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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

#121
post #100

Nearly 24 years with a single employer. How many programmers can claim that these days?

I think the better question is: how many employers can claim that these days?

My understanding is that there was a big cultural change in theory of management during the corporate raider era of the 1980s. Before, lifetime employment was common; employee loyalty was matched by defined-benefit pensions and the implicit commitment that you'd be kept on until retirement unless you did something terrible.

Corporate raiders, though, found that they could make a lot of money by buying a company and, among other things, ignoring all the implicit commitments. So they'd just lay off a lot of people, forcing out the older, more expensive workers. Getting rid of all that knowledge and loyalty might have long-term costs, but that didn't matter to corporate raiders, because they'd quickly sell off the company. Managers everywhere eventually adopted these tactics, both because it helped fend off corporate raiders and because narrow-focus financial evaluation of everything became the dominant management paradigm.

Now it's up to each worker to ensure that they stay marketable, and there's no particular incentive to stay around. Indeed, the incentives are often negative. At most places it's easier to get a raise if you move. And too many companies are stuck in legacy technology stacks; if you stay, you'll eventually become unemployable.

So I'd rather ask how many tech companies have programmers confident that their employer will stick with them until 67? Damned few, I'd guess.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#122
post #41
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh yeah and how do you make up for the years of experience then? fake jobs entries?

Requesting Years of experience can also be considered discrimination

in which world? because every job posting I have ever seen requires years of doing x or y.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#123
Is your dad for hire? We have this legacy toolchain in cobol and IBM assembler running on a bunch of mainframes and are just not ready to migrate to our brand new Itanium servers we have ordered a while ago. Our engineers are busy porting all the logic but need help understanding the inner workings of the old setup. While they're at it, we have this small list of features we'd like to have added to the old version...

(okok, it's Saturday so can we have this as a top level reply?)

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think more reasonably the same phenomenon of experienced workers needing to update their skills in order to stay relevant was going on 50 years ago.

I was 16 in 1986 when I started programming C. Replacing all the old fogeys with their Fortrans and Cobols and .. shudder .. A/PL .. This is not a new thing, this teenage thing. Tomorrow I guide some teenage punk through the wasteland of mobile development. Undoubtedly he's gonna throw some new shit at me. Hah!

Do you mean APL? I know there was PL/I. I was 14 in 1978 when I bought a used Commodore PET with tape drive built in. I had purchased a book on DEC assembly and read it before purchasing the PET, and of course it wasn't applicable, however, books back then were written to be able to learn by reading rather than copy/paste. BYTE magazine would list the programs for you to type in. Ah, nostalgia in the morning!

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#126
post #58
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Q: What's the difference between a house and a home? A: A home is where they put you when they want the house. That resume is from shortly after he turned 54. It must have been hard looking for a job at that age and I don't think the economy was brilliant in 1980 either. That was when Reagan got elected after Carter had only one term.

It was not, and stayed not the next 5+ years There was a recession, actually

In the bay area officially the recession was well over in 1983, but frankly it sucked till 1986-7. Commercial tech sucked worse than military.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#127
post #100

Nearly 24 years with a single employer. How many programmers can claim that these days?

None since they all became managers after year 5 :)

At my previous employer we had people on our team who were up there in age who were still programmers. One of them said he tried management but he's definitely not a people person and doesn't like playing politics. He said it went horribly for everyone involved, him, his team, his superiors. He went back to just coding and said he'll never do management again. Technically, he's very proficient, and as a new grad myself, he was always my go to for design questions.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#128
post #14

Contemporary programmer: spends a whole weekend tweaking CSS parameters, asking web forums for LaTeX templates, finding a cool fresh font pairing on Google Fonts. 1980s programmer: sits down at the typewriter and bangs out a fixed width table, finishes with a signature.

And the 1980s one is more pleasurable to read. No cruft. Just the facts.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#129

Looks like a simpler time. You just say what you did. No need to BS it up to sound like you are gods gift to programming. And once you get the job probably no logging every second of your time.

There was way less competition, though

Yes but higher signal to noise ratio back then and programming and computer science were not as much a commodity degree. Now there are so many people on the internet and playing chameleon ;)

You had to seek out jobs in newspaper listings in local or national newspapers (international too). I would get people applying for jobs back in early 90s who thought that having a modem at home and having read one programming book qualified them for the job.

No coding interview in those days, but you were let go in a day or week if you could not perform what you said you could do during your first two tasks.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#130

Put in a home? Why wouldn't you want to spend all the last time on this mortal earth with your parents, and holding their hands as they leave this lifetime? Repayment of when you yourself was born into this one? I don't understand Western opinion on this matter. But on topic, that is one concise application letter. Cheers for your dad efforts back then!

Elderly care homes have professional medical and nursing staff on site, so far better care can be provided than most families can offer in their homes.

It's a separate matter as to whether families make adequate effort to visit and spend quality time with their ageing parents/grandparents when they've been put into a home.

In the case of my family, my mother visited her parents daily for the last few years of their lives, and my partner's mother and aunt now visit their mother daily too - both before and since she was put into an aged care home.

Other families may not be as attentive and that's sad, but it's a separate issue as to whether aged care homes are good places for elderly people to live.

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