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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

#431

Post by hnlmorg »

walnutclosefarm wrote: post #392
hnlmorg wrote: post #280

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…

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 ve…

I was talking about 90s to modern era. Not just modern era.

And having computers doesn’t mean any of the lecturers understand the modern (for that era) trends in computing. More often than not, it’s computer clubs rather than cause material that hold the really interesting content.

I don’t doubt there will be exceptions to this rule. But for most people I’ve spoken to or read interviews from, this seems to have been the trend.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#432

Post by tomcam »

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…

Also many of those guys were EEs who had no degrees. They always seemed cheerful and happy with their jobs. It was one of the things that inspired me to teach myself programming.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#434

Post by cultureulterior »

nomdep wrote: post #382
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…

> ...in the late 90s, there were so many negative articles in the New York Times, vis-a-vis software In retrospective, the New York Times is always wrong about everything. Maybe it should be adopted as a useful heuristic

I have a reference somewhere to a NYT article explaining that stealth technology is impossible

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#435

Post by tomcam »

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #253
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 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…

Very interesting. I am from that era, teaching myself to program starting in 1983 (which I thought was quite possibly too late to catch the microcomputer gold rush ;). I was self-taught and learned from popular computer magazines and well-written, carefully selected books. But now that you mention it I remember looking at course catalogs from good schools and being shocked at how retrograde it all was. Those guys at the universities totally did not get microcomputers for years after they should have.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#436

Post by muffinman26 »

still_grokking wrote: post #303
chrisseaton wrote: post #139

Earlier 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…

Amusingly enough, my German-as-a-foreign-language teacher had a degree in Art History and made great use of it. Of course, the relevant part for her resume was that she had a Art History degree from a German university conducted in German as a US-native. It demonstrated a much higher degree of language proficiency than the average foreign-language teacher at a high school in the US and gave her classes a unique twist.

The US (although not the UK) college system values taking multiple paths early on, especially for MDs and JDs, so an Art History major isn't completely absurd. At the university I went to, pre-med was a list of classes, but you couldn't select it as a major. Most students would major in something related, like biology, to maximize the overlap in classes, but a Classics major (with a heavy focus on learning Greek and Latin to help with medical terms) was considered a rare but very viable option.

That said, I think the greatest strength of the German education system is its trade schools. The US trade school system is much more ad hoc. Most jobs/problems don't need the heavy theory of a graduate degree, and honestly I think both the US and Germany could use fewer PhDs and more people with practical skills.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#437

Post by chrisseaton »

muffinman26 wrote: post #436
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…

Amusingly enough, my German-as-a-foreign-language teacher had a degree in Art History and made great use of it. Of course, the relevant part for her resume was that she had a Art History degree from a German university conducted in German as a US-native. It demonstrated a much higher degree of language proficiency than the average foreign-language teacher at a high school in the US and gave her classes a unique twist…

I did a CS degree in the UK and took Latin in my first year!

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#438

Post by tomcam »

apurtbapurt wrote: post #388
aj7 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned Fortran 4 in high school in 1967-1968. That’s how good the NYC exam schools were — Stuyvesant in this case. We had our own 1130. This came in handy in college, I did the programming in a physics group, immediately. But it seemed too tedious to do as a career. I still feel that way.

So what you gonna do when you grow up? :-)

Switch to COBOL and REXX

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#439

Post by tomcam »

sircastor wrote: post #93
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…

A few years ago in school I had to read a paper that was written by a guy who happens to also be a part of my local electronics hobby group. I mentioned this to a friend and he noted that, unlike a lot of fields, Computer Science is still young enough that many of the pioneers are still around.

I worked at Microsoft in the late 90s and methodically went around to all of them, from the creator of MS-DOS to the creator of Turbo Pascal/C#/Typescript, and asked them all the questions that I couldn't find in the computer history books.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#440

Post by tomcam »

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…

This question makes me wish I hadn't retired. It would be a totally cool experiment if I still had my own company.
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