96 years old and still cooler than the current kids. Who else can say they used a computer with two ROUND screens?
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My dad's resume and skills from 1980
491–500 of 611 posts
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#492Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#493so cool!
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#494Earlier 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…
There was also bad programmer job market crash in the 80s that changed the market up a lot by the 90s. In fact, this was about when the gender ratio became very skewed (men and women dropped out of programming at equal rates, but the recovery was lopsided).
Our computer science department chair (Ed Lazowska) at the time brought this up as a reason to be wary about department expansion in the mid 90s.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
> people will finally accept that Python and JavaScript are no longer young languages > JavaScript is 26 years old, Python is 31 I can't speak for Python, but Javascript has changed¹ massively in recent years, more so (I expect) than Fortran or COBOL every did in their active history. It could be argued that what we have now is a younger language with the same name. > but I'd bet my bottom dollar that they'll at leas…
Yes...Fortran at least has changed a lot since inception. There's been Fortran 90, 95, 2003, 2008 & 2018 standards since to keep up with the various industry fads of the time (You want OO Fortran? Sure thing.). You can get a good overview of Fortran features from inception through the 2008 standard in the paper "The Seven Ages of Fortran" by Michael Metcalf or on the Fortran wiki ( https://fortranwiki.org/fortran/sho…
Does a lot of that extra pool of features get used in production (relative to more "legacy" code) as seen with many reengineering JS projects regularly, it is the Fortran user base more conservative? I might expect the latter, but this is just a gut guess.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Yes, this is one reason I am personally really sensitive when various people say how privileged I was to get into computers and that we somehow got all this encouragement unlike young women, etc. In the 80s we were mocked and called nerds for being interested in computers, and before and after dot com people thought this was dead end career.
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Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
Performance. So many people say it doesn't matter. Until it does. Python works around it by having so many libraries built in C or C++.
> Python works around it by having so many libraries built in C or C++. Which works quite fine, until it doesn't. By than the needed rewrite in some language that delivers decent performance and safety all over the place in one package will be very expensive. I'm not saying that you should avoid Python (and its native code kludge) altogether but when using it just pray that you never reach that point mentioned above.…
Prototyping in Python, then rewriting the performance critical parts in a speedier more difficult language is one of the most efficient paths a project could take.
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
all of the above the main point is how it is in direct contrast to how other sectors will interview for weeks and months , before any resolution at all, then require negotiating an offer, just to get to a two-week notice at a minimum and then require another 2 weeks to a month to get paid, with deposits taking several more business days (up to 5 actual days) to be available paid instantly when you realized you might…
I wouldn't call entertainment work (even the craziest corners of that world) nearly as off-brand as suggesting that women dominate it. I have no idea how far from 49/49 the makeup might be, but I do know that I'm a guy who's done plenty of entertainment industry gigs (music production, fwiw) where the pay is quite reliably received before going home, and that's the important distinction here.
yeah, we agree
I was referring to women dominated crazy corners and I don't have lived experience with man's equivalent job pursuit to say so I didn't speak about them
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#499When 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."
my father who was a research physicist from the 70s+ lamented at his colleagues who got too distracted with programming their computers! For me it was great, I got to grow up with computers and electronics and a bunch of adults who loved these things!
Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980
#500Can we bring back this form of resume, please? Information is clearly organized, easy to read, easy to remember. No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colored backgrounds, unreadable fonts, and whatnot...
My experience from around 2017: Today's employers just don't like good simple resumes for some reason. They expect you to be a graphic designer to even look at it. I had a clearly formatted, simple resume and had a 0% success rate (besides one offer for 30k which was an insult) after hundreds of applications coming out of college to places far and wide or local, until a recruiter for a consultancy company cold contac…
It's not 1980 any longer, and even the resume from that era has a nice table layout for ease of reference. Yours on the other hand looks like a first draft with arguably seome good stuff in it.
I don't care for a fancy resume, but it should at least look like you spent more than 15 minutes on it, and with the reader in mind.