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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

#511

Post by ClumsyPilot »

end_of_line wrote: post #312
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A. Bank caused the financial crisis of 2008 B. Are you saying top banks are bad at banking?

That's the convenient myth to think banks caused crisis. Money printing and credit rates lowering by government caused this. Free money? Sure, why not. Please watch princes of yen documentary where they speak about "credit window guidance" conducted by Japanese national bank for more than decades

oh so typical

literal fraud by banks and security rating agencies was directly responsible for the crisis. They defrauded their customers and each other.

Thats why they were called subprime loans.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#512

Post by telcal »

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 majored in Computer Science in the late 90s and honestly don't remember any of what you're saying regarding negative/hostile media.

To me it felt like a golden age. The .com bust hadn't happened yet. If you could turn a computer on there were jobs everywhere. The world was starting to get online. Linux was really gaining traction and Slashdot was all time.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#513

Post by omginternets »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #494
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…

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.

What caused the crash?

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#514

Post by vjust »

I worked at a startup, in India's silicon valley, before the word startup ever existed. 1 PC, with 640Kb of Ram, 20Mb hard-disk, the owner took a loan to buy that thing. We were 4 programmers sharing that 1 PC. We each had 2 hour timeslots to code in C or whatever other language. Away from the keyboard, I'd write code on paper, so that I could make the most of my slot. Sometimes I would have to print my code, and my boss (the owner) would go over it with a red-ink pen. I was an apprentice. The boss (owner) would warn me, "beware of the day computers will be writing programs, it will be soon here (and maybe put me out of a job)"

Bangalore was where it was all happening then (as far as India was concerned). It was a heady place and time. As a rookie customer support engineer I also got to see Data General's computers at various customer installations, spooled tape, and drum hard-drives, etc. This was early 90s in India. India's IT Export industry was in its infancy.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#515

Post by kjellsbells »

mgkimsal wrote: post #313
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…

I was having to deal with token ring in '96-'97, and have not touched it since. Seems like it went away quite quickly. Cue up someone replying that they're still maintaining a token ring system in 2022... :)

I had to deal with token ring way up until 2001 when even the most die hard nuts had to admit that you could buy a dozen ethernet cards for the cost of a single TR. IIRC the TR people tried to convince us that ATM was the future.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#516

Post by rablackburn »

poorbutdebtfree wrote: post #473
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.

While I’m not doubting you would personally do as you say, I would point out that as someone living somewhere with quite lax tenants rights and a nationally recognised housing emergency (Australia), landlords not renting to people because tenants rights are too onerous doesn’t seem to have a particularly large impact on housing availability.

Whereas some tenants rights seems to have a pretty large positive impact - ie all the positive effects of secure housing.

Of course ymmv in your local housing market.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#517

Post by Spooky23 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #350
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not consider that "full automated", but YMMV.

Same. It's fair to say our tooling today is far superior, but "fully automated" implies virtually zero input from humans beyond the initial configuration.

Being a bunch of engineers on HN, I get it, but that’s needlessly pedantic. My first real job was a systems and tools programmer working on scaled database systems.

Literally every aspect of that job is fully automated.

Where I work today 20+ years later, we have 1/3 of the people doing like 100x the amount of work by several measures. Little teams of developers can just crank out work.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#518

Post by tomcam »

robterrell wrote: post #447
tomcam wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Never really wrote about it!

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#519

Post by seanmcdirmid »

omginternets wrote: post #513
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What caused the crash?

I’m not really clear. A general recession at the end of the 70s along with an end in a booming rise of programmer jobs. If you look at https://www.geekwire.com/2014/analysis-examining-computer-sc...

You’ll see a huge drop off in computer science graduates after a local peak in 1985 (they wouldn’t get back to that level until 2000, note this article also quotes data from Ed Lazowska).

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#520

Post by tomcam »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #449
tomcam wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I didn’t take notes or anything and many of my questions were very specific. For example, how did Turbo Pascal do error handling (easily, because it was a handwritten recursive descent compiler), or did Tim Paterson, who sold DOS to Bill Gates for $50,000, ever regret it (no).
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