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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

#191

Post by drewzero1 »

shafoshaf wrote: post #95
walnutclosefarm wrote: post #53

When I first entered the working world as a programmer and administrator of an "academic computing center", in the early 70s, you met men like Ray - ex-military, GI-bill educated, learned computers from the electricity on up in their mid-career, rather frequently, either as customer engineers for one of the big mainframe manufacturers (there were 7 or 8, depending on when and how you counted), or from the minicompute…

It reminds me of "Mel"in 1983 which was in response to "Real Programmers write in FORTRAN." https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

This comes up on here every few months, and I can't help but read it every time. We had a few Mels in the earlier days of my employer's history and I can't help but be a little bit in awe of the stories I've heard from and about them.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#192

Post by snowwrestler »

Caught my eye:

Listing gender, height, health on the resume (!) Can’t imagine getting a resume with that info these days.

Listing corporate training under education. Again, wouldn’t expect to see that today. Not sure if that is because no one does employee training anymore, OR, if it’s just expected and understood that you’ll learn new stuff constantly as a programmer these days.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#193

Post by acjacobson »

walnutclosefarm wrote: post #53

When I first entered the working world as a programmer and administrator of an "academic computing center", in the early 70s, you met men like Ray - ex-military, GI-bill educated, learned computers from the electricity on up in their mid-career, rather frequently, either as customer engineers for one of the big mainframe manufacturers (there were 7 or 8, depending on when and how you counted), or from the minicompute…

My grandfather was like this. Full stint in the Marines and then worked on computers. I remember him telling the story of how exciting it was (and what a big deal it was) when one of their systems got upgraded to 4k of RAM.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#194

Post by jacobr1 »

wyattpeak wrote: post #51
jll29 wrote: 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'…

> there is nothing on the horizon which will plausibly replace it

I'm not going to be making any bets - but the one project that has possibility is WASM. A mature, polyglot ecosystem on top of WASM runtimes with web-apis seem like it could displace JS in browser as #1.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#195

Post by eesmith »

bredren wrote: post #109
sergiotapia wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did Python win the war with Ruby? Was it purely the math community deciding this is where we throw our weight and left Ruby the runt of the litter?

Growth of data science and AI/ML saved Python from being over leveraged on web dev backends. I’d say also it was more at war with node until data science took off.

It was already in wide use for scientific computing by 2000, due to the comparative ease of writing interfaces to C code. The main idea was to use Python as a glue language to "steer" high-performance computing.

The Python/C API was easy to learn and use, Python's reference counts worked well for C-based objects, and it was easier to build non-trivial data structures than Perl or Tcl, which were its two main competitors at the time.

(Tcl extensions required manual garbage cleanup, I remember Perl's extension API as being rather complex, and I had to read the Advanced Perl manual to understand something as simple as having a list of dictionaries.)

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#196

Post by zwaps »

chrisseaton wrote: post #139
morelisp wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've looked at a ton of German resumes and never seen this. Only once on someone from (and at the time of writing, in) South Asia. (German resumes frequently do have familial status though, and of course always with the fucking photographs...)

For example https://german.dartmouth.edu/opportunities/working-germany/w... mentions family info, which seems bizarre to British and US people, as it's not something a candidate can control, so it seems unfair to discriminate based on this. I know German culture is different of course.

Family info in this context means whether you are married and have children or not

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#197

Post by dkurth »

zackmorris wrote: post #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…

As Seymour Cray said, "The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late."

It can be months (at a high salary) before you really know whether a hire is likely to work out. I think it makes sense to invest more effort in screening applicants in this case.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#198

Post by chrisseaton »

zwaps wrote: post #196
chrisseaton wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example https://german.dartmouth.edu/opportunities/working-germany/w... mentions family info, which seems bizarre to British and US people, as it's not something a candidate can control, so it seems unfair to discriminate based on this. I know German culture is different of course.

Family info in this context means whether you are married and have children or not

What relevance does that have to do on whether you can do your job or not, though?

And here's another example of specifically parent occupation:

https://qz.com/1055416/americans-would-be-shocked-by-common-...

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#199

Post by skeaker »

sircastor wrote: post #93
walnutclosefarm wrote: post #53

When I first entered the working world as a programmer and administrator of an "academic computing center", in the early 70s, you met men like Ray - ex-military, GI-bill educated, learned computers from the electricity on up in their mid-career, rather frequently, either as customer engineers for one of the big mainframe manufacturers (there were 7 or 8, depending on when and how you counted), or from the minicompute…

A few years ago in school I had to read a paper that was written by a guy who happens to also be a part of my local electronics hobby group. I mentioned this to a friend and he noted that, unlike a lot of fields, Computer Science is still young enough that many of the pioneers are still around.

They're often on this very website, in fact.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#200

Post by Spooky23 »

DMell wrote: post #169
2ICofafireteam wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has been through several government vocational programs in Canada, I will say that when your Case Manager or Instructor says to write your resumes and letters a certain way, you do it.

My girlfriend is a biologist with the National Parks Service and all of their resumes are expected to be three to five pages long. It hurt my soul when she told me that.

Government resumes are different as they rely on documented experience as a substitute for a civil service exam. They want completeness more like a dossier than a marketing document. Your catalog of skills and experience is critical, as "X years of Y" rules the day.

It's actually easier - you just tag on whatever you do every one in awhile. "Normal" resumes are like ads for you, and the positive/negative usefulness of your resume is more about your ability to produce compelling bullshit for an audience, miss the mark, or land in the middle of the bell curve.

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