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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

#391

Wow, I wish I was an engineer in that era. 25 years at the same company, 3 languages over 13 years. And when he needed to learn a new language he actually went to school for it. I just started a new position, I have to learn at least 2 new languages (on my own time) which I need to be proficient in basically immediately. My very first project was, fix something in this new project which uses a new language, you have…

>I wonder if most engineers now are just permanent amateurs hopping around between tools and projects, learning just enough to make it work without breaking, but not knowing how to build things properly. How many years would it take to really become expert in that language? Even if you focused all your time on that, by the time you have mastered it another language will have come along to replace it, or the language itself will have been transformed into something new.

This is basically why I continually fail to make it as a web developer, at the times I'm forced to try. Even though I enjoy the work just fine, I don't have anywhere near the passion to keep up with every new framework on my own time.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#392

Wow, I wish I was an engineer in that era. 25 years at the same company, 3 languages over 13 years. And when he needed to learn a new language he actually went to school for it. I just started a new position, I have to learn at least 2 new languages (on my own time) which I need to be proficient in basically immediately. My very first project was, fix something in this new project which uses a new language, you have…

I'm a games engine programmer. I pretty much only know VS and C++, plus some bits of C# for an occasional tool. I feel like what you described is only applicable to Web programmers - my coworker has been at the same company for the last 26 years and he only knows assembly, C and C++, and uses windows batch for scripting. No need to learn anything else - that's enough to build the latest AAA games.

That sounds great.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#395

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...…

That would be super impressive if he was still programming at the age of 92. The resume does say "Health: Excellent", but still.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google/Microsoft/amazon/facebook/other big top companies seem to only have people work in group settings, but the problem is they pay a metric shitload of money. I've worked for several of them on this list. Work at one of those for 10 years and you might be fixed for life. I also used to work at Microsoft back when we all had private offices but I was lucky enough to be there when the stock was steadily appreciating…

Amazon doesn’t pay much.

i thought including the stock amazon pays well these days, better than microsoft. that's what my friend working there says.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#397

Wow, I wish I was an engineer in that era. 25 years at the same company, 3 languages over 13 years. And when he needed to learn a new language he actually went to school for it. I just started a new position, I have to learn at least 2 new languages (on my own time) which I need to be proficient in basically immediately. My very first project was, fix something in this new project which uses a new language, you have…

What kinds of companies do you work for and what kind of teams?

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#398
post #178
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requesting Years of experience can also be considered discrimination

FFS, It's not illegal discrimination. In the USA discrimination is 100% legal if 1) the group being discriminated against is not specifically defined as a protected group under law OR 2) it's a legitimate job requirement. Requiring programmers to know how to program also discriminates against non-programmers but non-programmers aren't a protected group. Requiring a stocker to be able to lift 30 pounds discriminates a…

Out of my own personal curiosity. How does the protection for people over 40 work?

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#399
post #74
post #19

I doubt a resume like this a would even be considered today. It's missing pretty much all the bling.

What bling? It seems like a completely acceptable CV even today.

To me, it might be. But literally all the jobs I’ve applied to in the past half year have given me some variation of a comment along the lines of “but can you list ALL of the projects you’ve ever worked on and the languages/libraries you used for them?”

Mind you, that’s in Japan, so possibly not entirely representative.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got fairly proficient in RoR some years ago. In that I understood most of the magic and was thinking on what is the best ways to design the program for readability / maintainability. Then I got good at Java + Spring Then I got good at React + Redux Now I gotta get good at Python + Django and the damn magic it does. Next I gotta get good at Scala. It is frustrating. And I feel that had I spent 10 years in any of tho…

IMO You don't need to specialize on a language or famework, but a problem domain, either technical (eg distributed systems, machine learning) or not (manufacturing, video, etc). It's better to be a good programmer that's deeply experienced in a domain, then a great scala developer that doesn't understand the domains he's working in. I'm more in the distributed space so I know elixir and scala very well with actor mod…

A fair point. At this point picking up front-end technologies is a thing I can fairly easily to. React was definitely hard because it was a different paradigm, but once I got over the hump, I'm solving the same problems as before.
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