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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

#281

Post by alar44 »

still_grokking wrote: post #247
notfish wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kin…

Nah, those were different times when bits and bytes mattered. Everything was written in assembly/,machine code. Mel's tricks were just how things were done back then. There was no repo, code didn't need to be maintained or added onto. The lifecycle of software was much much shorter.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#282

Post by [deleted] »

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #253
nervousvarun wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We probably are close to the same age. My dad was an engineer who also learned to program FORTRAN in the 70's. When I asked him a similar question his reply was (quotes are paraphrased): "It was way too tedious to do. You'd spend hours getting the cards just right. We used to put them in a shoebox and mark them with a pen in case we dropped them on the way to the lab. Then you'd wait until the next day to get your re…

> "I didn't thought this thing about computers would go too far." I almost didn't major in Computer Science because in the late 90s, there were so many negative articles in the New York Times, vis-a-vis software. People don't remember it now, but the media and the culture were utterly hostile towards us, and loved to say our jobs were going to India, that everything there was to know about Computer Science could be s…

[deleted]

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#284

Post by emiliobumachar »

VancouverMan wrote: post #244
itsoktocry wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So true, but the government is a fact. Walk-in hiring got unintentionally killed off when we intentionally killed GTFO firing.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#285

Post by deltree7 »

indymike wrote: post #260
dkurth wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've hired hundreds of developers over three decades, and this is completely wrong: > It can be months (at a high salary) before you really know whether a hire is likely to work out. It's only that way if you make it take that long. You should know if you have a good programmer 2-3 weeks after the hire. Here a couple things that make making great hires hard: * Making it difficult to learn and understand your system.…

Have you built a successful growing software firm?

Does your software systems scale to Millions?

What about counterfactuals?

Without that data, your 3-decade hiring process means nothing.

I'm sure someone working in IBM, TCS, AT&T, Booz can all claim that they have been hiring people for 3-decades and give an opinion

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#286

Post by glonq »

aidenn0 wrote: post #171
gomox wrote: post #144

Whoever can type a resume of that length in a typewriter with no errors I would instantly hire. Such level of attention to detail is extremely rare these days.

Most likely, someone with the initials "sd" typed out that resume rather than Ray Livesay

Can confirm. The convention back then was that the typist puts their initials at the bottom of letters or memos.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#287

Post by logical_ferry »

robertlagrant wrote: post #49
ryandrake wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: I kind of like the concise wording when the writer doesn't feel they need to adhere to STAR. "Duties Included" is the only meat I want to see when I read a resume. I don't care what the specific challenge you faced was, or if your hard work transforming protobufs from one format to another resulted in "23% year over year revenue growth and 3 industry awards" for a product that uses your protobufs 5 layers up th…

My guess is if you sum all of the money saved/revenue gained listed in each MBA CV you'd end up with a number bigger than the GDP of the history of the world.

Oh I've got a buddy that'll laugh his pants off when he reads this. I know I am.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#288

Post by drittich »

nervousvarun wrote: post #223
marcodiego wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

We probably are close to the same age. My dad was an engineer who also learned to program FORTRAN in the 70's. When I asked him a similar question his reply was (quotes are paraphrased): "It was way too tedious to do. You'd spend hours getting the cards just right. We used to put them in a shoebox and mark them with a pen in case we dropped them on the way to the lab. Then you'd wait until the next day to get your re…

This is exactly how I first learned to program. Waiting a whole day to find out you had a bug was just way too frustrating for me so I completely wrote it off, as much as I enjoyed writing code. Once the first PCs came on the scene, though, everything changed and I was all over it. Still am.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#289

Post by insane_dreamer »

marcodiego wrote: post #218
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."

It was very niche. My dad (also early FORTRAN programmer) graduated in the very first undergrad CS class at UCLA, around '69 or `70. I think very few universities had a CS course at that time.
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