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The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

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Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#201

Post by DonHopkins »

trhway wrote: post #59
nailer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something strange about Solaris. Around the same time, an investment bank (where the Solaris team constantly justified their existence with 'dtrace!' 'zfs!' 'zones!') was paying 50K a year per server multiplied by hundreds of servers to run Solaris 8 extended support - which didn't have any of those things, which is good, because the staff didn't know how to use them other than say they made Solaris great.

>where the Solaris team constantly justified their existence with 'dtrace!' 'zfs!' 'zones!' they did that inside Sun as well. Most noise was about DTrace, the most useless thing for the Sun/Solaris at that moment.

I miss fastboot.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#202

Post by cnvogel »

cptnbob wrote: post #186
bigger_cheese wrote: post #170

My work is pretty bad. We have a box running windows 3.1 hooked up to an instrument on our plant. The answer I got when I asked about it was it has a proprietary ISA DAQ card in it with 'flaky' drivers' that prevents us upgrading it. It's a non critical instrument but is providing 'useful' data I think its some type of microwave radar measurement instrument - very specialised hardware. It's been working well since th…

One of our clients still has a DOS box connected to a 14.4k modem that we have to drag EDI interchanges off. You wouldn't believe how much it cost to get a modem and POTS line installed in our DC so we could talk to it. There's a windows service written in .net that talks to it via a serial port and POSTs it to a REST endpoint.

Of course you could put a small internet connected embedded box to your clients place... (maybe even a commercial terminal server, if you trust the security of it) and directly emulate the whole modem+POTS line.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#203

Post by kjs3 »

jackgavigan wrote: post #190
kjs3 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that Olivetti X/OS or their SVR4 port. X/OS is really legacy.

It was the late '90s so it was probably the SVR4 port (I actually think a lot of those "ports" were little more than rebranding).

Yeah...pretty much everyone with a vaguely ISA/EISA/MCA box in those days just shipped a 99% unchanged reference port of i386 SVR4. It was interesting that one of the exceptions was, of all folks, Dell. They had a really nicely done SVR4 distribution with a hugely improved installer, a lot of open source stuff prebuilt and lots of bug fixes. Ran it for a while as my primary desktop and liked it alot. Shame Dell didn't stick with it.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#204

Post by rogerbinns »

pronoiac wrote: post #184
rogerbinns wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I maintain one at http://www.rogerbinns.com/blocked_recruiters.txt My resume has a "note to recruiters" attached. It is very clear if a recruiter has made any effort to read any of that. The clueless ones end up in the list above. http://www.rogerbinns.com/recruiters.html

Oof, I recognize one of those, from an email today. I'd thought I was talking to an internal recruiter... Incidentally, you have some duplicates.

Sometimes they are so egregious I have to add them twice!

I'm guessing it occurred due to doing a batch update, and having multiple emails from the same spammer.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#205

Post by logfromblammo »

bbcbasic wrote: post #134
artmageddon wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like everyone wants resumes in Word format. The one time I tried to send a PDF the recruiter nearly treated it like it was some unknown format and asked me to resend as Word.

Maybe it is just the recruiter. I saw a printed copy of my CV with their header on in one interview, so I assume they want to edit it to do that.

That's exactly why they want it as a Word document. That's what they use to produce their in-house resumes for distribution, and they don't want to waste ten seconds on opening an HTML or PDF resume in Word and selecting "Save As... Word document". They want to create their own resume, with your name on it, that is loosely based on your actual resume, so they can send it out to hiring managers.

It's very safe to say that if you don't know how to open and edit a PDF document, you have no business being a tech recruiter. Anyone foolish enough to be represented by such a person while looking for software jobs is going to have a bad time.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#206

Post by amyjess »

I went to college at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Our online Student Information System (SIS) was one of the very rare online services with operating hours. It wasn't available at night (and possibly on weekends too, but I graduated eight years ago, so my memory is fuzzy).

At one point, I started asking around, and I found out that it was because SIS ran on an old mainframe that couldn't read and write the disk at the same time. During operating hours, it reads the disk and makes all changes in memory. When operating hours are over, it writes all its changes to disk.

This was in 2003-2007 and they still had that mainframe controlling all their class schedules and student data. UTD was considered the biggest tech-oriented university in the southwest, too.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#207

Post by breischl »

DavidPlumpton wrote: post #189
mindcrime wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add "Crystal Reports" and "MUMPS" to the "do not put on resume" list. And RPG/400. I took two semesters of that in college, but (thankfully) never got roped into programming in it professionally. I'm honestly not sure you could pay me enough to write RPG code, even if you were Bill Gates. Just thinking about using SEU (Source Entry Utility, IIRC) to program in that column oriented nightmare gives me the heebie-jeebie…

Somebody should create a CV with years of experience in all the worst technologies and circulate it through all the worst recruiters and see what happens.

Aha, a CV honeypot! You could harvest the names of all the recruiters that take an interest, then publish a blacklist for legitimate job seekers so they would know who not to talk to. :)

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#208

Post by amyjess »

Kalium wrote: post #17
mring33621 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear %prospect_name%; I was in our recruiting DB the other day, and came across an old version of your résumé. I am very impressed with your background and think you might be a perfect fit for an opening that we have for a Senior ColdFusion Developer. Please get back to me at your earliest convenience regarding this exciting opportunity. Thank you. Sincerely, %recruiter_sig%

You're going to give me nightmares. I still get emails like this from a six-year-old version of my resume.

I legally changed my name over a year ago, and I still get calls from recruiters once a week or so asking for my old name.

Why? Because they have an old copy of my resume from before my name change. This also leads to me explaining that I don't work at my previous employer anymore and that I've found a new job that I love. They just don't give a shit about having up-to-date records.

My entire name was changed: first, middle, and last, and my new name doesn't resemble my old one in the slightest. It's very awkward having to explain to them that the name they asked for isn't my legal name anymore (and I'm half-tempted to be glib and say "he's dead", but I won't because that could get me in big trouble if they believe it and it gets back to the authorities that I've been using my name change to fake my death).

It's especially awkward, because it forces me to out myself to them as transgender, since my old name was unmistakeably male, and my new name is unmistakeably female. Hell, I'm very much out and proud, but it's just plain awkward to have to tell a recruiter over the phone when they're not expecting it and when it's my very first communication with them.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#210

Post by hadeharian »

What people don't always understand is outside of the tech world, there are people who still think computer upgrades are unnecessary expenditures. It's true that the theoretical lifetime of a computer is probably something like 50 years, minus the hard drive replacement and the power supply which will generally go bad much quicker.

The more difficult thing is in a field like aeronautics any minor changes have the possibility of generating catastrophic events. In these situations, the cost of replacement, and testing, and phasing stuff in is enormously high and the risk is obscene when change needs to be made.

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