Just curious, did he get the job at CDC? Where did his career go after 1980?
If I remember correctly it was General Dynamics and then CSC.
My dad's resume and skills from 1980
301–310 of 611 posts
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#302Can 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...
Presumably it was typed out by hand, one for each job? Maybe a photo copy. Its a good reason to keep it simple.
1980 was not the dark ages. Photocopiers though not personal ones were widely available and used. But yes it was probably typed on a typewriter initially. (There was typesetting but you probably wouldn’t have used it for a resume.)
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#303Earlier 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.
The provided link was fun to read (as a German). Personal highlights:
> German employers simply don't know what to make of an Art History major who wants to take a temporary job in an accounting firm before going on to medical school.
I'm still laughing.
I guess actually nobody knows what to make of an Art History major in the first place. That's one of the typical things one would study if your only plan in live is to become "a wife" (OK, today maybe also "a husband"), or when you have absolutely no clue what you want to do and need additional time to orientate.
Also nobody would hire an Art History major to do an accounting job. Never ever!
That's just ridiculous. You need professional training in accounting if you like to do accounting.
And going to medical school after getting an Art History major? Alone the idea is even more ridiculous than the idea that you could do an accounting job with an Art History major… You need almost teen years to become a full medic. Also getting into some of these universities require that you stand in line for quite some time, and have absolute top grades form school. The people that consider going for Art History study aren't the ones that would have any realistic chance to ever attend (a German) medical university.
So alone that sentence above is actually a kind of joke. But that's not everything funny in there.
> They may neither know what the Ivy League is nor know which university is more prestigious than another.
> In Germany, where you went to school is largely irrelevant.
Jop. And that's a big advantage!
Maybe not out of the perspective of some Dartmouth scholars, but most people on this planet agree that the anglo-saxon system for higher education is just complete madness.
The whole Bologna Process BS (which is modeled by the anglo-saxon madness) significantly decreased the quality of German's higher education, and at the same time almost invalidated the achievement of possessing an university diploma. Now everybody can get some "Art History Bachelor" degree, or some crap like that…
I strongly hope that we'll stop that madness at some point before our education finally hits the lows of the anglo-saxon equivalent!
There was a time that a German "Dipl.-Ing." or "Dr." title had some meaning. What you get nowadays with most "master" students are people that would miserably fail at "Vordiplom"… Also, "everybody" and his dog has a "bachelor degree" which makes it actually useless (and made just "regular school" out of university).
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#304Earlier 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…
I enjoyed programming in the 90s and early 2000s but I feel it’s turning again into tedious grunt work with scrum, agile, yaml configuration files and needlessly complex systems.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#305When 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…
> college recruiting materials might well brag that at their institution, there were not one, but two computers on campus.
Our community college highlighted their Vax minicomputer by having a special window that showed all the flashing LED's to passers by. But when PC's became the "in thing", they felt embarrassed and covered the window with PC posters. Poor Vax, lots of memories together. It was an early lesson in IT = star-today-washup-tomorrow.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#306That 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 copy of K&R belonged to my dad and was from the early 80s! My job interviews in the 80s and 90s (college summer jobs, or the one time a company tried to get me to leave college for a job) had no whiteboard-coding-style technical skills components, aside from demos of software I'd written and general discussions of implementation details. One job I interviewed for was at Davinci Email. This was probably 1990-ish? T…
> The last interview was with someone very technical, who had printed out a few pages of listings of the obfuscated C contest. He asked me to go through them and tell him what each program would output. I did not get the job.
It's nice to know that stupid interview questions are not a modern innovation.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#307Earlier 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/
Direct link: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#308The 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 ch…
SQL is pretty darn perfect for its purpose. As long as databases exist, SQL will exist. It is also super easy and intuitive to learn- I taught myself and it has been my bread and butter for the ~17 years since .
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#309A LaTeX template for this style (from the last time this was posted): https://www.overleaf.com/read/cqscsqsqmskm
Restricted, you don’t have a permission
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#310Earlier 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.
That's something specific called a "federal resume" required for most jobs with the US Government. It's more akin to a job application than a resume.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Resume_(United_States)