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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

#571

Post by walnutclosefarm »

btilly wrote: post #541
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 Uni…

> Computers are older than you think.

I doubt it. If by computer you want to mean any machine capable of mechanically doing some kind of calculation, then of course there are examples going back hundreds of years, or even millenia - the Antikythera device was without doubt a mechanical, astronomical computer, for example. But I wrote "the first commercial computer," and the first stored program, Turing complete computing machine that you could actually write a purchase order and be invoiced for, the UNIVAC I, was only produced in 1951. So, I cheated a bit with "less than 20 years old in 1973." It was 22 years old. The point being in terms of my post, that when I started, computers, and programmers, were still very unusual in the employment landscape, and for people like Ray, of the original post, the concept of being a programmer appeared AFTER their formal education in electronics was finished.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#572

Post by vintermann »

gedy wrote: post #483
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…

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.

Yes. Even as the internet started to become a thing in 1994-1995 when I was in middle school, I'd reckon less than half of my class had a computer at home - and fewer still of them would ever want to mention it.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#573

Post by vintermann »

walnutclosefarm wrote: post #392
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…

That may well be true of some universities today. In 1970, they were pretty much the only place you could get hands on experience with a computer unless you somehow slid into a programming job in the financial industry, or a one of the few other areas that actually used them. And they were not behind the curve on the technology, although they tended to have lower end hardware than industry, because any compute was ve…

It definitively is true of local universities. I've met people from the local university who have a master in machine learning, yet have never heard of docker.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#574

Post by heurisko »

cowanon22dhhf wrote: post #273
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, 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 late 90s and even early 2000s the common wisdom with guidance counselors and even local recruiters was that programming and software design were dead end

My career advice as a teenager was that there wasn't any point doing software, as Microsoft had made it all already with Microsoft Office.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#575

Post by mywittyname »

vintermann wrote: post #573
walnutclosefarm wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may well be true of some universities today. In 1970, they were pretty much the only place you could get hands on experience with a computer unless you somehow slid into a programming job in the financial industry, or a one of the few other areas that actually used them. And they were not behind the curve on the technology, although they tended to have lower end hardware than industry, because any compute was ve…

It definitively is true of local universities. I've met people from the local university who have a master in machine learning, yet have never heard of docker.

This is a good thing. Opportunity costs are incredibly important with university educations because students have a limited time to learn.

Why spend the time futzing with a tool like docker? It's not foundational to machine learning, so learning that tool takes away from time that could be spent learning something more relevant. And the student may or may not use it when they get a job.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#576

Post by daveslash »

aasasd wrote: post #462
daveslash wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct.

I didn't even think about this at first, but—perhaps the parents' occupation is there because of the caste system? I heard that it's still around not just in India, but also in diasporas like the Silicon Valley.

Could be. I work with a lot of Indians, both here and abroad. I won't/can't profess to be an expert on them of their culture. But I can say that I've learned a lot over the years. I can only speculate (but won't do so here) on the reason for giving parent's occupation. From what I understand, the caste system is not what it once was and is beginning to disappear into the past, but it's legacy can still be felt in some profound ways both in India and here in the U.S.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#578

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Spooky23 wrote: post #517
enraged_camel wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You call it pedantry, I call it "field of work". I've managed to avoid working on apps built around databases for my entire career, instead focusing initially on operating systems, device drivers and OS-level tools; then later on software for pro-audio/music creation workflows. Literally no aspect of this work is "fully automated".

Yes, the productivity of modern day "stored-in-the-DB/presented-in-the-browser" project teams can be astounding. But that's only one type of software.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#579

Post by Maursault »

User23 wrote: post #569
Maursault wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Cognitive Linguistics degree at CMU in the 90's was an interdisciplinary combination of cognitive science, neurology, computer science and linguistics, and disappeared when the faculty member that created and sponsored it passed away in the mid-1990s. While Pitt is a quality university, I don't think they offer degrees from CMU. Pitt was on my radar and one of the few places I was accepted to, but out of state tu…

Perhaps I wasn’t clear. CMU allowed Pitt students to register for CMU classes. Your degree would say Pitt on it, but you would have attended the exact same classes as the CMU students. As in sat in the same classroom with the same professors at the same time, doing the same assignments and taking the same tests.

Thank you, that is what I understood you to mean, but if Pitt doesn't offer the same degree, how could one graduate accumulating credits for a degree that doesn't exist? While many universities allow non-students to audit courses, and one could take every required course of a subject this way, without actually being awarded the degree one can not claim the degree. Also, as I explained, I was out of state, making Pitt tuition expensive. CMU does grant its FT employees and their children free tuition after a token number of years of employment, but, of course, even a qualified and experienced HS graduate without an undergraduate degree would not make it past HR for an interview. And unfortunately, the Cognitive Linguistics degree only existed for a very short window, about 5-6 years. Personally, my only option to attend CMU was to get about $90K worth of college loans, or conversely, $60K worth of loans to attend Pitt, but I would gave sooner accepted the appointment offered me to Annapolis, an even more selective university than CMU that costs nothing but a commitment of 5 extra years of military service. What I did instead was study CS at Virginia Tech and graduate only $10K in debt, which was not difficult to get out from under. And though I did not study any linguistics there, I did exhaust my curiosity in cognitive science and neurology via an elective in philosophy of mind. CS was itself 60 credits of CS and Math with a built-in Math minor, and was tricky enough completing without idk how many other credits in proper neurology and linguistics that I missed out on at CMU or Pitt, though fascinating, each considerably complicated subjects in their own right.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#580

Post by HourglassFR »

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... :)

Not quite 2022, but yeah I was maintaining a token ring based network for some subway at my last gig in 2019. As far as I know, no work is done on it now but the subway-car using the system are schedule to run for at least another decade so another bugfix release of the networking firmware is not entirely out of the question.
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