Odd Jobs Are Good For Your Career
How wrangling lobsters, performing magic, and printing t-shirts have improved my programming career
If you are a student and summer vacation is fast approaching, you might currently be trying to get a summer internship or job at places that are related to their career paths. This in general is a good strategy: if you have plans to become a scientist, go work in a local university’s labs; if you are going to become a doctor, volunteer at hospitals and work on inputting medical records; if you plan to be a world class programmer, try getting an internship at one of the big tech companies and work all night on open source projects.
However, when I was going through that phase in my life, I had a serious problem: I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. How would I know where to apply for a summer position if I didn’t know what I wanted to do long term? I could always get a job bagging groceries or filling cars with gasoline at a full service gas station, but would these jobs benefit me down the road?
Everyone covets the superstar internships. I remember applying to one of Seth Godin’s summer internships and getting rejected. I was disappointed, but then again, was I really interested in marketing? Not really. So with the big-named internships and jobs filled up, what did I do?
What I ended up doing instead of picking a summer opportunity that lined up with my yet non-existent career path was to try out as many different types of interesting jobs as possible. Every summer I did something different, met new people, and learned what kinds of work I enjoy doing and what kinds of work I would never want to do again. All of these odd jobs paid off and I still use skills I learned then in my programming job now.
The Lobster Wrangler
One summer in high school I worked at a lobster shack, doing everything from cleaning floors, waiting tables, running the register, and of course cooking lobster and other seafood. Most of the time this was a one person operation so I learned very quickly how to manage my time: drop a lobster into the pot, have a customer pay for their meal, work on chopping cabbage for coleslaw, pull and serve the lobster, check on other tables, etc… On really busy nights, the owner would help as well so we’d have two people running the whole restaurant. Although the kitchen temperature was frequently over 100 degrees Fahrenheit and I always came home smelling like seafood, I loved this job because I was making serious bank for a high schooler — I think my wage was $10/hour and the bill for an average 4 person meal usually exceeded $100 so the tips were great.
Although the job was rewarding, I quickly learned the difficulties a small business owner faces. The owner had a difficult time with his work/life balance since he always had to be at the restaurant. Hiring a competent manager for the place would have cut into profits too much and the owner wouldn’t be making enough for himself. Although he was a good chef and managed the orders and customers pretty well, the owner was terrible at his accounting and paying me — I think in that one summer I had 3 or 4 checks bounce. It eventually ended up with my mother having to go to the police station to have someone go out to the restaurant and have this guy pay me for a few weeks of missed pay.
The time management and organization skills required from having to wear so many hats in the restaurant has directly translated to helping me with my project management skills professionally. Also seeing how difficult it can be to find good managers and the resulting work-life unbalance that comes from having to do everything yourself was an eye opener too.
The Magician
From the age of twelve to eighteen, I was “The Amazing Bert”. I had grown up performing magic as a hobby until I eventually had a large enough repertoire that I could perform at kids birthday parties and group picnics. This was a summer job that I never planned for — just one day I realized that I could probably earn some money from all of the magic tricks that I learned to do.
The key skill I learned from being a magician was becoming comfortable at presenting in front of large crowds. Most people would think of magician’s primary skill as the technique of doing a magic trick itself, however this is far from the truth. A magician’s largest skill is presentation and storytelling. Almost anyone, if they had the desire, could learn to do a lot of the effects done at birthday parties and corporate events. The tricks themselves are easy. What’s difficult though is capturing the audience’s attention and forming an emotional connection with them, making them believe that what they are seeing is unreal. A trick, condensed down to just the technique without the storytelling patter, can most of the time be done in a few seconds. Adding a backstory, presentation, timing, and audience engagement take that several second trick and turn it into a 7–10 minute performance.
Learning to become comfortable in front of an audience was my biggest takeaway from being a magician. Although I’m not performing card tricks on a regular basis anymore, I am frequently giving presentations and seeking buy-in from individuals and groups. The performance skills I picked up from being magician are a huge benefit to me in a corporate environment.
The T-Shirt Maker
One summer I worked at a screen printing shop. I helped do everything from help explain product and prices to customers, converted shirt designs to separate colors in order to print negatives, transferred the designs to screens, and actually screen printed the shirts. Screen printing is a mystery to most shirt buying customers — without any education about the process, customers don’t understand why the setup fees are so large, why minimum order numbers exist, and why the more colors in a design the more money their shirts will cost. It was my job to help inform the consumer about why those setup fees exist because we have to create a physical screen for each color in their design. Each physical screen also adds labor to printing each shirt and explains why more colors means more money. Another major part of that job also involved working with a customer to help them convert their million color photo into a 5-color t-shirt design.
Overall, working in screen printing shop taught me how to learn to work with customers who were unfamiliar with the task at hand. Not only was it my responsibility to educate customers about the process, but also to help them translate their creative design decisions into what we would be able to print on a final product. All of these customer service skills have been a tremendous help to me now as a programmer since managing projects is quite a lot like dealing with customers of that print shop: I have to gather business requirements after understanding what the customer is looking to achieve, give estimates and provide costs of programming certain features over others based on any timelines, and then make sure that the customer is completely satisfied with the finished product.
None of these summer jobs I had directly made me a better programmer; after coming home from my summer jobs, I still read programming books, read tutorials, and watched videos to improve my skills. All of these jobs did however teach me the skills for running my own businesses and also translate to my programming skill-set today. I also learned what aspects of different jobs I liked (working with customers, being in control of my own projects) and what things I didn’t (accounting, crazy work schedules).
So my advice for everyone looking for a summer job this year is to get a job doing something fun and totally different from what you have done before: not only will you learn how to do something new, but you will help define what kinds of things might interest you in a career and what job traits you will want to avoid.
