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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

#521

Post by paintballboi07 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #222
Spooky23 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do. 80% of the tasks that I did as an engineer in 1999 are fully automated today.

Interesting. Almost nothing I've done as a programmer since 1985 seems automated today. What do you mean by "fully automated" ?

I worked at a place a long time ago upgrading legacy software from the 80s. I helped them update their build process from file shares, copy/pasting and manual building to Git, Jenkins and automated builds/tests/packaging. I know it's not automated code, but it certainly saved us a lot of time with about 50 assemblies. I'm sure some companies were ahead of the curve when it comes to stuff like that, but this was a really small company. Modern CI/CD software is great and saved us lots of time.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#522

Post by akamaozu »

rmnclmnt wrote: post #6

Can 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...

I just updated my resume for a new round of job hunting, and I think its similar to what you're describing

http://designbymobius.ca/resume

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#523

Post by smcameron »

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…

> Even what came after that, e.g. in C / C++ was considerably tedious compared to what we do today. Folks sometimes had to do objdumps of compiled binaries to debug what was going on.

They used to do objdumps. They still do, but they used to too.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#524

Post by high_5 »

still_grokking wrote: post #356
greyhair wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python3 yes, but Python2 will have faded away. Perl! Oh, poor Perl. Python 3, or its children, will be around a long time. As will some version of /bin/sh

> As will some version of /bin/sh I hope not! That's one of the things I pray every day to go away. (Even I don't believe in any gods, and am a Linux-only user for the last 20 years). The Unix shell language is one of the most horrific legacy technologies that are still around. I really wish it dies soon™ and gets replaced finally by something sane!

It won't because it's too close to human interaction.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#525

Post by jimt1234 »

marcodiego wrote: post #218
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…

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 grandpa told me the same thing; he didn't think computers were gonna last.

Not sure of exact time, but I think it was late-60s-to-early-70s; Gramps was a business professor at a major university in the Midwest. A team of math nerds started working on this new thing called a "computer". He said it was almost the size of a basketball gymnasium, it took weeks to get the thing set up, and was always breaking. In the end, it could only do simple calculations. He said the university viewed the project as pretty much a failure. So, Gramps, the futurist, told all his business students not to get involved with computers, there was no future in them. Good job, Gramps.

He later told me his big hope was that none of his students listened to a word he said. LOL

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#526

Post by User23 »

Maursault wrote: post #472
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 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 fo…

The backdoor into CMU back then was and maybe still is Pitt. Pitt students had the privilege of signing up for any CMU course and it just meant a slightly longer walk to class.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#527

Post by wilsynet »

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 CS in the late 90s and this wasn’t my experience at all. The Netscape IPO happened in 1995, followed by 5 years of the dot.com gold rush. Computers flew off the shelves, and everyone wanted to get online.

The dotcom crash happens later in 2001, but if we are talking about the late 90s, then I’d say it was a period of huge energy in the CS field and tech companies were hiring as fast as they could and jobs were plentiful all around.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#528

Post by bestcoder69 »

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.

You would gladly take in someone with a history of non-payment, on the sole condition that you can evict them for non-payment?

In that case, one benefit of public housing is that it slims the pool of “sob story”-havers that you can evict for sport!

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#529

Post by switchbak »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #304
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 enjoyed programming in the 90s and early 2000s but I feel it’s turning again into tedious grunt work with scrum, agile, yaml configuration files and needlessly complex systems.

If you really find the agile processes you're using are adding tedium, why don't you do the agile thing and tailor them to your specific context?

But I imagine we're probably using the same word to describe very different things.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#530

Post by njacobs5074 »

hnlmorg wrote: post #280
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…

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 remember taking a graduate level networking course at NYU in the early 1990s. The instructor was an IBM consultant. We studied token ring, FDDI, SNA, HDLC/SDLC and several other commercial products.

One evening, I raised my hand and asked when we were going to study TCP/IP.

He simply quipped, "TCP/IP is not a real networking protocol."

So I wouldn't say that universities are always behind the curve :)

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