Hah. I used to live 2 doors down from your dad. Small world.
My dad's resume and skills from 1980
241–250 of 611 posts
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#242[deleted]
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
> bring back walk-on hiring? This make sense for highly productive labor, that foreman hiring people for just showing up generally got a positive expected return for this. In fact, this is still how a lot of (sometimes illegal) day labors go about getting work: truck comes by, picks up people ready for work, work get done and everyone makes money. > Why again does boutique startup need to interview 500 overqualified…
> Most of my labor has gone to waste. More projects than not never ultimately shipped Same here and I've been in the biz for ~35 years. An architect can drive around a city and point to buildings he designed. It's a bit disillusioning to think that the vast majority of the work I've done has just sort of disappeared because either a startup didn't make it or got swallowed up into a larger organization that had other…
> An architect can drive around a city and point to buildings he designed
I was under the impression that architects also did a lot of spec work, or designs for RFPs that don't ever get built. Or maybe only get built as a model.
I'm not disagreeing with your premise -- there is a lot of programming work that is hidden, lost, or wasted. However, it's not a trait that's exclusively a programming thing.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#244If 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…
> It's just business for crying out loud. Umm...there's some administrative and legal overhead related to hiring, firing or otherwise replacing an employee you seem to be overlooking.
Pretty much all of that is completely artificial, and only exists because it's imposed by government.
Things would function just fine, if not a lot better, without such unnecessary burdens being forced on employers and employees.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#245That resume reinforces the argument that the GI Bill is the best legislation every passed in the US.
Shame it wasn't available to everyone who qualified:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill#Racial_discriminatio...
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#246The 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?
Probably not. Lots of "critical" software is re-written frequently. I met the head of IT at Target during a presentation he gave on how they switched from PHP to NodeJS (~2012). I took a year to migrate the entire ERP solution to NodeJS (plus frontend).
Just like that, PHP was gone.
If the entire ERP can be re-written that quickly, then if a better language comes along, it will displace the Node infra.
What didn't change? SQL.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Which is, of course, included as “The story of Mel” in the jargon file: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/
I was fascinated by this story as teenager.
But looking back on it, I would say out of my current perspective this Mel guy was not a genius, but one of the worst programmers you could probably hire:
He written unmaintainable and even unchangeable "write-once" code that was so complex that nobody else could handle it either. He refused to do what he was payed for and just went away as he lost interest.
One of this kind of dudes on your engineering team and your company is in real deep trouble…
It's a given that you will need to throw away everything they did and start form scratch should any changes be necessary later on. However there's one fundamental constant in software engineering: Your software is going to need to change over time! No mater whatever somebody told you upfront. So in case you've got software built by some "Mel" you're completely screwed at that point, especially as changes to SW are usually needed the most at some critical period in time for your company.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#248That job market seems like so long ago. See job ad, type out a letter with your CV, wait for them to write back, somehow organize a time to meet, more rounds, and so forth. At least it must have been hard to spam out CVs. The guy seems pretty hardcore from my perspective. University training for all those techs. Of course hardware back then cost a lot of money so you wanted people who knew what they were doing. What…
My first interview for my first job in 1981 consisted of the manager asking me general programming questions ending in a description of an errant program which I had to explain how I would figure out what was wrong, and what it was likely to be. No whiteboards, no coding, nothing. That was the only interview, and I was hired on the spot, despite having 0 work programming experience and 0 college education in programming (was chemistry major, programmed for fun on an Apple ][). Highly unlikely to happen so easy today. I retired recently after nearly 40 years as a working programmer.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#249Can 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 contac…
Ah, I had the same experience as you when I graduated
People will offer all sorts of wacky feedback about resumes when prompted, but the real issue is that recruiters just don't look at or care about resumes that much. For my last few jobs I just sent an unformatted text file as my resume, one that would make dist1ll's eyes bleed. The most recent recruiter was actually angry at me for how "unprofessional" he thought my resume was, but the decision was out of his hands.
You have to network your way into a job. Put out feelers to friends, family, friends' families, professors, professors' friends, etc. A referral will jet you past the recruiter's filters and get you a real shot at a job.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#250Good to see your dad's resume. Good recollections of the programming languages COBOL and FORTRAN. Hope your dad enjoyed and continues to enjoy whatever he does.
I was born in 1981, learnt programming in college in 1999-2000. I learnt COBOL and FORTRAN too. To me, at this moment, all programming languages are almost the same. I am doing go now, will pick up rust by the end of this year.
We have to the solve the problems they keep changing.