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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

#241

Post by isostatic »

wglb wrote: post #170
kevsim wrote: post #100

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

Not very many. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Christensen (inventor of the BBS and author of xmodem) is one, at 44 years for IBM. I knew a very small numbers of career Allstate folks at over 40 years.

My company employs modern website jockeys, but also traditional broadcast engineers.

The departments looking after things like websites think 5 years with the company is a long time.

The department I'm in tends to be lifers - I personally know two people who have made 50 years, a few more at 40. Certainly if you're under 10 years you're new.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#242

Post by panzagl »

_uhtu wrote: post #234
booleandilemma wrote: post #214

Wow, a resume from an era when programming was a respectable job, instead of the circus of group interviews, take home tests, whiteboard tests, and non-stop emails from this new class of people whose sole job it is to find programmers jobs. Before hiring managers asked you if you’re familiar with agile, SOA, TDD, microservices, BDD, Domain Driven Design and that JavaScript framework that came out last year. What a di…

If tech was just look at a resume and decide to hire or not people would hate that even more than modern complicated forms of interviewing. There's flaws in the ways a lot of companies hire, but the process has to be complicated when you get down to the numbers of how many people are for hire and how many are worth hiring.

'but the process has to be complicated when you get down to the numbers of how many people are for hire and how many are worth hiring.'

i.e. we're trying to hire imaginary unicorns because we don't respect actual programmers.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#243

Post by zafka »

jlarocco wrote: post #79
ekianjo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm 36. If I get a degree in a new field and work 15 years, I'll be 55, but my resume will say I have a Bachelor's degree with 15 years of experience.

I picked up my BCE at 36. Of course now that I am 58, even 44 is getting to the outer edge for those who would discriminate.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#244

Post by seanmcdirmid »

walshemj wrote: post #230
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like complaining about interactive terminals because programmers no longer have to think so hard about their code before writing it out to punch cards....

I think you mean writing it out on coding sheets before sending it to the "girls" to be punched onto card's

That was so early 1960s. In the mid 60s to the mid 70s, you had to mostly do it yourself unless you were really senior and still programming.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#246

Post by curuinor »

booleandilemma wrote: post #214

Wow, a resume from an era when programming was a respectable job, instead of the circus of group interviews, take home tests, whiteboard tests, and non-stop emails from this new class of people whose sole job it is to find programmers jobs. Before hiring managers asked you if you’re familiar with agile, SOA, TDD, microservices, BDD, Domain Driven Design and that JavaScript framework that came out last year. What a di…

Didn't it pay like, half or less of what programmers get paid nowadays? And technical leadership at companies was much less of a thing.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#247

Post by throwaway0255 »

_uhtu wrote: post #234
booleandilemma wrote: post #214

Wow, a resume from an era when programming was a respectable job, instead of the circus of group interviews, take home tests, whiteboard tests, and non-stop emails from this new class of people whose sole job it is to find programmers jobs. Before hiring managers asked you if you’re familiar with agile, SOA, TDD, microservices, BDD, Domain Driven Design and that JavaScript framework that came out last year. What a di…

If tech was just look at a resume and decide to hire or not people would hate that even more than modern complicated forms of interviewing. There's flaws in the ways a lot of companies hire, but the process has to be complicated when you get down to the numbers of how many people are for hire and how many are worth hiring.

I hate the state of tech interviews with a passion but I have to reluctantly agree.

When I was involved in hiring I was astonished at how difficult it was to even find a person who was both worth interviewing and willing to interview, and resumes were basically worthless at helping you make that determination.

Resume did not matter at all. The hiring pool is flooded with a thousand bootcampers, 1 in 40 can actually program and its impossible to tell who they are without conducting a remote. A thousand people with Masters degrees in comp sci, 1 in 50 can actually program and most of them don’t even seem to have any interest in programming.

Then there are unfortunate language barriers, where a large percentage of the pool are international but your company doesn’t have anyone who can interview them adequately.

There’s a reason finding tech hires has become its own industry and we all get spammed 10x daily. It’s because it’s really, really difficult and time-consuming and exhausting and expensive to make a good tech hire, and the cost of making one of your first 5 or 10 engineering hires a bad one can literally be that your company just fails.

It’s just so hard to hire software developers. I’ve been on both sides so I know how frustrating the situation is for devs, but I don’t think it’s half as frustrating as being on the hiring side of it. It’s just so fucking hard and exhausting. Even beyond the logistics of it, you’re spending all your time judging people’s economic worth and sending emails that you know will ruin their day. It’s just not a fun job at all.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#248

Post by mohsen1 »

ilaksh wrote: post #219
iforgotpassword wrote: post #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...…

He has severe dementia unfortunately. I just thought it might be interesting to people to see what technologies were in use at those times. My dad loves to play catch with his stuffed doggie (or whatever you will throw to him) but activities more complicated than that are not feasible.

If people didn't realize, your dad is 92! I wish my dad lives that long, I love to take care of him when he's vulnerable. Just to return the favor a little bit.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#249

Post by United857 »

booleandilemma wrote: post #214

Wow, a resume from an era when programming was a respectable job, instead of the circus of group interviews, take home tests, whiteboard tests, and non-stop emails from this new class of people whose sole job it is to find programmers jobs. Before hiring managers asked you if you’re familiar with agile, SOA, TDD, microservices, BDD, Domain Driven Design and that JavaScript framework that came out last year. What a di…

> Before hiring managers asked you if you’re familiar with agile, SOA, TDD, microservices, BDD, Domain Driven Design and that JavaScript framework that came out last year.

His resume/cover letter still listed off a lot of buzzwords for specific technologies/platforms/languages to get the manager's attention -- they just were different ones from a different era.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#250

Post by zdragnar »

panzagl wrote: post #242
_uhtu wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If tech was just look at a resume and decide to hire or not people would hate that even more than modern complicated forms of interviewing. There's flaws in the ways a lot of companies hire, but the process has to be complicated when you get down to the numbers of how many people are for hire and how many are worth hiring.

'but the process has to be complicated when you get down to the numbers of how many people are for hire and how many are worth hiring.' i.e. we're trying to hire imaginary unicorns because we don't respect actual programmers.

As an engineer involved in the hiring process at two different companies, it's rather depressing how many people outright lie on their resume about what they know or what experience they have.

We certainly weren't looking for imaginary unicorns, but we also couldn't afford to train someone who sent in a code sample in a MS word doc that was full of syntax errors...

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