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My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

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Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#261

Post by drfuchs »

copperx wrote: post #238
falcor84 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really have no idea what you're talking about. I absolutely hated paper. The inconvenience of wanting to add some content higher up the page and having to redo the whole page to achieve that was infuriating to me. I for one am quite pleased that I no longer have as many violent urges when I'm composing text.

Typewriters weren't the right tool for composing text, although there were some successful people that made it work, especially at offices or newspapers. Knuth still does use a pencil and paper, as far as I know. He only types the manuscript in Emacs once he has composed it.

And more than just for academic papers: TeX was hand written in full on yellow legal pad, and then typed into the full-screen editor.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#262

Post by iforgotpassword »

ilaksh wrote: post #219
iforgotpassword wrote: post #123

Is your dad for hire? We have this legacy toolchain in cobol and IBM assembler running on a bunch of mainframes and are just not ready to migrate to our brand new Itanium servers we have ordered a while ago. Our engineers are busy porting all the logic but need help understanding the inner workings of the old setup. While they're at it, we have this small list of features we'd like to have added to the old version...…

He has severe dementia unfortunately. I just thought it might be interesting to people to see what technologies were in use at those times. My dad loves to play catch with his stuffed doggie (or whatever you will throw to him) but activities more complicated than that are not feasible.

> I just thought it might be interesting to people to see what technologies were in use at those times.

It definitely is, not just to see what technologies were in use, but what an exemplary career in that field looked like, so thanks for sharing. It's just that the first thing that went through my head was this joke, since it's really something that isn't too far fetched situation wise (see that one longer reply).

Fun story: About 6 years ago, my uncle was still working at a big car manufacturer. They have bounties for when employees come up with ideas to optimize some workflow or cut costs somewhere. He handed in a suggestion to stop computing big reports on one of their mainframes that were meant for being printed out but weren't actually for quite some time, so basically just went to /dev/null, while the generation process took quite some time. There was quite some confusion first since the IT people in charge insisted no such thing was going on, so they had him show them where this job was actually wired in and where the output went. In the end they decided to remove it and paid him some reward. How did he know? He coded that job in the 80s.

I guess your dad would have quite some interesting stories too.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#263

Post by larrywright »

metaphor wrote: post #55

If I lived through 3 wars and had a strong career alignment with major defense contractors, I suppose I'd be inclined to disclose health and height out of habit...but was this generally expected on a resume back in the 80s?

I've never seen health and height before, so that might be specific to military folks, but I know that in that era and earlier it was very common to include personal details such as your marital status, number of children, even your religion and what church you attended. I saw something recently about how in the 1950s/1960s, if a man were interviewing for an executive position with a company, part of the hiring process would be to interview his wife, often over a dinner that she hosted. There were classes available for women to teach them how to speak and act in those situations, so that their husbands had a better chance at the job.

All this to say: the idea that resumes and interviews would stay out of your personal life is a rather modern concept.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#264

Post by curuinor »

throwaway0255 wrote: post #247
_uhtu wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If tech was just look at a resume and decide to hire or not people would hate that even more than modern complicated forms of interviewing. There's flaws in the ways a lot of companies hire, but the process has to be complicated when you get down to the numbers of how many people are for hire and how many are worth hiring.

I hate the state of tech interviews with a passion but I have to reluctantly agree. When I was involved in hiring I was astonished at how difficult it was to even find a person who was both worth interviewing and willing to interview, and resumes were basically worthless at helping you make that determination. Resume did not matter at all. The hiring pool is flooded with a thousand bootcampers, 1 in 40 can actually p…

In my experience, bachelor's in CS counts more than master's in CS, which in turn of course counts more than bootcamp. It's just time spent in front of a computer.

I hope your pay and total comp is actually competitive, in which case you're grousing over something you could fix in a jiffy.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#266

Post by laumars »

walshemj wrote: post #225
laumars wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes you enter that information on your CV to demonstrate responsibility and/or trust rather than because you're specifically after another equivalent position

Not no for jobs not requiring SC /DV clearance it would be to "waltish" to brag about your clearance. BTW a "walt" is short for "walter mitty"

Sorry but even the walter mitty reference is lost on me.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#267

Post by code_potato »

curuinor wrote: post #264
throwaway0255 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the state of tech interviews with a passion but I have to reluctantly agree. When I was involved in hiring I was astonished at how difficult it was to even find a person who was both worth interviewing and willing to interview, and resumes were basically worthless at helping you make that determination. Resume did not matter at all. The hiring pool is flooded with a thousand bootcampers, 1 in 40 can actually p…

In my experience, bachelor's in CS counts more than master's in CS, which in turn of course counts more than bootcamp. It's just time spent in front of a computer. I hope your pay and total comp is actually competitive, in which case you're grousing over something you could fix in a jiffy.

Why is a bachelors degree more worth than a masters?

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#268

Post by YZF »

zdragnar wrote: post #250
panzagl wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'but the process has to be complicated when you get down to the numbers of how many people are for hire and how many are worth hiring.' i.e. we're trying to hire imaginary unicorns because we don't respect actual programmers.

As an engineer involved in the hiring process at two different companies, it's rather depressing how many people outright lie on their resume about what they know or what experience they have. We certainly weren't looking for imaginary unicorns, but we also couldn't afford to train someone who sent in a code sample in a MS word doc that was full of syntax errors...

There are companies that will check a resume for employment and education details. You also can and should do reference checks. In my experience outright lying is rare, there's definitely some embellishment. The person who sent in the MS word doc was a CS/Engineering graduate with significant experience in respectable companies? Hard to believe.

Any software development job requires training. Every project is different and it takes time to come up to speed. For a good developer catching up on some particular buzzword is much faster than your undocumented spaghetti of a project ;) If you can't afford new people ramp up then you have a bigger problem.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#270

Post by Pokepokalypse »

throwaway0255 wrote: post #247
_uhtu wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If tech was just look at a resume and decide to hire or not people would hate that even more than modern complicated forms of interviewing. There's flaws in the ways a lot of companies hire, but the process has to be complicated when you get down to the numbers of how many people are for hire and how many are worth hiring.

I hate the state of tech interviews with a passion but I have to reluctantly agree. When I was involved in hiring I was astonished at how difficult it was to even find a person who was both worth interviewing and willing to interview, and resumes were basically worthless at helping you make that determination. Resume did not matter at all. The hiring pool is flooded with a thousand bootcampers, 1 in 40 can actually p…

Yeah; well, you can distinguish me from the poseurs, by asking for my professional references. Call them. They will convey the authenticity of my 25 year work history.

Or don't, and run my resume through a buzzword search program, instead. Yeah. That will work. Good luck with that.

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