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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

#551

Post by brailsafe »

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…

It's still tedious grunt work

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#552

Post by _glass »

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…

When I started uni in 2004 it was still like this. I kind of was ashamed at parties to tell what I study, not to come off as too nerdy. I did a double major, so business was hipper. Just imagine! The status of developers changed so much in two decades. Nowadays people are impressed. And even in my career I see the difference. Not so many VPNs anymore, the move to the cloud made everything much easier.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#553

Post by StudyAnimal »

chrisseaton wrote: post #28
daveslash wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been reviewing a lot of resume's lately that call out the candidate's exact date of birth and marital status. Many even call out their parents' occupation. I've seen more than one that say "Mother's Occupation: Homemaker" . Although I now realize this is a cultural difference issue, it caught me off guard at first.

> Many even call out their parents' occupation. Are those German resumes? Very odd. Can't be used for anything except discrimination.

A German would point out, the very purpose of a job application is discrimination.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#554

Post by StudyAnimal »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #183
nsxwolf wrote: post #30

It is so simple. There's no "Experienced software architect with a proven track record of delivering high quality and performant blah blah blah" shit. What were the interviews like back then?

It's my understanding that the interviews consisted solely of a firm handshake

And a drink.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#555

Post by chrisseaton »

StudyAnimal wrote: post #553
chrisseaton wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many even call out their parents' occupation. Are those German resumes? Very odd. Can't be used for anything except discrimination.

A German would point out, the very purpose of a job application is discrimination.

Discrimination based on relevant skills surely - not irrelevant things like family situation? In other countries things like that are actually illegal.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#556

Post by Cogito »

jimmaswell wrote: post #364
dist1ll wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many problems with your resume, and lack of fancy design is not one of them. - Half of your CV is empty space - Dates are formatted really badly, no one would be able to get a good grasp on your project and work timeline quickly - You have a game project that spans several years, and you sum it up into one sentence. Why are you doing that? It's one of your main selling points, and you don't expand enough on…

If I got this resume from a junior I would hire them assuming the interview went decently. Half is empty - just graduated, can't expect that much stuff to put there. Maybe I should have expanded more on the game but I was getting the impression nobody cared that much about personal projects. The very first two things you do with a resume are match up the list of technical skills with the list of tech in your position…

The advice I give for resumes is that they fill two roles.

The first is like what you say - make sure you check the right boxes. OFten the first person who sees your resume is non-technical, so make it easy for them to progress you on to the next step.

The second purpose of the resume is far more important: get people interested in YOU.

Almost everyone has done interesting things, but many people are bad at communicating those things. Often people are bad at even identifying the interesting things!

For each skill/technology you want to highlight think of a situation where you solved a problem using that skill. You're aiming for a problem your interviewer will find interesting, and will want to ask you questions about. Very briefly highlight the problem and that you fixed it with SKILL, and you're done. The more specific you can be the more interesting you will appear.

Two or three of those, your employment/education history, and contact details, and you're done.

I think your resume does do this, but it should be both more prominent and more intentional.

If I was helping someone today and they showed me this resume, I'd recommend re-ordering the sections and putting a brief intro at the top serving the same purpose as a cover letter. I'd also make sure they create tailored versions for each job they apply for.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#558

Post by djmips »

gwbas1c wrote: post #83

My mom passed about a month ago, and when going through a closet, my dad handed me some papers she wrote for a college course. Turns out she was the same age as me when her father died a similar death, and she wrote about similar feelings.

That's very beautiful in a melancholy way.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#559

Post by dusted »

still_grokking wrote: post #322
dusted wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nah, when you're constrained enough, you rarely to never sacrifice anything in the name of future changes. You figure out what needs to be done, then you write a program that does it. If it needs to change, you write a new program. Part of why that's not as bad as it sound is exactly because of those constraints, you're not dealing with megabytes of source code. There are lots of problems that are specific and simple…

No, not even given the historic context this makes any sense. We're not talking about embedded software with special constrains here! This story is about mundane enterprise software . Nothing in the story justified this insane level of over-engineering and premature optimization . Just using the "optimizing compiler" was deemed "good enough" for all other needs of the company, likely… Also nobody asked for that over-…

I'm pretty sure a card dealing game is rarely considered mundane enterprise software..

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#560

Post by rbanffy »

no-s wrote: post #100
rbanffy wrote: post #4

96 years old and still cooler than the current kids. Who else can say they used a computer with two ROUND screens?

> Who else can say they used a computer with two ROUND screens? Hmm, that takes me back, heheh. I remember using some spanking new equipment in the late 60’s with round screens. I was just 8 or 9 then so my recall is unsure but think it was Digital. I do recall learning how to read and enter memory locations with toggles so I could cheat at Lunar Lander.

The PDP-1 could be fitted with one (I believe you can play with it at the Computer Museum in Mountain View). The CDC-6xxx series had a magnificent console with two round screens (and vector graphics, although they weren't direct view storage tubes like the supercool Tektronix were). There were two such consoles at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle.

And, BTW, it's not always that I meet a fellow Elder Thing. I am myself from 1968, so I didn't get near an interesting computer until much later.

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