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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

#471

Post by hunter2_ »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #429
ianlevesque wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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,…

I share this position fully, but we need to consider the benefit of a standardized test despite its flaws. Other paths to success need to exist (e.g., university admissions take people on other merits besides SAT and similar) but it can be more difficult to assess the validity of any claims regarding level of experience without a well-known certificate.

When a job doesn't focus on what LC asserts, and I think we'd agree about how huge that segment is, then naturally it should be a small or non-existent consideration.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#472

Post by Maursault »

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…

> I almost didn't major in Computer Science because in the late 90s

You missed, by a few years at least, the opportunity to study and earn a degree that is no longer available from CMU, the B.S. in Cognitive Linguistics. I got an early acceptance from CMU in late 1988, my first choice of education because I wanted that degree in particular, but I could not afford CMU tuition let alone housing, and I was ineligible for financial aid. I studied CS at Virginia Tech at about a tenth the cost and never regretted it. Though I never met him, Allen Briggs[1] was an underclassman there while I was an upperclassman. He ported NetBSD to 68k Macs while still an undergraduate at Virginia Tech, which always impressed me. A/UX licenses were not cheap, and MacBSD was free.

[1] https://www.netbsd.org/ports/mac68k/history.html

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#473

Post by poorbutdebtfree »

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…

"Workers' rights" makes hiring and particularly firing very expensive. The same thing with "tenants' rights." I would rent to anyone with bad credit and a sob story if I could simply evict them within days for non-payment. But because of these rights now everybody has to have an 800 credit score and six figure W2.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#474

Post by theGnuMe »

yourapostasy wrote: post #419
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…

> ...and loved to say our jobs were going to India. They weren't wrong, though; they just omitted delimiting that assertion. Back in those dark ages, mainframe jobs were still considered by career "experts" the "adult in the room" jobs of programming. It is hard to convey to people who never studied that era or grew up in that era just how much microprocessor-based computers were considered "not real computing" in va…

I think that the tv series "Halt and Catch Fire" illustrates the rapid recombination of tech and "new ideas" quite well.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#475

Post by a4isms »

unnouinceput wrote: post #463
a4isms wrote: post #408

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…

>...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 Why is that? You don't build your own computers anymore? Or write a small for fun application on ESP32 that you slap on a board made by yourself? That's the fun, to have a helicopter toy flying your own board + software.

No, even when I put together a PC, I was putting chips and boards together.

But as a boy holding that memory board, I was looking at the cores that held individual bits of memory. Instead of connecting things with ribbon cables or whatever, I was looking at tiny wire that would transmit individual bits of information.

Completely different level of abstraction.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#476

Post by hunter2_ »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #284
VancouverMan wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So true, but the government is a fact. Walk-in hiring got unintentionally killed off when we intentionally killed GTFO firing.

I guess as long as abending of interviews is still legit, it's as viable to take walk-ins as to take electronic applications. Just be sure to act on any GTFO needs before the start date. The interview process is longer to accommodate those legal protections, but those don't start until hiring (or something that isn't the first conversations), right?

Long story short: I think we can lengthen the interview period to accommodate those legal time sinks without killing off the (now a bit of a novelty) meatspace first impression. Unless you're talking about blind selection, where the candidate's likeness (name, etc.) is redacted for DEI. In that case, I can see how witnessing the candidate's skin, gender, etc. could be problematic. TFA even explicitly included the types of things we try to leave unspoken these days: excellent health, 5'4"?!

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#477

Post by jboy55 »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #416
still_grokking wrote: post #338

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…

My guess is that the earliest Code Versioning systems were completely manual, "Duplicate your tape, mark it 1.2, store it in drawer". And these manual processes were brought to and duplicated on computers when code began to be stored on the computers themselves, instead of through cards and paper tape.

Certainly if you were a business, you had an extreme business interest in keeping your "known good" stack of cards in a place, and every revision in code required a new stack of cards.

"Hey, the machine just ate 10 cards from the payroll software, can we get duplicates made?"

"No, those were the originals, guess we're SOL no one gets paid" never happened.

Most likely "Ok, version 1.34 of the payroll software that was updated last week? Cards 1032 to 1042? Duplicate cards will be up to you within the hour"

or "We have to revert to the old payroll processing software, can you create a new fresh copy of 1.33, 1.34 has some bugs and we need to get tonights run in?"

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#478

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

hunter2_ wrote: post #471
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I share this position fully, but we need to consider the benefit of a standardized test despite its flaws. Other paths to success need to exist (e.g., university admissions take people on other merits besides SAT and similar) but it can be more difficult to assess the validity of any claims regarding level of experience without a well-known certificate. When a job doesn't focus on what LC asserts, and I think we'd ag…

I have no problem with licensing, depending on the job.

Some stuff should definitely have a steady hand on the tiller, other jobs, not so much.

But the thought of licensing software engineers is daunting. The industry is so incredibly varied.

For example, almost none of the programming I do, involves higher math. I've pretty much forgotten all my calculus, while other jobs are almost nothing but math.

I could be writing crucial, lifesaving device control stuff, and the math person could be working on a game physics engine.

I am in awe of game programmers, but they also work on "nice to have" stuff. I know someone that writes software for medical devices. He is not a "math person," but he's also very dependable, and can be relied upon to Get The Job Done. He has many years of working on things like USB drivers, firmware, Bluetooth, and networking layers.

So, if the “licensing test” insisted on a good command of advanced math (because “everyone should know it” –the same argument given for LC), neither he, nor I, would make it, so the company would be deprived of some very good, dependable, disciplined, and talented engineers, fully capable of writing highly effective asynchronous device control code, and would, instead, prefer an inexperienced math programmer that would try to rewrite the project in haskell.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#479

Post by majormajor »

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…

Yeah, that's why I don't take re-kindling of the "it'll get offshored any day now" panic post-Covid that seriously. Time zones haven't gone away. The communication-based hard parts of software development haven't gone away. The way that delivering what someone asks for usually leads to them asking for more things, not fewer, hasn't gone away.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#480

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #346
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 find it astonishing that only a couple years later the basic Unix development environment (ttys and full-screen terminals instead of cards, cc, sh, make, ...) came into existence, and has basically prevailed.

UNIX packaged a lot of ideas that had been invented elsewhere. (Often badly.)

CTSS -> Multics -> UNIX. All had interactive development and scripting to varying degrees.

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