I really need to post something like this about my mom. She had a BS in math and was sent to learn how to program computers in the late 50s in her first job. I have a photo of her in a skirt moving jumpers around on a room sized computer. She programmed in Fortran for most of her career. She retired in the early 90s and passed away soon after. If anything, I followed in her footsteps. I still remember playing colossal cave adventure on the minicomputer (Harris?) in her office in the late 70s.
My dad's resume and skills from 1980
391–400 of 611 posts
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#392Earlier 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…
That may well be true of some universities today. In 1970, they were pretty much the only place you could get hands on experience with a computer unless you somehow slid into a programming job in the financial industry, or a one of the few other areas that actually used them. And they were not behind the curve on the technology, although they tended to have lower end hardware than industry, because any compute was very expensive. The invoice on a 64k byte HP3000 in 1972, which on a good day could support half a dozen users actually doing any work, was over $100K. Memory upgrades to 128K ran you about $1/byte installed - maybe $8 in today's money. It was a big deal to be allowed hands on use of them.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like you dont have a culture where docs with "2022 Budget FINAL v2 - my copy (3).xls" aren't normal :)
No, indeed I don't. So enlighten me, since I don't use Word much: if you mark your resume "Final" and a headhunter wants to "improve" it, what do they need to do?
I just answered my own question, since I had the MS report in Word.
I was hoping I'd have to supply a password to edit it, which would be a somewhat reasonable level of security. But no; you just click "edit anyway." Duh.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This makes no sense. If anything, "anglosaxon" countries are much less obsessed about prestigious schools than places like say, France. So to portray it as a uniquely anglosaxon trait doesn't make sense.
Also, german higher education is meh at best. Even beyond rankings, german universities are usually well in the middle of pack at best, in almost every quantifiable metric. Though putting the blame on the anglos for that is... very typically german I guess.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#395Earlier 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…
My dad is an accountant who took some punch card FORTRAN programming classes in the early 70's as well. After 3 semesters he told his professor he wouldn't be returning to the computing department - his professor was shocked, for he was a star pupil! - for much the same reason. He and my mother still tell stories of Saturdays and Sundays spent organizing his punch cards and applying patches (literal in those days!) in the campus computer labs so he could have a more rapid debug cycle than was available during the week.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#396I'm at the age where the college I went to required us to take JCL, but it was already on its way out. I also took IBM 360 assembly language, which was WAY MORE high-level of a language than I was expecting it to be. Before then, my impression of assembly instruction set were from 6809E and 6502. In comparison, IBM 360 was a dream. But I never worked with it. It was just a class.
The other thing that was interesting is that unlike the rest of our assignments which we could do in the lab, this one we had to send the code to a computer in a different city, which ran the job, and came back with results 4 hours later. You had only 4 runs to get your code to work.
The most interesting about part of this story is that the every next semester after me, the same IBM 360 assembly language class use an IBM 360 emulator that ran on IBM PCs (this is at time of real-mode 640K DOS). So if I had just waited a semester, I could have done my assignments using an emulator on the PC.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#397If 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…
That reminds me of one of my dad's favourite jokes. A guy goes up to the shipyard gates and asks to see the foreman. When the foreman comes along he asks "Hey, any chance of a job in your yard?" "Yes, of course", says the foreman, "if you're prepared to start at the bottom and work your way up. Are you any good at making tea?" "Yes", says the man, "I can make the tea!" "Great!", says the foreman, "do you know how to…
Any chance someone could explain this to me? I think I'm missing something.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#398If 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…
> Hire someone right away and let them quit if they want to and hire someone else. It's just business for crying out loud. This is missing the point of interviewing. The goal isn't to find any warm body to fill the chair, the goal is to find someone qualified to do the work who also has a history of doing good work at previous employers. You also don't have unlimited headcount and hiring budget, so it's worth making…
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Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hire someone right away and let them quit if they want to and hire someone else. It's just business for crying out loud. This is missing the point of interviewing. The goal isn't to find any warm body to fill the chair, the goal is to find someone qualified to do the work who also has a history of doing good work at previous employers. You also don't have unlimited headcount and hiring budget, so it's worth making…
I actually very much agree with this comment. I was a manager for 25 years. A bad "team fit" was not good. I never had a technical failure in my hires, but I did have a couple of "bad cultural fits." These usually weren't toxic people, but people that couldn't handle the responsibilities and pressures (we were a small, high-functioning team, and everyone's visibility was fairly high). But this: > who also has a histo…
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Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need it to be fancy, you just need to be one step above the raw Word appearance you have there. It's the equivalent of having the same pair of pants but it fits you. But as you've said it's moot now that you have a job.
The OP resume looks like a raw typewriter document to me. I don't understand what value it brings to go beyond - it's nothing but a tool to convey your skills and experience.
Dumb things such as having a tiny bit of color or a slightly less basic format can make or break you when the recruiter/hirer is sifting through the pile. Besides, it takes all of ten minutes to do this and be done with it.
It's like fashion. Arbitrary but just having the basics understood goes such a long way professionally and socially compared to the effort expended