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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

#211

Post by Gordonjcp »

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…

That reminds me of one of my dad's favourite jokes.

A guy goes up to the shipyard gates and asks to see the foreman. When the foreman comes along he asks "Hey, any chance of a job in your yard?"

"Yes, of course", says the foreman, "if you're prepared to start at the bottom and work your way up. Are you any good at making tea?"

"Yes", says the man, "I can make the tea!"

"Great!", says the foreman, "do you know how to drive a forklift?"

The man squints at him quizzically, "How big is your f***** teapot, then?"

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#213

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

sergiotapia wrote: post #94
wyattpeak wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

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?

I knew Python decently well before I ever played with Ruby.

Ruby to me feels like a very ugly version of Python. It's like Python and Perl had a baby, and I have very strong negative opinions of Perl's syntax. It baffles me how a language that people jokingly refer to as a "write-only" language ever got any sort of ground.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#214

Post by emptybits »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #5

Why does he call out that he is 5'4" I wonder? The "Health: Excellent" seems amusing in today's context too.

1. This is an "old" resume. I'm not as old as OP's dad but I definitely recall putting my gender, height, probably weight, definitely "health: excellent", etc. on my resumes in the 1980s. Different times. Times of discrimination? Probably. :-/

2. As others point out, this gentleman was in aerospace and even though he wasn't a pilot, here's a fun fact for the morning ... I watched a documentary on the early years of fighter pilot selection and grooming. Russia apparently recognized and exploited the value of a short heart-brain distance in its pilots. If I recall correctly, pilots with shorter distances between heart and brain can pull higher G's (or maybe negative G's) before browning or blacking out in certain maneuvers. It makes sense when you think about it. So if you're an air force looking for every edge you can, you might select for this trait. Shorter men (specifically, shorter sitting height: reasonably correlated with heart-brain distance). Also some women, I would expect. Anyways, this is probably not why OP's dad shared his height, but sharing a possible TIL as it was for me... :-)

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#215

Post by no-s »

> resume and skills from 1980

Wow, I had a resume (with several years of experience) in 1980. Now I’m feeling really auld.

My mom has roots in the era of programming where the program was entered by wiring a plugboard...

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#216

Post by UncleOxidant »

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…

> can we also bring back walk-on hiring?

This used to happen in the 80s. I went to interview at a startup company in Mountain View in 1987. There was some chit-chat then the interviewer asked me to wire-wrap a circuit (diagram was provided) and power it on and connect it up to the logic analyzer - he went away for about 1/2 an hour while I did that. He came back and complemented me on my neatness. Then he took me over across the room to talk to the VP of engineering who, after a few minutes of chit-chat, asked me when I would like to start. Those were the days.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#217

Post by chrisco255 »

jacobr1 wrote: post #194
wyattpeak wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably not. Unless you're rendering to another target besides the DOM (ie canvas) I doubt you see JS displacement as #1 in the browser. JS is not the performance bottleneck, the DOM itself is. And in the meantime, you've got 25 years of example code, component libraries, talent development, dev productivity tooling, browser integration, etc built up around it.

And unlike other operating systems, the browser does not give you any kind of standard library of reasonably good components to build on. So the sheer size and volume of components and the ecosystem built up around npm well be an uphill battle for any WASM target language to compete with.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#218

Post by marcodiego »

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 father was a physicist. He learned to program in FORTRAN in the university in the 70's.

Decades later I, still a teenager, asked him something like this: "Dad, you were a FORTRAN programmer and physicist in the 70's, you could be a very well paid developer anywhere in the developed world... why didn't you?"; he answered me: "I didn't thought this thing about computers would go too far."

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#220

Post by Beltalowda »

bee_rider wrote: post #138
enw wrote: post #97

> My dad is 92 and we just put him in a home. Can you stay healthy enough to die of old age in a regular home? “Put him in a home” sounds so ominous and forceful.

I'm not sure it is a matter of health. An relative of mine in her upper 90's recently passed away at home -- fortunately a number of relatives were well off enough to move nearby and help out, and hire a nurse to check in occasionally, etc etc. If anything I suspect dying at your home would be easier if you weren't very healthy.

My grandfather died in his home after a short but severe illness with round-the-clock care from the family. It was relatively easy, as far as these sort of things are ever "easy".

My grandmother died a few years before that, after spending a year in a nursing home with a less severe illness. It just wasn't feasible to keep her at home: she couldn't really walk any more and half the family would have to pause their lives. I don't really know her opinion on that as we never really had that kind of heart-to-heart relationship, but I would certainly much rather be "put in a home" than be such a burden. My grandfather was very happy that his end was a swift one, so the family wouldn't have to put through a long drawn-out ordeal again.

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