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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

#401

Post by IggleSniggle »

eastbound wrote: post #367
UncleOxidant wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can we also bring back walk-on hiring? This used to happen in the 80s. I went to interview at a startup company in Mountain View in 1987. There was some chit-chat then the interviewer asked me to wire-wrap a circuit (diagram was provided) and power it on and connect it up to the logic analyzer - he went away for about 1/2 an hour while I did that. He came back and complemented me on my neatness. Then he took me ove…

Pretty much my interview process. I ask them to program a contains(string, substring), then come back 30 minutes later to code scattered all over the place, sometimes with “// 54 upvotes http://stackoverflow.com/…” , code not compiling, and I’m still wondering whether I should accept them. I wonder what’s so hard with my interview. 5 years ago, even interns could do it, one of them could even tell the difference betw…

Maybe the problem is that nobody needs to solve that problem in their jobs anymore? For the last few months I've had the joy and privilege to really get to know the TCP and TLS stack intimately, and find myself looking for the patterns that are going to be most useful for handling data bit by bit. But prior to that, I really needed to care much more about the semantics (and the engineering culture around them) and the large scale structure of my code. I might get more hung-up/distracted by `contains(string, substring)` vs `string.contains(substring)` than what the actual operations to achieve it might be. And also, "surely this problem is already solved, optimally" aligns with one of the 3 great programmer virtues: A Great Programmer is Lazy. 30 minutes is unfortunately exactly the wrong amount of time if somebody has fallen into this trap.

Anyway, I guess it depends what compute layer you're interviewing for, but it doesn't necessarily sound like your interview process is broken, exactly. Like, it could be testing for the right thing, but in the absence of that thing, maybe you just need to find another thing that is substitutable.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#403

Post by still_grokking »

mardifoufs wrote: post #394
still_grokking wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Though putting the blame on the anglos for that is... very typically german I guess.

I'm not putting blame on anybody. (I wouldn't be here, or wouldn't have even learned the language if I wouldn't enjoy being with the "anglo people" as such ;-)).

I've said that the standards were undoubtedly much higher before the "Bologna Process", which adapted the German system in most parts to the anglo-saxon model, for net negative gains, imho.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#404

Post by IggleSniggle »

Sprocklem wrote: post #397
Gordonjcp wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The joke is that the would-be worker assumes the forklift question relates to the previous question, and thus that the teapot is so large that it requires a forklift.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#405

Post by noptd »

deltree7 wrote: post #285
indymike wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not sure why this is downvoted. Considering the parent led with

>I've hired hundreds of developers over three decades, and this is completely wrong

in order to argue from a position of authoritative experience, these questions are entirely fair game.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#406

Post by avisser »

nimajneb wrote: post #324

That's cool. I may have worked in former IBM buildings in Endicott that he might have worked in. I worked there a few summers in the early/mid 2000's when it was Endicott Interconnect Technologies. I loved exploring those old buildings, lots of tunnels, abandoned sections, old equipment. I wish I took photos.

I was born and raised in Endicott. My only cool visit was going into the quiet room in the IBM Glendale facility. It was covered with that angled studio foam. It was disconcertingly quiet. That sense of "oh this is a big room - I can tell by the echo" starts reporting strange readings.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#407

Post by nonethewiser »

zackmorris wrote: post #142

If 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…

> 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.

That's hard to do when there are so many strings attached to employing someone. It's a double edged sword which makes the decision to hire someone a lot bigger." Yeah, I have stuff I need help with right now" is not enough.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#408

Post by a4isms »

My mother was a systems analyst in the 1960s. She got a contract as part of a team installing a brand-new IBM/360 at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, her job was to write administration software.

She told me it was a top-of-the-line model with 64K of RAM. At some point, it had a malfunction and they had to replace one of its memory "boards," which were lattices with ferromagnetic cores suspended on filaments. She brought the defective board home for me to play with.

Although I went on to write software on punch cards, and built a PC in the 1980s, I think the moment that I held core memory in my hands was the closest I've really gotten to "the metal" in my life.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#409

Post by emmelaich »

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."

What is forgotten sometimes is that there was (for men) a severe prejudice about working with a keyboard. The image pre-1985 or so was that keyboards were almost exclusively associated with typing pools. Those typing pools were were as far as I know 100% female.

To be honest, this prejudice still exists. I heard a C-suite exec mocking "those guys with the ticky-tacky machines".

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#410

Post by eastbound »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #401
eastbound wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much my interview process. I ask them to program a contains(string, substring), then come back 30 minutes later to code scattered all over the place, sometimes with “// 54 upvotes http://stackoverflow.com/…” , code not compiling, and I’m still wondering whether I should accept them. I wonder what’s so hard with my interview. 5 years ago, even interns could do it, one of them could even tell the difference betw…

Maybe the problem is that nobody needs to solve that problem in their jobs anymore? For the last few months I've had the joy and privilege to really get to know the TCP and TLS stack intimately, and find myself looking for the patterns that are going to be most useful for handling data bit by bit. But prior to that, I really needed to care much more about the semantics (and the engineering culture around them) and th…

Our real algo: We save a bunch of objects, but some of then exist in the DB, so you need to intersect what’s in the DB with what’s in memory before saving, except you can never hold all of the db at once.

It should be our real-life test, but it’s too long. It’s our most complicated algo, and honestly it’s very simple in the end. But given all the variables scattered around in a string.contains() (I don’t even look whether the result is correct, I look whether it’s structured for intelligibility and how they debug the off-by-1 errors), I can’t suppose a more complex algo will be done cleanly.

Maybe I’m mot giving them their chance - It might have taken time for me to output clean algorithms.

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