My dad's resume and skills from 1980 • Hacker News Board

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#331

Post by pishpash » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 6:54 PM UTC

mbreese wrote: post #243

UncleOxidant wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Is there also a lot of custom rebuilding of pipes or nails, either the exact same ones or in a new shiny material?

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#332

Post by quadrifoliate » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 6:58 PM UTC

jcadam wrote: post #41

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colored backgrounds, unreadable fonts, and whatnot... I read a lot of resumes. Honestly, the number of quirky over-designed resumes I see is probably 1 in 50. The vast majority of people do submit clearly organized resumes based on a template they found. The reason those quirky over-designed resumes get shared on HN or other social media is because they’re different, not beca…

I eventually gave up on Word templates and now keep my resume in LaTeX. Neat and organized - not unlike this example only with more detail and nicer fonts :) Occasionally a recruiter will ask/demand I give it to them in MS Word - I've learned it's always a bad idea to give recruiter a resume in an easily editable format.

Yeah, I usually move on from these recruiters.

"Can you send it to me as a Word file?"-style recruiters have always been correlated with a poor experience for me.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#333

Post by dlandis » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 6:58 PM UTC

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.

Yeah, genuinely curious for how many people in their 90s that are “put in a home”, does that change end up being the right move for them. Kind of wish the question was studied so people could make more informed decisions.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#334

Post by mitchdoogle » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 6:58 PM UTC

hnlmorg wrote: post #280

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

Universities are always several years behind the curve. At college in the 90s they were still teaching token ring networking despite Ethernet already being common place. The same college told me that programmers didn’t design any of the code they write; they only transcribe code from flow charts. Just yesterday I was talking to a grad about DevOps. He said the field sounded boring from what he was taught at uni. Then…

It's highly dependent on school. The Ivies, including "public Ivies" will teach you proper comp sci. A lot of other big schools will do you well also. When it comes to smaller regional universities or junior colleges and community colleges, then it's hit or miss. Your intro CS course may be great if you manage to get an instructor who knows it well themselves and wants their students to know it, or you may get someone who teaches students how to do Microsoft Office without a shred of programming.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#335

Post by phamilton4 » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 6:59 PM UTC

How amazing it would have been to work for Convair or General Dynamics during that time!

The absolute heyday of Convair! The B-58 Hustler would have been introduced around the same time your father worked there! One of my favorites!

I wonder how many return calls you'd get if you used that resume format today!!

I hope you (or whoever owns that repo/resume) gets the chance to talk to him about working there and what it was like to watch computers shrink in size while getting more powerful! Thanks for sharing!

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#336

Post by dleslie » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 6:59 PM UTC

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…

> Your software is going to need to change over time!

Not so for anything shipped on ROM.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#337

Post by mitchdoogle » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 7:02 PM UTC

spaetzleesser wrote: post #304

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 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.

This is one industry where reinventing the wheel is quite the norm. It's good for all the developers - it keeps them working. Older devs can work on legacy systems, and newer devs (or devs picking up new skills) can recreate systems with the new tools and languages.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#338

Post by still_grokking » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 7:03 PM UTC

alar44 wrote: post #281

still_grokking wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Nah, those were different times when bits and bytes mattered.

Obviously not. We're talking about mundane business software.

Also the "optimizing compiler" that couldn't reach such levels of "perfection" wouldn't be a thing if this would really matter.

> Mel's tricks were just how things were done back then.

Obviously not. Otherwise there wouldn't be any point in this story.

It points out, with a lot emphasis, how exceptional Mel's code was!

> There was no repo, code didn't need to be maintained or added onto.

VCS dates back quite some time…

Also maintaining code was of course not any less important for a company as it is today. Simply as companies back than also relayed on their software to operate.

> The lifecycle of software was much much shorter.

No, of course not, as nobody would throw away some very expensive asset for no reason.

If anything, lifecycles of software were much longer than today (when you can deploy changes every few minutes if you please). Stuff written in the 70's is still running on some mainframes today!

As changing software was much more dangerous with much higher risk of breakage, less experts around, and everything much more difficult in general, it was more usual to try to not touch an already running system. (Maybe you even heard some quite similar proverb coined back than ;-)).

But "not touching" it does not work, as there is only one truly constant thing: Change.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#339

Post by smcl » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 7:06 PM UTC

rmnclmnt wrote: post #6

Can 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...

With the amount of people who can put "duties involved: computer programmer" in their CV today, you're asking to receive dozens of near-identical applications. Hope you enjoy interviewing every single candidate because you can't evaluate ahead of time whether their programming experience involved, say, pottering around with VBA or implementing their own compiler.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#340

Post by a1pulley » Tue, Oct 25, 2022, 7:06 PM UTC

notfish wrote: post #129

shafoshaf wrote: post #95

Earlier 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 a physics major until I stumbled across the jargon file online. It was an, "aha, my people!" moment. It was already showing its age then—nearly 20 years ago!—but sucked me into CS where I was much happier.