from Storyworth
I’ll give this as a two-part answer – with the first part being part-time jobs during school, and the second part being my first full-time job.
PART 1 – During School
I didn’t work in high school – in part, because I changed cities/states mid high school – so I never got any jobs in motion. In college, I mainly worked for my dad during the summers (I had one summer where I wrote software for an actuary). I did not work during the school year when in college.
Getting a summer job with my dad was easy – he hired me. I was a fully-grown man, and was able to do a manual labor job at the FMC Corporation chemical distribution center that he ran. I wrote in another posting how I needed to double my calorie intake for those summers because of how physically demanding the job was – and how, when I worked for the actuary, I got (relatively) fat – because I naturally ate more, but burned fewer calories. Also, when I worked for my dad, part of my job was sweeping up the floor at the end of the day – so I joke to my wife that I used to be (in part) a ‘professional sweeper’.
PART 2 – Post School
Getting a job out of college should be easy, but for me it wasn’t. There were a couple of factors: 1) it was pre-internet, so it wasn’t as easy then to find suitable open positions, and 2) I screwed up a bit in college: I took huge class loads, but failed to take all the classes needed to graduate – so I needed to go an additional semester – to take one additional class. (Overall in college, I ended up taking the equivalent of 6 years of classes in 4 1/2 years – sometimes needing dean approval for large class loads. Plus I took extracurricular classes like Ameslan and Esperanto.) Graduating mid-year got me out of sync with any on-campus recruiting, and with company hiring cycles.
So after college graduation, I ended coming home to live with my parents in the Chicago suburbs for a couple of months, and applied for scores of jobs from there (with some help from my mom). I still have the written notebook tracking all the jobs that I applied for. It’s interesting that the resume I used to apply for jobs had a photo of me in the corner (since it was pre-internet, I mailed in my applications). I don’t know how common a photo on a resume was at the time, but I still have copies of that resume, with moppy-haired Tom in the corner.
I applied for a job with FMC Corporation in Minneapolis MN, but ended up with an interview with FMC in San Jose CA. (It’s amazing for me to think that I could have started my career working in Minnesota.) FMC flew me to San Jose, interviewed me, and subsequently made me a job offer. (Remember, I had already worked for FMC when I worked for my dad.) At the time, Ronald Reagan was president, and defense spending was a priority. FMC in San Jose was a defense contractor that built ‘armored personnel carriers’ – sort of scaled-down tanks.
I hired in along with a dozen other engineers – and we worked hard, and played hard. We all socialized together, and had a great time. FMC moved me out to California, with all my belongings, including my ten-year-old Ford Mustang II – a slightly sporty car.
When I hired in (mid 1980s) software technology was just getting going. One of our early tasks was to replace a bunch of analog electronic circuity with a microprocessor running software. I had to learn a new (DoD-approved) software language, but we made it happen. I worked at FMC for four years, then moved on to work for an airline. Part of my motivation for leaving FMC was that I eventually felt guilty contributing to the ‘war effort’ – that killed people 😒
So in summary: I worked for my dad most summers in college (plus one summer for an actuary), but my first real job was for a defense contractor in San Jose, which I landed a few months after (late) college graduation.