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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

#441

Post by [deleted] »

brianobush wrote: post #151
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…

If software was so regular like construction, we could automate most of it.

[deleted]

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#442

Post by [deleted] »

thaeli wrote: post #172
mylons wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

then why isn't construction automated? i think if your company's processes are so specialized and nuance, you should really take a step back and ask if they should be.

Construction in the US is highly mechanized, the vast majority of laborers have been replaced by machinery.

[deleted]

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#443

Post by vkou »

znpy wrote: post #378
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…

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.

And why wouldn't they base it on that CPU? If you're trying to learn the basics of shipbuilding, you don't start by going on a deep dive into the construction of an aircraft carrier.

It's a simple chip, with a simple instruction set, that can actually be taught to you in the time allotted over a three-credit class.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#444

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

sgerenser wrote: post #357
mitchdoogle wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 someon…

I went to RIT in the early 2000s. I remember the CS and CE departments were quite good (although the prevalent Sun workstations were already getting outdated). Somehow I ended up taking 1 elective from the "Management Information Systems" department and the instructor kept mixing up search engines and web browsers. I think I dropped the class shortly thereafter.

I dumpster dove at RIT to pull out a discarded VAX (in think an 11/70) and serial terminals. Probably about 1989 or 1990.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#445

Post by peter303 »

nervousvarun wrote: post #223
marcodiego wrote: post #218

Earlier 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…

In one of my early scientist-programmer jobs I was assigned an assistant to keypunch, submit jobs and pick up printouts. The other scientists thought I was odd for wanting to do all this myself. I had much more productivity than them.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#446

Post by Aeolun »

VancouverMan wrote: post #244
itsoktocry wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just business for crying out loud. Umm...there's some administrative and legal overhead related to hiring, firing or otherwise replacing an employee you seem to be overlooking.

Pretty much all of that is completely artificial, and only exists because it's imposed by government. Things would function just fine, if not a lot better, without such unnecessary burdens being forced on employers and employees.

> Things would function just fine, if not a lot better, without such unnecessary burdens being forced on employers and employees.

Oh yes, ‘at-will’ states are absolute front-runners in employee happiness.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#447

Post by robterrell »

tomcam wrote: post #439
sircastor wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would love to read these if you've collected them somewhere.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#448

Post by Aeolun »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #211
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…

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…

I can totally see why this one would be someone’s favorite.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#449

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

tomcam wrote: post #439
sircastor wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where can we read it?

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#450

Post by peter303 »

cowanon22dhhf wrote: post #273
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…

> 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 studied in railyard switching, in existing abstract math textbook…

In the early days computer programming was considered a clerical job one learned in trade schools. I think people looked down on it partly because many of the early programmers were female, beneath the dignity of a male profession.

It rook my alma mater MIT until 2018 to recognize software worthy of a department in itself (after a huge financial donation). Before then it was a step child of Electrical Engineering. This is kind of ironic because me and most of my classmates ended up writing software for money, though almost none of us majored in that field.

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