It's a shame he just went into a home, because we could always use some COBOL programmers.
My dad's resume and skills from 1980
291–300 of 611 posts
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#292Sorry must be at least 5'10.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#293> 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.
runvnc is my github. Yeah maybe I didn't word that the best. The short version is that after my mother passed away, myself and my sister were there full time for several months, but at some point we couldn't handle it anymore. His memory was almost completely gone, bodily functions often seemed to be like torture to him, but the big issue was that he started yelling every time we tried to move him. The hospital said it was apparently a type of vertebral compression fractures or something.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#294Anybody knows what the “sd” means after his signature?
Initials of who typed up the letter. Standard practice back then. I learned about it in H.S. typing class in the late 80s Edit: s/resume/letter/g
Ditto! We had big dumb noisy electromechanical typewriters in my Typing 9 class, and then upgraded to some kind of semi-smart typewriter for Typing 10 that had a small buffer so that you could type+correct one line but it wouldn't print until you pressed the return/enter key. They only taught us a couple weeks of word processing on computers. Microsoft Works, if I recall correctly.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see them a lot for interns and new grads. I think there's a bunch of templates that have these 'features' and when people are first starting out they don't know better. No interviewer I've ever met thought 5-star ratings were a good idea.
I graduated last year and one of our final classes required a resume be submitted using the professors format which was colorful, differing fonts, and used "confidence percentages". I wouldn't dare use it in the real world but I'm wondering how many of those new grad resumes are similar.
And new grads are probably often looking for something anything to stand out if they haven’t done any projects that really stand out and have a middling GPA from a middling school.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#296Earlier 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?
The libraries. Ruby has Rails. Python has... everything else (plus Django, so it also kinda has "a Rails"). You'll likely be using something less well-maintained and shakier if you use Ruby outside of Rails stuff, than if you'd picked Python. Python's basically the modern Perl. Why that all happened, IDK. I write that as someone with a soft spot for non-Rails Ruby (after much consideration and repeated encounters, I…
> Why that all happened, IDK.
I'd reckon the parent's suspicion about the scientific community is correct in that it was a large influence. When ML and deep learning blew up, the academic Python community was in a great position -- you had numpy and scipy early on (both optionally BLAS and LAPACK btw), then scikit-learn for ML, matplotlib for plotting results, open CV ports, etc. As for why Python was adopted so early by the scientific community, I'm not sure. Maybe because it was a scripting language that was also very friendly for hooking to C and Fortran?
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#297During the early 2000's there was an IT slump in CA due to the dot-com crash, so I spent a lot of time sending out resumes. Eventually I created a script to quickly customize them for a given job ad.
It had topic meta-tags, and each topic had four levels: high, medium, low, skip. The level would control the placement and amount of detail given to each topic. Medium would default to "low" if there were no medium-level content/detail. Thus, I didn't have to always type 3 variations per section+topic. There were other switches I won't go into.
A found that highlighting applicable domain experience helped a lot: "billing", "budgeting", etc.
I still did some hand customization, but the script allowed me to send out roughly 1,000 resumes and/or CV's all over the nation without getting carpel tunnel. (I preferred to stay in CA, but the market was really dry at the time. Plus, location mattered less if it were only a contract.)
When feeling trapped, a programmer always "writes a script".
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#298I'm going to borrow this layout for my new resume, also I'm definitely using typewriter font.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#299If 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…
If software was so regular like construction, we could automate most of it.
We automate tons of software. That's what compilers and interpreters are. And now we're even entering the era of plausibly-deniably-stealing-other-people's-code-from-Github-as-a-service.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#300Earlier 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, when you're constrained enough, you rarely to never sacrifice anything in the name of future changes. You figure out what needs to be done, then you write a program that does it. If it needs to change, you write a new program. Part of why that's not as bad as it sound is exactly because of those constraints, you're not dealing with megabytes of source code.
There are lots of problems that are specific and simple enough to solve, that it's easier to write a C program from scratch, than it is to find, install and then learn how to do it with some existing package... The same concept goes for programs.. At a certain scale, it's not worth the extra infrastructure/overhead/rigidity/complexity that it takes to write software that's optimized for change.
That said, today, in 2022, it's more or less the opposite, codebases are huge enough that most of software "engineering" is about plumbing together existing libraries, and at that scale, it's an entirely different thing.