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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

#141
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I blame Microsoft. Now these sorts of interviews are done even by companies writing pedestrian web apps that don't require hard-core CS knowledge. Yet they test every applicant on it anyway.

> Yet they test every applicant on it anyway. If you have enough applicants, why not filter out so you have the best of them? (well, maybe not quite the best, there is some value in having someone less likely to get bored and move on PDQ).

One reason, besides the obvious lack of respect, is that the more you test for things you don't need, the higher the odds that you select somebody with false positive results on the things you need.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#142
If the minimalist resume is appealing, can we also bring back walk-on hiring?

In warehouse and construction work, if someone shows up at 7:30 AM on a Monday morning, odds are quite good that the foreman will have something for them to do. Maybe not that day, but maybe tomorrow, or maybe someone on the list above them won't show up that week and they'll get called. I made rent doing that in my early 20s and they even let me leave early sometimes to work on my internet business because I didn't have a family to support and maybe someone else had a bill they needed to pay and wanted my shift.

Why again does boutique startup need to interview 500 overqualified people? Hire someone right away and let them quit if they want to and hire someone else. It's just business for crying out loud.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#143
I dearly miss my adoptive father, and his close friend, who introduced me to computers in the early 1980s, in a dreary backwater town of a backwater Middle-Eastern country, starting with a Sinclair ZX-81, soon followed by a ZX Spectrum :)

We were always behind the rest of the world in everything; to get new software or books and magazines we had to wait for someone to make a 10-12 hour trip to the nearest major city, which happened once every couple months, so we had to prepare wishlists in advance ^^

Those 80s computer mags were the best part of my childhood: Your Sinclair and specially ZZAP! because those were all I had access to when someone else was using the TV, or the computer, or just waiting for the electricity to come back on (something which that part of the world still struggles with)

I graduated to a Commodore 64 and fantasized about getting a Commodore Amiga, but by the time we could afford a new computer, the world had moved on, and I got my first "IBM PC" in 1993: a 286 with a 40 MB (megabyte) HD :)

My dad's friend, my uncle, was pretty much a genius who had taught himself electronics, repaired his own TVs etc and even built his own audio equipment and other simple devices for his friends. He tried to teach me programming in BASIC but none of it stuck with me (I try to make up for that by learning Z80 and 6502 coding these days)

The guy died relatively young, and his genius was never recognized outside our small town, but the children he influenced and instilled a love of technology in, always remember him and owe their skills to him.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#146

If the minimalist resume is appealing, can we also bring back walk-on hiring? In warehouse and construction work, if someone shows up at 7:30 AM on a Monday morning, odds are quite good that the foreman will have something for them to do. Maybe not that day, but maybe tomorrow, or maybe someone on the list above them won't show up that week and they'll get called. I made rent doing that in my early 20s and they even…

> Hire someone right away and let them quit if they want to and hire someone else. It's just business for crying out loud.

You're not hiring construction workers, you're hiring architects. It often takes more than 3 months to get used to a new codebase and understand how and why things are done the way they are.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#147
post #6

Can we bring back this form of resume, please? Information is clearly organized, easy to read, easy to remember. No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colored backgrounds, unreadable fonts, and whatnot...

My experience from around 2017: Today's employers just don't like good simple resumes for some reason. They expect you to be a graphic designer to even look at it. I had a clearly formatted, simple resume and had a 0% success rate (besides one offer for 30k which was an insult) after hundreds of applications coming out of college to places far and wide or local, until a recruiter for a consultancy company cold contacted me. People online lombasted my resume for not being fancy enough. I still think it's an example of a perfect resume personally. Doesn't matter anymore thankfully now that I have a great job I want to stay in.

Found a picture of it for reference, plus or minus minor tweaks depending on the company: https://external-preview.redd.it/Sfx4gvcEZXKXr8cxBseyyW2ycGP...

Certainly far above average chops for an entry level applicant so I don't know what every employer's problem was. Much harder world for junior developers than anyone would make you think if even I had that much trouble. I was legitimately scared I had no future outside of fast food for a while there.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#148
post #6

Can we bring back this form of resume, please? Information is clearly organized, easy to read, easy to remember. No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colored backgrounds, unreadable fonts, and whatnot...

This resume has better UX than 80% of the resumes I've seen - which is particularly frustrating especially if it's a FE resume. These days I'm happy if the candidate can correctly spell the technology they claim to have been using the past N years. Most are full of bullet points with every other word bolded. If the bulleted skills list is greater than 5 lines chances are it has the same skill duplicated multiple times. I'm not sure if the candidate is fully to blame as I'm sure the recruiting companies manipulate the resume format. But ultimately the candidate is responsible for the quality of the resume.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#149
post #22

The interesting bit about this post is that with that resume, you can still feed a family in 2022 (okay, you won't need any assembler, and one from the set { Fortran, COBOL } will do). I wonder if Python and JavaScript will get you that far 50 years from now?

I must be looking in the wrong places, but I don't have the feeling that Fortran on my Resume has really helped me a ton. Fortran is a fine language and of course "real programmers can write a Fortran program in any language," but it is hard to compete with the breadth of C++.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#150
post #22

The interesting bit about this post is that with that resume, you can still feed a family in 2022 (okay, you won't need any assembler, and one from the set { Fortran, COBOL } will do). I wonder if Python and JavaScript will get you that far 50 years from now?

One day, long after I'm gone, people will finally accept that Python and JavaScript are no longer young languages. JavaScript is 26 years old, Python is 31. They both continue to grow in importance year-on-year, JavaScript because there is nothing on the horizon which will plausibly replace it, and Python because a large number of industries and programmers genuinely love it. I think there's a nontrivial chance they'…

Python3 yes, but Python2 will have faded away.

Perl! Oh, poor Perl.

Python 3, or its children, will be around a long time. As will some version of /bin/sh

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