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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

#581

Post by btilly »

walnutclosefarm wrote: post #571
btilly wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compu…

There is a distinction between computer and stored program computers, and you're right that the first commercially available stored program computer appeared in 1951. (Though, interestingly, there was a 1936 patent application on the idea in Germany. And a barely functioning one was actually built in 1941.)

But Turing complete computers predated that. In fact Turing's own design for a Turing machine was NOT a stored program computer. And you're right that the modern idea of programming postdated stored program computers.

But computers are older. As you pointed out, arguably thousands of years older.

However I maintain that automatic tabulating machines were on the path to modern computers. Early accounting applications were based on them, as were key parts of the technology used. Like punch cards.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#582

Post by jmfldn »

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."

Ditto more or less. Dad was a mechanical engineering academic. Learned fortran programming in the late 1960s on punch cards.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#583

Post by indymike »

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

> Have you built a successful growing software firm?

Yes, three times.

> Does your software systems scale to Millions?

Is 8m active users per day enough?

> What about counterfactuals?

A broken clock is correct twice a day. Not sure what you are wanting here.

> 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 don't work for them.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#585

Post by diseasedyak »

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... :)

Hah, not quite nowadays but I, too, was dealing with one from around '97-2000'ish. What a pain in the ass. That was just one network in the building, I also had to deal with 10base-t, which was also a nightmare. shudder

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#586

Post by kjs3 »

dspillett wrote: post #495
kjs3 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes...Fortran at least has changed a lot since inception. There's been Fortran 90, 95, 2003, 2008 & 2018 standards since to keep up with the various industry fads of the time (You want OO Fortran? Sure thing.). You can get a good overview of Fortran features from inception through the 2008 standard in the paper "The Seven Ages of Fortran" by Michael Metcalf or on the Fortran wiki ( https://fortranwiki.org/fortran/sho…

Does a lot of that extra pool of features get used in production (relative to more "legacy" code) as seen with many reengineering JS projects regularly, it is the Fortran user base more conservative? I might expect the latter, but this is just a gut guess.

I'm not doing much work with Fortran-using communities these days, so this is an opinion only, and probably out of date in various ways.

Yes, developers are using the new features. Most code I touched was regularly using up to 2003 features, with later stuff dependent on other factors (solid compiler support across different compilers being a big one). However, most Fortran programs are going to be fleshed out with components taken from the vast collections of well debugged and tested libraries available, many of which are still F77, and probably will stay that way. Fortran is more 'conservative' in the sense that there's not much compulsion to rewrite working code in the name of 'refactoring' or whatever. Adoption of new features is more 'I'm going to use a select set of things that will make my life appreciably easier' rather than 'everyone on board with all the latest shiny things'.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#587

Post by blandflakes »

jimmaswell wrote: post #566
blandflakes wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I'd even interview this person; I'd at least have to find reasons to. It definitely doesn't give me anything to ask about. Quotes like "Save a lot of time by automating an email process" are so vague and ambiguous that the bullet point may as well be omitted. Education on the top is a waste of most anybody's time, let it be on the top only if you have no work experience (and if that's the case, yikes). I…

> It definitely doesn't give me anything to ask about. Quotes like "Save a lot of time by automating an email process" are so vague ... are you kidding with these two sentences side by side? you just answered your own question, ask about the email process! and how is that outline of what I did even that vague? and everyone says to list accomplishments that benefitted the company instead of responsibilities, which thi…

Don't beg the question in your resume. I don't want coy points to ask about, I want details so I can make sure that I can actually have an engaging conversation about something, especially so that I can figure out how it might relate to work I'm doing here. It's astonishing to me that you can't grasp that a resume is a form of communication, and that therefore you might want to, I dunno, communicate in it.

> and everyone says to list accomplishments that benefitted the company instead of responsibilities, which this is a perfect example of.

It's not perfect, it's nearly worthless. A perfect example would have at the very least some hint of the business value and the nature of the problem at hand.

> The way I instinctively read and understand a document by actually reading it and caring about the content first is just too mismatched from the average neurotypical's way of looking at the world for me to empathize.

This is pretty patronizing. I'm actually suggesting that the content of the resume you provided is itself lacking. The issue is not that "oh no the neurotypicals don't want to read my resume", the issue is that this resume's content has room to improve, but you think that can't possibly be the case. Yeah, you're lacking empathy (or at the very least pretty defensive), but it's because we WANT content, not because we're looking for surface-level stuff. In fact most of the feedback has actually been that this resume is TOO surface-level (list of skills? don't care, vague bullet points? don't care), and you're defending the superficiality of content, which is incoherent alongside the claim that people don't care about the substance.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#588

Post by listenallyall »

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…

> You used to legit need that CS degree in order to code in your day-to-day

And when people today look back with disdain at ugly VB applications and wonder what simpleton, non-programmer, drag-and-dropper built this piece of excrement (that has somehow been running for 17 years without an update and the replacement project that we hired those consultants for ended up 3x over costs and nobody uses it) as opposed to a Real Software Program, there's the reason.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#589

Post by antonknee »

jimmaswell wrote: post #418
Bakary wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumb things such as having a tiny bit of color or a slightly less basic format can make or break you when the recruiter/hirer is sifting through the pile. Besides, it takes all of ten minutes to do this and be done with it. It's like fashion. Arbitrary but just having the basics understood goes such a long way professionally and socially compared to the effort expended

Maybe this is a good use case for AI. Write your resume then let AI rewrite it to be aesthetically pleasing to resume readers. People like my interior decorating, I can appreciate other things that are aesthetically pleasing, and I've made my share of actual art. I just don't think I have it in me to understand whatever in the world is going through someone's mind when they're displeased with this resume. It's a miss…

I agree a standardised database would be ideal.

I think it’s telling that you have received very valid and constructive criticism on this resume from multiple people, yet you still can’t see why this is a bad resume. You know from data and observation that in the real world this is in fact a bad resume, because it doesn’t get you interviews and offers - which is the point of a resume.

Re: My dad's resume and skills from 1980

#590

Post by throwaway41597 »

ilaksh wrote: post #293
enw wrote: post #97

> My dad is 92 and we just put him in a home. Can you stay healthy enough to die of old age in a regular home? “Put him in a home” sounds so ominous and forceful.

runvnc is my github. Yeah maybe I didn't word that the best. The short version is that after my mother passed away, myself and my sister were there full time for several months, but at some point we couldn't handle it anymore. His memory was almost completely gone, bodily functions often seemed to be like torture to him, but the big issue was that he started yelling every time we tried to move him. The hospital said…

Very sorry to hear that, end of life is hard for many. Thank you for your post and the discussion it brought.
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