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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

#541

Post by btilly »

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…

Computers are older than you think.

Computers based on integrated circuits were more recent. But the foundations were much older.

For example take the punchcard. Punchcards as a way to work with automatic computing devices go back to Hollerith machines and the 1890 census. That was how IBM got started. The phrase "Super Computing machine" dates back to 1931, and referred to a tabulating machine built for Columbia University. Raytheon was producing and selling analog computers starting in the late 1920s. Much of the calculations for the Manhattan project were done by machines - Feynman talks about this in Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman.

And to give a sense of how much history there is, one of my favorite essays in the 1945 essay, As We May Think, which you can find at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m.... It provided the inspiration for both hypertext and the science citation index. The recombining of those ideas in the PageRank patent was the foundation of Google. But how could someone in 1945 understand computing that well? It is simple! Its author was the man who designed those computers Raytheon sold in the 1920s, and among other things was in charge of the development of mechanical computers for the Manhattan Project. (OK, he did a lot more than that...)

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#542

Post by kristopolous »

deltree7 wrote: post #285
indymike wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've hired hundreds of developers over three decades, and this is completely wrong: > It can be months (at a high salary) before you really know whether a hire is likely to work out. It's only that way if you make it take that long. You should know if you have a good programmer 2-3 weeks after the hire. Here a couple things that make making great hires hard: * Making it difficult to learn and understand your system.…

Have you built a successful growing software firm? Does your software systems scale to Millions? What about counterfactuals? Without that data, your 3-decade hiring process means nothing. I'm sure someone working in IBM, TCS, AT&T, Booz can all claim that they have been hiring people for 3-decades and give an opinion

I've done that.

I have a human conversation, make sure the expectations are clear and ask them if they think they can do it. Then I look at some of their work to verify and that's literally all.

No whiteboard, no takehome, no brainteaser, nothing like that.

Go google "how gates hires" or "how jobs hired" ... it's more or less the same. None of this I watch you implement a sliding window in a shared coding environment bullshit.

Let me put it this way. Say your candidates were all award winning scholars with phds and prestigious organizations to their name, then how would you go about it?

With respect but also, you'd still check to make sure it's the right fit, obviously.

Now here's the crazy go-nuts bananas idea - treat everyone with that level of respect. Totally wacky, I know. But hear me out - you can apparently build better teams with trust allocated to trustworthy people as your building block. That starts the day you interview and extends forever, well beyond your time working together.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#543

Post by nb1987 »

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 was in high school in the early 00s and heard the exact same thing, and that was a major reason why I chose not to major in CS! (The other is that my HS programming curriculum and teacher were inadequate, but at the time I was convinced that I just wasn't wired for programming.) In the end I took the long way around and ended up in the field as a self-taught programmer.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#545

Post by pastage »

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."

One have to understand the social factors as well. It was womens job in the beginning, the stigma of being seen as a female computers was most probably what made it unattractive and tediuos to many men at the time. Many highly placed engineering bosses in programming were women for a long time because those where the people who had experience. See Margret Hamilton of Apollo, and also some of the pioneers in cellphone "software".

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#546

Post by spaetzleesser »

switchbak wrote: post #529
spaetzleesser wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The current implementation of Agile in most cases is pretty much the opposite of agile as described in the agile manifesto.

In my team we have reduced the process to having a simple backlog which we work through. But I have seen other teams where you spend enormous amounts of time on planning but it’s frowned upon if you think any further than the next sprint. Just check off tasks without any thoughts about long term architecture or strategy. Basically just a sweatshop with replaceable “resources” (the company doesn’t hire “people” anymore but “resources”)

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#547

Post by smcameron »

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…

I remember going off to college in 1986, and thinking I might major in computer science, and my dad told me, "anyone can learn to program computers, you might be better off with EE." To be fair, at the time, anyone could learn to program computers (and it's probably still true) -- my dad was doing it, and his major was chemistry -- and really, anyone that's really good at programming computers is necessarily self-taught to a great extent. You just don't become a great programmer by dint of tutoring. Anyway, I stayed in EE for a year, then switched my major to computer science with a minor in EE, and no regrets.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#548

Post by vgel »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #165
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…

> Hire someone right away and let them quit if they want to and hire someone else. It's just business for crying out loud. This is missing the point of interviewing. The goal isn't to find any warm body to fill the chair, the goal is to find someone qualified to do the work who also has a history of doing good work at previous employers. You also don't have unlimited headcount and hiring budget, so it's worth making…

The first thing you mention is a common problem in marketplaces: used cars, online dating, etc. Term is "market for lemons"

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#549

Post by hilbert42 »

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."

"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?"..."

I'd suggest there is likely another reason, and if your father didn't actively think about it he probably understood it subliminally. Back then, programming was part of mathematics at many universities and, like it or not, everyone doing science and engineering had to study the subject—and for many universities that was Fortran. Fortran was essential part of the background culture: if one was doing mathematics or any of the physical sciences, Fortran was just there—thus, one didn't see it as special or exceptional.

I had no option but to study it but I didn't see that as an imposition—diehards like me were regularly chucked out of the punch card room by the university security guards last thing at night when the joint closed.

Moreover, at my university the Fortran lecturer also wrote the Fortran textbook (well, the ones we used at least), so there was no leniency or excuse: Introduction to FORTRAN IV programming using the watfor compiler - 1968 & 1971 and Basic FORTRAN IV programming (version IBM 360), 1969—by John M Blatt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Blatt.

As I found out later there were better textbooks on the subject and Blatt was a didactic forceful character without much charisma, so his lectures were somewhat painful. However, comic relief was not that infrequent. We had Fortran lectures in a large hall which had an upper circle like a picture theater, a certain fraternity would frequent the circle and aim paper airplanes at him when he was facing the blackboard much to his chagrin. No, I wasn't one of the guilty but I fully enjoyed the spectacle.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#550

Post by adwn »

peter303 wrote: post #450
cowanon22dhhf wrote: post #273

Earlier 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…

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. Th…

> In the early days computer programming was considered a clerical job one learned in trade schools.

That's because in those days, the term "programming" didn't mean "software development", it referred to data entry. It actually was clerical work, comparable to typing a dictation on a typewriter. Only later, when user interface devices (keyboards, displays) considerably improved and it became more efficient to unify those tasks in one person, did "programming" and "software development" start to become synonymous.

It has nothing to do with "dignity of a male profession", or oppression of women, just a misunderstanding of a shift in the meaning of words.

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