>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.

5000 kids asking you for a job per month is a nuisance.

it's a great marketing platform, if anything. Strong brand loyalty going forward and costs you not much to do well, not to mention you can brighten a day or few for thousands of kids in all sorts of life situations.

You're right of course. I hadn't thought of the negatives when this self-restraint is absent.

I only sent one letter to one team because I was a fan. The restraining factor was being a fan. Remove that, and it can indeed rapidly go out of hands....