And being grateful for not being fired? Come on! Be grateful to friends and lovers, not to governments and corporations.
- thejacenxpress 14y ago
  I can understand this POV but I don't think it's the case every time. I feel grateful all the time because I was the only person hired in the tech dept that had no experience. Everyone else is either principle or has about 5-10 years experience. I've checked our job boards and the requirements involve standards I was no where near at the time. Yes they want to train you, but they want to train you because they believe in you as a person and what you can do...yes for them...but also for yourself. My boss isn't a cold dude, he's young, has tat sleeves, and was helped along the way by others...just like I am...minus the tats.
  - bearmf 14y ago
    You are right that everyone's situation is different and it looks like your boss really went an extra mile for you. Did you share some common background with him, like went to the same school? Keep in mind, though, that the situation when some (or all) current employees would not be hired under current job requirements for outside hires is more common than people think!
    - thejacenxpress 14y ago
      We did not, he actually give's me crap for my school (UT Austin) because he went to USC (look up Rose Bowl 2006). We did share common backgrounds. He went to school for creative writing and I went for Film. He was essentially given a chance at being a programmer and I'm assuming I've rec'd that same treatment.
daeken 14y ago
Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com, Lindows/Linspire, etc. I had been in the press for the release of PyMusique (open source client for the iTunes Music Store, which didn't apply DRM (it was done client-side, and in fact still is)) and he saw one of the articles. He sent me the following email: > Cody, > I really admire what you're doing. I am the founder and former CEO of MP3.com. I'm not anti-DRM, but I am pro-consumer. I recently launched MP3tunes.com, a MP3 only store which also includes a locker so you can sync to many devices. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help. You might also be interested in MP3beamer. See: http://www.mp3beamer.com http://www.mp3beamer.com > Keep up the good work. > -- MR I told him how much it meant to me to receive the email, and that the thing I really needed to continue the work was an IDA Pro license; I had one a few days later! Shortly thereafter, he contracted me to build hooks into iTunes to display the MP3tunes store, and other functionality like that. Flew me out to San Diego (my first time on a plane, from a tiny little farming town in the middle of nowhere in PA), took me to the deviantArt summit, etc. I can't overstate how important all this was to me. He took a chance on me, and I ended up working my ass off for him for about two years before starting my own company and moving on. I was 17 -- I could've been a one-hit wonder, or I could've not fit with the team, or any number of other things. While MR and I are not on good terms these days, I owe my success in large part to him; for that I'll be forever grateful. I hope I can pay the favor forward some day.
- jonathanjaeger 14y ago
  Awesome! He's great at responding to emails if you have an actual question/comment. While I don't agree with all of his politics, he has very interesting opinions that he shares on Twitter and in interviews. In terms of tech, he has great advice. His interviews on This Week in Startups and This Week in Venture Capital are some of my favorite episodes of both podcasts.
tommaxwell 14y ago
Someone took a chance on me recently... and I fucked it up. Long story short, I was given the best job in the world and I decided to take it for granted so I was fired. Taught me a lot about respect.
pjungwir 14y ago
Mine is not a hiring story (though that's another story, since I was hired with just an English major), but a few months into my first job I asked my boss which of two different architectural approaches he thought I should take on a project, and he said, "I trust you." That really meant a lot to me.
neoveller 14y ago
Sendhub took a chance on me when I was just half a year into programming and one hackathon API prize in. I've been set ever since.
thejacenxpress 14y ago
I feel truly grateful for three people who took chances on me. I worked first in the film industry at Panavision with some of the top camera crews in the world because my boss (1) at the time believed in me. After that I decided software was a better future and a friend of mine (2) wanted me to work at the company he worked for...a digital agency. With no resume or cover level I got a job because my current boss (3) two years later believed in me. Now I'm here on HN, have a youtube channel teaching others, and just wrapped up an eight month enterprise website with a great team...and I'm going to buy a sports car this weekend! How big hearts in some people can make such a big difference in someone's life...forever grateful!
c_t_montgomery 14y ago
Tony Stubblebine, co-founder and CEO of Lift. Can't thank him enough. https://medium.com/unforgettable-moments/36369a6063d1 https://medium.com/unforgettable-moments/36369a6063d1
ritchiea 14y ago
Interesting thread. I hope I can be nearly this lucky in the future. Can't tell you how many times in NYC I've been flat out told "we don't take chances on people." I understand and I certainly don't feel like my life has been stymied by lack of opportunity. But I'm definitely still looking for the first one that really clicks.
kefka 14y ago
Noone has "taken a chance on me". I've had plenty of interviews, applications, resumes: you name it. Even went through the unemployment interview and resume courses. No real reason why. I can't even get a helpdesk position. I've went back to school. I hope something pans out soon.
- precisioncoder 14y ago
  I had the same thing happen in the city I was in, no one was hiring programmers straight out of school, I got two phone interviews and that was it. Ended up losing a bet with my wife (That I could find a job in 3 months) and moving to Austria. Learned enough German to get a job (took about 5 months) and then found out they were desperate for software people here. I got two job offers in my first week of applying, I accepted one and have been with my firm for a year and a half now.
  - bromang 14y ago
    Out of interest, what is the attitude in Austria (and Germany) towards hiring programmers without degrees?
    - precisioncoder 14y ago
      My colleague doesn't have a degree, the programmer I replaced also didn't have a degree. On the other side Austrian and German people see degrees as a rank and social status which means you will be generally respected more if you have a degree. Your starting salary will usually be higher as well if you have a degree.
rsingla 14y ago
Brian, who took a young student with no experience and took the chance for me to be a co-op. Securing that position revamped my entire view of what I do and has already opened doors.
lbraasch 14y ago
As a senior in high school, a pair NASA mech. engineers allowed me to shadow them. I had no experience in the field, nor current acceptance into an engineering program. They took me in and let me to work with flight hardware (presently taking 3D images of the sun [1]). They had to jump through hoops to get me in the door. The jobs were reserved for UC Berkeley students, and for some reason, they picked me. It was an amazing, life changing experience. I got through some of my hardest engineering exams knowing I'd one day get to do something as cool as them. I now build research instruments for physical oceanography. I'm not at all surprised I stayed in a field of exploratory science. [1] http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/stereo3D_press.html http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/stereo3D_press...
Edmond 14y ago
No Mom/Dad ?
beachstartup 14y ago
pretty much everyone who hired me before i turned about 27.
BESebastian 14y ago
Up until a few years back, I was long term unemployed. 2-3 years or so, it was pretty grating, but I tried to make the best of it, learning new skills, practicing and playing a shitload of WoW. The latter part wasn't exactly helpful, to be honest. I'd been through numerous government training and employment schemes but coupled with my depression and my lacking recent employment history, not many people were willing to take me on. I had spent a lot of this time approaching local design agencies and web dev studios (of which there are a lot in my area) for internships and the like, rarely ever met with a response, let alone a "thank you, but no," so I kept plodding away. Eventually, someone responded to my enquiry, a small design agency with a few fairly big clients, they offered me an unpaid internship working 3 or so days a week to build up some experience. As much as I came to learn they were exploiting me (I was there well over a year, eventually working for minimum wage), I still do owe them a hell of a lot. Getting back into the swing of things, doing something that I loved gave me my confidence back, I learned to trust my skills and that I am good at what I do. From that point on, literally every changed in my life. I came off the anti-depressants, found a new girlfriend, got a new house and now have a new job making decent money for a company I really enjoy. As much as I may bitch and moan about how that agency took the piss so much with me, the chance that they took on me turned my life around.
edw519 14y ago
Who took a chance on you? No one. Perfect SAT scores. Great grades. Most creative in class. Most encouraged in class. Rejected by every college but one. After graduating college, rejected by every prospective employer except Denny's. Taught myself to program and gave it away until someone hired me. Ten time employee who quit every company because someone got promoted over me even though I did 3X the work. Beat the pavement but couldn't find customers until I wrote the software first, then they purchased. When friends & family saw how much money I made, they all wanted in on it until they saw the sacrifice I expected from them, then every one backed out. Rejected by Alphalab because "no one would buy" what I had already sold many times. Rejected by Ycombinator because they didn't think anyone would buy what I had already sold many times. Rejected by Incubate Miami because they wanted to see a business with a product and customers first. (Then why would I need you guys? I thought the whole point of these programs was to find otherwise unavailable opportunities by giving prospective founders a break from their other responsibilities to be able to focus on just building.) Rejected by prospective cofounders who didn't want to make the same sacrifices I have made. After being underestimated by the cool kids, teachers, girls, family members, employers, and strangers for being an ugly skinny nerd my whole life, I thought it would be different in the tech world, but it's not. It's still a beauty contest based primarily of superficial subjective perceptions. People are still often too lazy or unable to dig below the surface to find the reality. Please don't misunderstand. I'm not bitter. I'm glad... I wouldn't be half the builder I am now if someone would have given me a break along the way. So I just keep on building and loving it.
- RobAley 14y ago
  Have you ever stopped to consider why no one gives you a break? If so, what did you conclude? (This is a serious question, not a snipe).
  - kamaal 14y ago
    Actually advertising yourself is a huge factor in things like these. Merit doesn't always count. Look at it this way, a manager is likely to promote a guy who for example... takes him out for lunch, looks after his interests at work and else where. Managers trust 'yes men'. So if you work hard but don't quite really act like their closest associates in the gang, you are done. Nerds with high self worth, who can actually be something by themselves by their work and sweat alone can't do all this. They always lose out like edw519 even if they have done 3x the work. Lose out might be the wrong word. Because though you lose out on the shorter run. On the longer run, the 'yes men' lose capability to do something on their own (Read:Retire on their middle management job). The hard working nerd, if he really sticks to his guns and doesn't give up will make it big someday.
TomGullen 14y ago
My brother, was at a bad stage of my life and he invited me to co-found with him. Risky on his part, two years on though and we're miles ahead of where we dreamed we could be!
deusebio 14y ago
A local creative director in town gave me my first break. I was slated to work as a designer at coupon company making classified ads until he decided to give me a chance and hire me at his company. I think my career would've taken a much different path if he didn't give me that chance. Granted, he was in a different type of design discipline. Learning fundamentals and how to think was more valuable to me at that time than just learning software.
mkopinsky 14y ago
I am getting a 404. Why would someone pull down a page which is on the front page of HN?
dirtyalpaca 14y ago
I've always wanted to be a programmer. Ever since I was a kid when I spent a bit of time in QBasic giving my friends unlimited lives in Snake and Gorillas. By the time I was nearing adulthood I knew that I definitely wanted to pursue programming as a career (by the standard-seeming path of getting a CS degree), so I joined the National Guard so I could pay for it. In 2008 I was working at Wal-Mart throwing boxes off of trucks and trucking product out to the shelves. Incidentally this was the best job I had ever had excluding my current career, and I still look back fondly on it. I had tried to go to the local technical college for their programmer analyst degree but quickly dropped out after I found that I knew most of the material and could not even test out of classes that were primarily focused on teaching you how to use a mouse. In 2009 my unit was deployed to Iraq and I resigned that I would try to go to a four-year college for CS when I returned and I had my VA benefits to throw around. Everything changed when I met my mentor (a figurehead in the Ruby community) online via a comment that I had left on his blog. I had been learning Ruby/Rails in my downtime during the deployment to that point and we continued to converse throughout the rest of the deployment. When I got back in 2010, instead of applying to college, I already a job offer waiting for me because my mentor decided to take a chance on me and hire me at the RoR consulting company he was CTO of at the time. Three years later, I've spoken at a conference, co-authored a book, and have been working in the career I always dreamed of because someone decided to take a chance on me. I owe the success of the last three years in large part to Chad Fowler and the rest of the awesome folks I worked with at InfoEther in 2010, and I'll always be eternally grateful for the chance I was given that led me to where I am today.
rokhayakebe 14y ago
Life. I am here. Sentient, mobile, and mentally able. That's all I need.
INTPenis 14y ago
I dropped out of school but my brother got me to move out of my hometown and start working for a small web host where the boss took a chance on me. Turns out I was so hard working, so dedicated, that years later when I was stuck in a callcenter because I didn't have any grades from school, that same boss recommended me to a big consulting firm, who took a chance on me. And it payed off, for both of us. Now I have a career in IT and I never graduated what Americans would equal to High school. :)
nir 14y ago
The CTO who hired me, a college dropout and former construction worker, to my first startup. It was a menial data entry job but he took a chance when he let me start coding 2 months later, and lead the web team to the launch a year after that. By then I had the chance to pay it forward by mentoring employees with design and liberal arts background to become decent web devs. Coding for the web isn't really that hard to learn if you're motivated, which is why it pains me to see the bullshit "our hiring process" posts. As a child in Israel, I'd hear about the American ideals of giving someone a chance and taking a risk. Many years later, when I lived in NYC, I was disappointed to find employers so risk averse they can barely make a decision on hiring a junior PHP coder without an Ivy League degree, 4 references and a 6 hour interview process. I had enough experience for degrees not to matter, but I feel for kids in the US who are now where I was when I started out.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
marbleint 14y ago
Why would I expect someone to take a chance on me?
smurph 14y ago
The Computer Science program at my college. At the school I went to, you had to apply to your program at the end of your Sophomore year, and in order to continue, they had to accept you. The advisers basically told us up front that you had to have this GPA overall and this GPA in classes in that program and it helps if you get good grades in classes X, Y and Z since they are the weed outs. I didn't meet either GPA requirement, and I only had good grades in classes X and Z, with an average grade in class Y. I was also pretty shy and antisocial in the academic setting, so I didn't have any professor friends to go to bat for me. I got the acceptance letter anyway, and my plans for a back up degree in finance didn't have to come into play. I've always been thankful that they took a chance on the under performing dude they didn't know and let me develop my passion.

128 points by nikunjk 14y ago

kosei 14y ago

I'm thankful that a manager at Xbox took a big chance on me and helped me to get my foot in the door in video games when I only had a college degree and a boatload of passion. But I'm just as thankful that when I first moved to Seattle, there were a few companies that didn't take a chance on me, because if they had, I never would have even applied for that job in video games - now doing something that I never dreamed I'd be able to do: designing video games for a living. Just as important to getting the opportunities is taking advantage of them. If Bijan had never agreed to take part in Spark, this may never have happened. So kudos to him for taking the bull by its horns.

oinksoft 14y ago

When I was about to graduate high school, I knew one thing: I couldn't be an adult and live with my folks (who are wonderful), or depend on them, period. Just the way I'm wired, I guess. I knew HTML and CSS really well (this was when A List Apart was huge), but that was about it. I had no right to a web designer/frontend developer job, let alone a leading one. But there I was in Fairfax at my first real interview just a handful of days before graduation, nervous as hell. The business was document management and tax preparation web applications. My portfolio consisted of a single website I created to accompany my resume a week before this interview, with some made-up content about Herndon, deployed to a free webhost. I talked a good game about <table>-less CSS-driven layouts, accessibility, all the stuff his departing designer had been pushing for (thanks again, ALA). The guy thought I was sharp and took a chance on me. He offered a small salary that seemed like a pot of gold to 18-year old me, and it was enough to be able to get my own place, not even with roommates. I was ecstatic, and I'll never forget the excitement of that summer. In the rare event that you read Hacker News, thanks Arnold :^) ... Who knows where I'd be today if you hadn't taken that risk.

kibwen 14y ago
Similar story here. I spent a year out of college unemployed, listlessly sending out job applications in an awful market and stewing in depression. When I finally got a break it was at a company full of old-hand COBOL and RPG-IV programmers... and they wanted to hire me to lead a huge web-based modernization effort! Me, a scraggly-looking kid, decades younger than the rest of the team, with no real evidence of my talents or experience. And likewise the pay was a pittance compared to what the programmers in SV were allegedly making. But the degree of freedom to do basically whatever I wanted, however I wanted, more than made up for it. To this day they're delighted with the work that I produce, and it's done absolute wonders for my self-confidence. And even though I could strike out for greener pastures at this point, the fact that they took such a chance on me is the reason that I stick by them.

Mahn 14y ago

Personally I'm thankful my first employers/managers didn't fire me for being consistently late at work. Took me a while to figure out that being punctual is actually perceived as a big deal.

bearmf 14y ago
Which is completely arbitrary. Most software engineers do not need to be present at the office at a set time.
- Mahn 14y ago
  Sure, but not everyone realizes this. People can be rather conservative here in Europe.

muglug 14y ago

Chris Phillips. He was the first person to see promise in me beyond my own ambition, which was a big deal to a somewhat immature 18-year-old. He died in a freak climbing accident before I could ever properly thank him.

fumar 14y ago

It is great to hear people's success stories. For a while I applied to jobs left and right. I have very little professional experience(marketing). I hoped for similar story; someone willing to give me a shot. It never happened. Instead, I changed my focus to growing my girlfriend's dog treat business(startup). In the end, I gave myself a shot.

habosa 14y ago

I'm still in college so I don't have a ton to look back on, but I am very grateful that hackNY took a chance on me last summer. I certainly wasn't as qualified as many of the fellows and the program changed the direction I plan to take my life over the next few years. I was a Bioengineering Major dabbling in programming and now I'm goingfull-steam-ahead with CS and couldn't be more excited for where programming will take me over the next few years. I now know someone at dozens of cool companies and I got a chance to meet some industry legends, all because whoever read my application thought an Android app or two was enough experience to write production code for pay at an incredible startup (SecondMarket). Best summer of my life and only good things ahead, thanks hackNY.

starpilot 14y ago

Someone on Craigslist paid me $50 to fix his CSS in the late 1990s. I was a teenager in Virginia looking at CL for the first time (not knowing it only served the Bay Area) when I saw the post in "gigs." I told him he could pay me half the original amount since I didn't totally solve his second of two problems, but he said, "I don't underpay my contractors," and the full amount was in my PayPal shortly thereafter. As a teenager who'd never held a job I was pretty stoked about getting paid for something fun. Later I'd be the only non-CS major hired by my university as a summer student PHP programmer. I never took the plunge to do programming full time, but I'm slowly working it into my job as a mechanical engineer.

mchaver 14y ago

I am thankful for my last boss. I had just got my Masters degree in Computer Science, but because I was so busy I never really had time to put together a portfolio. He found me on Reddit and asked if I could code in Python. I said yes, he hired me right away without asking any other questions and said if he was satisfied after two weeks I could stay. I was quite nervous at first but I was never fired, and I learned a lot working for them. Unfortunately 8 months later they ran out of funding, but I will always remember the benefit of the doubt that he gave me. Now I need to find someone else to take a chance on me!

abstractbill 14y ago

Honestly, very few individuals have ever taken a chance on me, but the British government certainly did in a very life-changing way: I was lucky enough to go to university when a full student grant would still pay for tuition and all basic living expenses. I got a BSc and then a PhD, which was a giant leg-up (from a working-class background).

dpweb 14y ago

Really great recruiter in NYC in 1997. Told me exactly what to say for the interview and I got the job, with zero experience and a 2 yr gap after college. Even got me $33k when I asked for $27k. Thought I was the luckiest kid at the time!

jmathai 14y ago

My parents[1], The Shuttleworth Foundation[2] and my parents[3]. [1] http://jmathai.trovebox.com/p/5bk/tags-mathew,mary http://jmathai.trovebox.com/p/5bk/tags-mathew,mary [2] http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellows/jaisen-mathai/ http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellows/jaisen-mathai/ [3] http://jmathai.trovebox.com/p/38f/tags-mathew,mary http://jmathai.trovebox.com/p/38f/tags-mathew,mary

trafficlight 14y ago

There were two different instances. 1. In 1998, I was hired by the editor of the local newspaper to help maintain their new website. I was 14 at the time and my resume consisted of a couple of websites dedicated to Age of Empires. 2. In beginnig 2000, at the age of 15, I was hired on by a small dialup ISP for a tech support role. I was the first employee the founding group had hired. At first it was just an after-school job, but it turned into a full-time job a few years later. I can't even begin to describe how much I learned there over the years.

ruswick 14y ago

This is a testament to how much weight luck holds in achieving a successful career, and how one's life is largely governed by people's whims and general arbitrariness. (This is true not only due to people taking chances on others, but because people are born into situations that govern their capacity for success. Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates this wonderfully in Outliers, a book that has had a large impact on me and which I recommend to everyone I can. But I digress.) It's actually somewhat disconcerting to consider.

bearmf 14y ago
Very true. Most "took a chance on me" stories are also biased towards people at the start of their careers. Many older unemployed people desperately need someone to take a chance on them.
redschell 14y ago
It's definitely a bit disconcerting, but perhaps not in the way you mean. I'm not so worried about failing to achieve my dreams because I didn't get lucky. I'm worried I'll fail and never know if I failed because I was unlucky, or because I just wasn't good enough. That's what makes me uncomfortable. I get over it pretty quickly, but it's still unsettling, if only for a moment.
sayemm 14y ago
Well, then, like anything else, you maximize your chances of success and having a few lucky breaks by: (a) having a long time horizon, developing expertise, and sticking with it, (b) simply going up to bat more and taking more and more chances (e.g. "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take"), and (c) learning from failure/mistakes and rebounding from it. At first glance, his post reads like he had one lucky break after another after another, but I'm sure the road felt very shaky and uncertain along the way, and he doesn't mention any of his mistakes/failures and I'm sure he made several (it just wasn't the point of the post). Max Levchin endured 3 failures early on, and then he had this chance encounter with Peter Thiel before founding PayPal: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1022 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1022

thetabyte 14y ago

The list is practically innumerable, but a particularly relevant pair: Trace Wax and Obie Fernandez. They took on a 17 year old intern with no web development experience outside of HTML/CSS, who could only work remotely, from out of state, for about 8 hours a week, trained him in Ruby on Rails through hours of pairing and paid for his trip to NYC to try working on site. That experience has equipped me with what I've needed to land another internship, start freelance consulting work, win a major hackathon, and get accepted into a brilliant program. All because they took a chance on me. I'm watching a brilliant, college age friend struggle through that initial "getting started" process in web development, and all I can think is: Thanks Trace, thanks Obie! Edit: Also, thanks HN, for being the forum by which I found them! Though I'm still not sure that was the correct use of an AskHN thread (and I'm afraid to recommend the tactic to friends) it definitely helped me!

hydralist 14y ago

Paul Graham in my 2013 summer application /future

bearmf 14y ago

Why is it that people are so grateful to their first employers? These guys did nothing special, they just hired you. It is normal to hire inexperienced people and train them. One should be reasonably grateful for that but understand that employer also benefits from it (hi Captain Obvious). If a person is reasonably smart he/she will be able to produce useful work after a month of poking around. And being grateful for not being fired? Come on! Be grateful to friends and lovers, not to governments and corporations.

thejacenxpress 14y ago
I can understand this POV but I don't think it's the case every time. I feel grateful all the time because I was the only person hired in the tech dept that had no experience. Everyone else is either principle or has about 5-10 years experience. I've checked our job boards and the requirements involve standards I was no where near at the time. Yes they want to train you, but they want to train you because they believe in you as a person and what you can do...yes for them...but also for yourself. My boss isn't a cold dude, he's young, has tat sleeves, and was helped along the way by others...just like I am...minus the tats.
- bearmf 14y ago
  You are right that everyone's situation is different and it looks like your boss really went an extra mile for you. Did you share some common background with him, like went to the same school? Keep in mind, though, that the situation when some (or all) current employees would not be hired under current job requirements for outside hires is more common than people think!
  - thejacenxpress 14y ago
    We did not, he actually give's me crap for my school (UT Austin) because he went to USC (look up Rose Bowl 2006). We did share common backgrounds. He went to school for creative writing and I went for Film. He was essentially given a chance at being a programmer and I'm assuming I've rec'd that same treatment.

daeken 14y ago

Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com, Lindows/Linspire, etc. I had been in the press for the release of PyMusique (open source client for the iTunes Music Store, which didn't apply DRM (it was done client-side, and in fact still is)) and he saw one of the articles. He sent me the following email: > Cody, > I really admire what you're doing. I am the founder and former CEO of MP3.com. I'm not anti-DRM, but I am pro-consumer. I recently launched MP3tunes.com, a MP3 only store which also includes a locker so you can sync to many devices. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help. You might also be interested in MP3beamer. See: http://www.mp3beamer.com http://www.mp3beamer.com > Keep up the good work. > -- MR I told him how much it meant to me to receive the email, and that the thing I really needed to continue the work was an IDA Pro license; I had one a few days later! Shortly thereafter, he contracted me to build hooks into iTunes to display the MP3tunes store, and other functionality like that. Flew me out to San Diego (my first time on a plane, from a tiny little farming town in the middle of nowhere in PA), took me to the deviantArt summit, etc. I can't overstate how important all this was to me. He took a chance on me, and I ended up working my ass off for him for about two years before starting my own company and moving on. I was 17 -- I could've been a one-hit wonder, or I could've not fit with the team, or any number of other things. While MR and I are not on good terms these days, I owe my success in large part to him; for that I'll be forever grateful. I hope I can pay the favor forward some day.

jonathanjaeger 14y ago
Awesome! He's great at responding to emails if you have an actual question/comment. While I don't agree with all of his politics, he has very interesting opinions that he shares on Twitter and in interviews. In terms of tech, he has great advice. His interviews on This Week in Startups and This Week in Venture Capital are some of my favorite episodes of both podcasts.

tommaxwell 14y ago

Someone took a chance on me recently... and I fucked it up. Long story short, I was given the best job in the world and I decided to take it for granted so I was fired. Taught me a lot about respect.

pjungwir 14y ago

Mine is not a hiring story (though that's another story, since I was hired with just an English major), but a few months into my first job I asked my boss which of two different architectural approaches he thought I should take on a project, and he said, "I trust you." That really meant a lot to me.

neoveller 14y ago

Sendhub took a chance on me when I was just half a year into programming and one hackathon API prize in. I've been set ever since.

thejacenxpress 14y ago

I feel truly grateful for three people who took chances on me. I worked first in the film industry at Panavision with some of the top camera crews in the world because my boss (1) at the time believed in me. After that I decided software was a better future and a friend of mine (2) wanted me to work at the company he worked for...a digital agency. With no resume or cover level I got a job because my current boss (3) two years later believed in me. Now I'm here on HN, have a youtube channel teaching others, and just wrapped up an eight month enterprise website with a great team...and I'm going to buy a sports car this weekend! How big hearts in some people can make such a big difference in someone's life...forever grateful!

c_t_montgomery 14y ago

Tony Stubblebine, co-founder and CEO of Lift. Can't thank him enough. https://medium.com/unforgettable-moments/36369a6063d1 https://medium.com/unforgettable-moments/36369a6063d1

ritchiea 14y ago

Interesting thread. I hope I can be nearly this lucky in the future. Can't tell you how many times in NYC I've been flat out told "we don't take chances on people." I understand and I certainly don't feel like my life has been stymied by lack of opportunity. But I'm definitely still looking for the first one that really clicks.

kefka 14y ago

Noone has "taken a chance on me". I've had plenty of interviews, applications, resumes: you name it. Even went through the unemployment interview and resume courses. No real reason why. I can't even get a helpdesk position. I've went back to school. I hope something pans out soon.

precisioncoder 14y ago
I had the same thing happen in the city I was in, no one was hiring programmers straight out of school, I got two phone interviews and that was it. Ended up losing a bet with my wife (That I could find a job in 3 months) and moving to Austria. Learned enough German to get a job (took about 5 months) and then found out they were desperate for software people here. I got two job offers in my first week of applying, I accepted one and have been with my firm for a year and a half now.
- bromang 14y ago
  Out of interest, what is the attitude in Austria (and Germany) towards hiring programmers without degrees?
  - precisioncoder 14y ago
    My colleague doesn't have a degree, the programmer I replaced also didn't have a degree. On the other side Austrian and German people see degrees as a rank and social status which means you will be generally respected more if you have a degree. Your starting salary will usually be higher as well if you have a degree.

rsingla 14y ago

Brian, who took a young student with no experience and took the chance for me to be a co-op. Securing that position revamped my entire view of what I do and has already opened doors.

lbraasch 14y ago

As a senior in high school, a pair NASA mech. engineers allowed me to shadow them. I had no experience in the field, nor current acceptance into an engineering program. They took me in and let me to work with flight hardware (presently taking 3D images of the sun [1]). They had to jump through hoops to get me in the door. The jobs were reserved for UC Berkeley students, and for some reason, they picked me. It was an amazing, life changing experience. I got through some of my hardest engineering exams knowing I'd one day get to do something as cool as them. I now build research instruments for physical oceanography. I'm not at all surprised I stayed in a field of exploratory science. [1] http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/stereo3D_press.html http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/stereo3D_press...

Edmond 14y ago

No Mom/Dad ?

beachstartup 14y ago

pretty much everyone who hired me before i turned about 27.

BESebastian 14y ago

Up until a few years back, I was long term unemployed. 2-3 years or so, it was pretty grating, but I tried to make the best of it, learning new skills, practicing and playing a shitload of WoW. The latter part wasn't exactly helpful, to be honest. I'd been through numerous government training and employment schemes but coupled with my depression and my lacking recent employment history, not many people were willing to take me on. I had spent a lot of this time approaching local design agencies and web dev studios (of which there are a lot in my area) for internships and the like, rarely ever met with a response, let alone a "thank you, but no," so I kept plodding away. Eventually, someone responded to my enquiry, a small design agency with a few fairly big clients, they offered me an unpaid internship working 3 or so days a week to build up some experience. As much as I came to learn they were exploiting me (I was there well over a year, eventually working for minimum wage), I still do owe them a hell of a lot. Getting back into the swing of things, doing something that I loved gave me my confidence back, I learned to trust my skills and that I am good at what I do. From that point on, literally every changed in my life. I came off the anti-depressants, found a new girlfriend, got a new house and now have a new job making decent money for a company I really enjoy. As much as I may bitch and moan about how that agency took the piss so much with me, the chance that they took on me turned my life around.

edw519 14y ago

Who took a chance on you? No one. Perfect SAT scores. Great grades. Most creative in class. Most encouraged in class. Rejected by every college but one. After graduating college, rejected by every prospective employer except Denny's. Taught myself to program and gave it away until someone hired me. Ten time employee who quit every company because someone got promoted over me even though I did 3X the work. Beat the pavement but couldn't find customers until I wrote the software first, then they purchased. When friends & family saw how much money I made, they all wanted in on it until they saw the sacrifice I expected from them, then every one backed out. Rejected by Alphalab because "no one would buy" what I had already sold many times. Rejected by Ycombinator because they didn't think anyone would buy what I had already sold many times. Rejected by Incubate Miami because they wanted to see a business with a product and customers first. (Then why would I need you guys? I thought the whole point of these programs was to find otherwise unavailable opportunities by giving prospective founders a break from their other responsibilities to be able to focus on just building.) Rejected by prospective cofounders who didn't want to make the same sacrifices I have made. After being underestimated by the cool kids, teachers, girls, family members, employers, and strangers for being an ugly skinny nerd my whole life, I thought it would be different in the tech world, but it's not. It's still a beauty contest based primarily of superficial subjective perceptions. People are still often too lazy or unable to dig below the surface to find the reality. Please don't misunderstand. I'm not bitter. I'm glad... I wouldn't be half the builder I am now if someone would have given me a break along the way. So I just keep on building and loving it.

RobAley 14y ago
Have you ever stopped to consider why no one gives you a break? If so, what did you conclude? (This is a serious question, not a snipe).
- kamaal 14y ago
  Actually advertising yourself is a huge factor in things like these. Merit doesn't always count. Look at it this way, a manager is likely to promote a guy who for example... takes him out for lunch, looks after his interests at work and else where. Managers trust 'yes men'. So if you work hard but don't quite really act like their closest associates in the gang, you are done. Nerds with high self worth, who can actually be something by themselves by their work and sweat alone can't do all this. They always lose out like edw519 even if they have done 3x the work. Lose out might be the wrong word. Because though you lose out on the shorter run. On the longer run, the 'yes men' lose capability to do something on their own (Read:Retire on their middle management job). The hard working nerd, if he really sticks to his guns and doesn't give up will make it big someday.

TomGullen 14y ago

My brother, was at a bad stage of my life and he invited me to co-found with him. Risky on his part, two years on though and we're miles ahead of where we dreamed we could be!

deusebio 14y ago

A local creative director in town gave me my first break. I was slated to work as a designer at coupon company making classified ads until he decided to give me a chance and hire me at his company. I think my career would've taken a much different path if he didn't give me that chance. Granted, he was in a different type of design discipline. Learning fundamentals and how to think was more valuable to me at that time than just learning software.

mkopinsky 14y ago

I am getting a 404. Why would someone pull down a page which is on the front page of HN?

dirtyalpaca 14y ago

I've always wanted to be a programmer. Ever since I was a kid when I spent a bit of time in QBasic giving my friends unlimited lives in Snake and Gorillas. By the time I was nearing adulthood I knew that I definitely wanted to pursue programming as a career (by the standard-seeming path of getting a CS degree), so I joined the National Guard so I could pay for it. In 2008 I was working at Wal-Mart throwing boxes off of trucks and trucking product out to the shelves. Incidentally this was the best job I had ever had excluding my current career, and I still look back fondly on it. I had tried to go to the local technical college for their programmer analyst degree but quickly dropped out after I found that I knew most of the material and could not even test out of classes that were primarily focused on teaching you how to use a mouse. In 2009 my unit was deployed to Iraq and I resigned that I would try to go to a four-year college for CS when I returned and I had my VA benefits to throw around. Everything changed when I met my mentor (a figurehead in the Ruby community) online via a comment that I had left on his blog. I had been learning Ruby/Rails in my downtime during the deployment to that point and we continued to converse throughout the rest of the deployment. When I got back in 2010, instead of applying to college, I already a job offer waiting for me because my mentor decided to take a chance on me and hire me at the RoR consulting company he was CTO of at the time. Three years later, I've spoken at a conference, co-authored a book, and have been working in the career I always dreamed of because someone decided to take a chance on me. I owe the success of the last three years in large part to Chad Fowler and the rest of the awesome folks I worked with at InfoEther in 2010, and I'll always be eternally grateful for the chance I was given that led me to where I am today.

rokhayakebe 14y ago

Life. I am here. Sentient, mobile, and mentally able. That's all I need.

INTPenis 14y ago

I dropped out of school but my brother got me to move out of my hometown and start working for a small web host where the boss took a chance on me. Turns out I was so hard working, so dedicated, that years later when I was stuck in a callcenter because I didn't have any grades from school, that same boss recommended me to a big consulting firm, who took a chance on me. And it payed off, for both of us. Now I have a career in IT and I never graduated what Americans would equal to High school. :)

nir 14y ago

The CTO who hired me, a college dropout and former construction worker, to my first startup. It was a menial data entry job but he took a chance when he let me start coding 2 months later, and lead the web team to the launch a year after that. By then I had the chance to pay it forward by mentoring employees with design and liberal arts background to become decent web devs. Coding for the web isn't really that hard to learn if you're motivated, which is why it pains me to see the bullshit "our hiring process" posts. As a child in Israel, I'd hear about the American ideals of giving someone a chance and taking a risk. Many years later, when I lived in NYC, I was disappointed to find employers so risk averse they can barely make a decision on hiring a junior PHP coder without an Ivy League degree, 4 references and a 6 hour interview process. I had enough experience for degrees not to matter, but I feel for kids in the US who are now where I was when I started out.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

marbleint 14y ago

Why would I expect someone to take a chance on me?

smurph 14y ago

The Computer Science program at my college. At the school I went to, you had to apply to your program at the end of your Sophomore year, and in order to continue, they had to accept you. The advisers basically told us up front that you had to have this GPA overall and this GPA in classes in that program and it helps if you get good grades in classes X, Y and Z since they are the weed outs. I didn't meet either GPA requirement, and I only had good grades in classes X and Z, with an average grade in class Y. I was also pretty shy and antisocial in the academic setting, so I didn't have any professor friends to go to bat for me. I got the acceptance letter anyway, and my plans for a back up degree in finance didn't have to come into play. I've always been thankful that they took a chance on the under performing dude they didn't know and let me develop my passion.