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Comment by 0xfai | Hacker News Reader

When I was 15, so.... like 1997? Whatever. I had been writing PHP for a year and was having a bad time at school and life in general and I applied for a job at NeoPets and got through all the interviews and got a $150,000 offer with a relocation package to SF. I was living with my parents in Washington state. They never asked how old I was and I had an orientation call with the HR lady and they were so excited to hire me. Video calls were not really a thing then. After the HR call I walked out of my bedroom and told my mother I had solved all of my problems and was moving to California and she said "WHAT! No you aren't!". Looking back, this disconnect should have maybe been diagnostic criteria for ASD. Lol.

I no showed to the job, obviously.

I did not get another comparable pay package till well into my 30s.

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I suspect you have your story mixed up. Neopets wasn’t created until Nov 1999, didn’t have non-founder staff til the following year, and HQ was always in LA (actually Glendale) not SF.

Yeah. It's been a loooong time. I was an emancipated minor at 15. I did get a job at neopets at the height of the dot com boom and I did not end up going. Maybe I sold that PHP job and got emancipated and then the neopets thing happened because it was really hard to be a kid building websites for small local businesses. eh. It's not a thing I've thought about much at all in the last 20 years. When I see neopets in the news though I am always still very impressed that they survived the dot com crash and are still around.

For sure at the time I had no concept of the difference between any California cities. I guess over time LA turned into SF in my head because what tech comes out of LA that isn't for the movies? I actually ended up taking a job in LA about eight years ago and it was hilarious hearing people talk about Silicon Beach like anyone was writing code out there and it wasn't just a content farm. LA is a tomb. Changing that detail in my memory and now knowing both cities, yeah. That job for sure would have killed me before my 18th birthday.

It sounds like your information is accurate and from wikipedia or whatever. So putting that together that they probably just started when they hired me also makes sense for how they signed a contract with a child.

Hmm.

> That job for sure would have killed me before my 18th birthday.

Is it a bad place to work?

That's an incredible story. How do you (and your mom) feel about it today? Do you wish you had taken the job? Does she?

Yeah. Small town kid with undiagnosed brain problems with a 1997 $150,000 salary. I'd never had more than a few hundred dollars to my name before. For sure my life would be very different but it's pretty hard to say what would have happened to me.... but it probably would have been a dangerous mess knowing the route I've had to take through the world to get to some self awareness. It's fun to think about though.

I'll have to ask my mom. We really haven't spoken about it since. I wouldn't be surprised if she completely forgot that happened. My memory from that time.... there was so much going on for me and not much of it good... yeah. My memory is spotty. I'll have to ask her and get the adult version of how that affected them. I guess I did get in front of a judge and became an emancipated minor that year and sold my first PHP contract. I think that was the result? What a stupid life.

Was just about to ask about emancipation. By the way, what was the interview like in 1997? No leetcode I'm assuming...

At that time if you could upload PHP code to an FTP and it connected to a mySQL database you were a pretty rare animal. I mean, this is not long after PHP became a thing at all. Most important stuff was Java or Perl out there on the web. I also was very handy with photoshop, HTML, and cut up and layout. I've always kind of been visual first. I don't think I became a "good" programmer until I was in my late 20s but I've always had a bit of an edge in that I have natural design instincts and an inability to fully recognize that I can't do something.

Anyway, it was pretty easy to demonstrate that I had the chops for what they were looking for by showing them my websites on the internet and talking about my code. The insane treadmill of javascript frameworks was still a decade away. I still can't white board code any algorithms but to quote Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) "Yes, I am a terrible coder, but I am probably still better than you :)"

I know in our current culture this experience I'm describing could be seen as a good thing or some sort of mythmaking. It's not. It's a failure of the school and social system to take care of a distressed gifted kid.

EDIT: I just remembered that I started with Macromedia Flash before I got into PHP. I didn't understand what vector art was though so I made stuff with Paint Shop Pro and when things scaled they would be all jaggy. Lol. I think that was the real bullet for Neopets. That not only could I post a form to a database but I had flash chops... Wow. I have not thought about how much time I spent working in flash in a looooong time. I should see if I can find any of those works in my archives. I can only half remember two animations. I bet there is some fun stuff.

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