Live data from Hacker News

My dad's resume and skills from 1980

github.com

421–430 of 611 posts

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#421

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…

> 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…

The GP was using the proxy of "shows up at 7:30AM, ready to work" as signal for motivation and a lesser extent, competence. Not a morning person, but would prefer this to leetcode hazing.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

`upsert`, not sure how having someone implement `contains` is going to help solve your IRL problem optimally, but I guess the interview process is more about testing cognitive strength vs. practical experience.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Almost nothing I've done as a programmer since 1985 seems automated today. What do you mean by "fully automated" ?

ORMs didn't go mainstream until Hibernate in 2001 or so? Before that, everyone was writing custom SQL and DB access by hand.

I implemented "an ORM" at amazon in 1994. None of the code outside of the library used SQL, everything pushed and pulled C++ objects.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#424
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because it's self-evident that designing a quick-ramp up process and modular system/good docs makes this a lot easier. It's 2022, you should be able to review checkins on gitlab the first week with a couple of basic tickets.

If folks are too green for that then they can be put thru an internship first. If an obscure language, have them do checkins on a tutorial.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#425
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which country/region are these resumes from? I would be very surprised to see something like that on a U.S. or UK resume/CV. I know that it’s quite common for photos and personal details to be on CVs in parts of continental Europe though.

My bet is on India or thereabouts.

You are correct.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#427
post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In 2015 or 2016 o was taking the computer architectures class at my local university… the processor they based the whole course upon was the motorola 68000.

As far as introductory courses go, the older/simpler the processor,the better it is for everyone. My class groused at being taught "old tech" because we taught the 68k, but very few of us had done any assembly before, I think most of the class would have failed if started of on amd64

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll second that. I never hired anyone who couldn't do the work. The only times things went badly were times when the person basically didn't want to do the work, due to some personal hangup. No amount of interviewing is going to weed out that guy who can code perfectly fine but deep down is yearning to be a psychologist instead. Like any other job that pays bills, you are vulnerable to paying his bills until they fi…

>I suppose what it really does is finds you people who are willing to put in the time to study all the hundreds of questions. Yes, this is it.

As opposed to putting in the time to learn how to write and release ship software.

I won't study LC, because I'm waaaaaayyyy too busy, learning Swift, UIKit, AppKit, WatchKit, SwiftUI, DocC, MapKit, SiriKit, device SDKs, networking, USB, etc.

I literally work every single day (like seven days a week), and learn something new every single day, yet I am barely keeping up. I would be nuts to sacrifice any of this time, studying schoolboy questions that have little to no relevance in the software that I write.

These technologies result in actual applications that you can sell and market.

Just another way to look at it.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 e…

>VCS dates back quite some time… Let's see. From the story: >I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp... [The firm] had just started to manufacture the RPC-4000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGP-30#RPC_4000 > the General Precision RPC 4000, announced in 1960 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control#History >IBM's OS/360 IEBUPDTE software update tool dates back to 1962, arguably a precurs…

As you like to discuss this detail:

I can't find any definitive info when this computer got actually manufactured ("announced in 1960" doesn't mean strictly the same). But this was the time Mel was met first time by the author.

The story plays likely some time thereafter.

I guess some significant time, because it takes time even for a genius to become familiar enough with a machine to do all this kind of trickery described in the story.

I think it may make sense to assume even some years passed between when the author met Mel the first time and Mel's departure form said company.

So I wouldn't be even so much off with the VCS statement—which actually doesn't state any relation between the usage of VCS and the story. I've only said that "VCS dates back quite some time". Which is obviously true. ;-)

But, all this actually doesn't matter.

The more important statement was the following. Which is a direct reply to "code didn't need to be maintained", which is in my opinion just not true.

I did not say VCS was used back than for that purpose.

I guess they preferred more a sort of solid hard copy. :-)

Post reply on HN