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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

#271

Post by ransom1538 »

throwaway0255 wrote: post #247
_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.

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 p…

Good people are all hired. So you are looking through a pool of people that couldn’t get hired in the hottest market ever. I would pause. Find someone whose work you really appreciate and hyper focus on their network and poach. Stop using recruiters or spam networks and put in the actual time.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#272

Post by andrewmweaver89 »

MaggieL wrote: post #108
mbrock wrote: 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.

Real 1980s programmer: sits down at IBM 3278 mainframe terminal, edits resume into text file containing DCF/Script markup. Prints mailing copies on IBM 3800 laser printer using typewriter font, hoping operations staff running printer doesn't notice (unlikely considering speed printer runs at). --signed, real 1980s programmer (also 1970s programmer, 1990s programmer, 2000s programmer, 2010s programmer) current resume…

You worked at Andesa, weird .. I work there now

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#274

Post by YZF »

throwaway0255 wrote: post #247
_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.

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 p…

There are three parts to this problem. First is that you need to be able to attract/find good people. The second is that you need to be able to find the right cues in the resume (or otherwise make a determination who to interview, e.g. screens, references/recommendations). The third is you need to actually be able to tell good people apart from the others (and have a realistic definition of good).

If everyone applying can't program then no amount of resume analysis or interviewing will yield a good candidate. So if that's your problem you need to address it.

It's also quite likely you are rejecting good people. Possibly even great people. Some hiring processes have people jump through ridiculous hoops that have nothing to do with their potential to do great work in the actual role they're hired for.

I've never worked for a company that doesn't say it hires the "best" people. Guess what, most people are average. That's true in Google, in Amazon, in Apple, in Microsoft etc. etc. The 100's of thousands of developers working there all lie on a nice Gaussian with some minor offsets. In all these companies there's like 20% of the people at the most who do the really hard bits and the others are worker bees/supportive roles.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#275

Post by bfred_it »

lev99 wrote: post #185
ajmurmann wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder if they higher fast and fire even faster approach isn't ultimately better for everyone than the silly whiteboard interviews many companies do nowadays. At least there was an exact match between the skills because of which you have the job and the skills you need on the job.

Hiring and firing come at a nonzero cost, just like whiteboard interviews. If ten people apply for a position and their resumes all look good the company needs some way to determine who to hire.

That's right. A whiteboard interview can be done without getting the interviewee up to date with the company's policies and tools, which might take longer than a couple hours.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#276

Post by twblalock »

y4mi wrote: post #98
magicbuzz wrote: post #94

Looks like your Dad got exposure to IBM equipment and realised that being a programmer could be a good job. I did my undergrad in the early 80s and the Uni had a CDC which was old then. First assignment in Pascal was writing it on a punchcard machine and handing the card batch over. But it was more an exercise in showing new students what had come before. I was fortunate to get a job working in COBOL on HP, which led…

you expect a webdev to know the difference between the current standard and its next version thats hardly used at the moment? aren't you expecting a little bit too much? Don't get me wrong, its great if you do... but knowing about upcoming encryption standards is imo something a security engineer should be fluent in, not a web developer.

I expect web devs to know about a lot of security concepts, including SSL/TLS, subresource integrity, CORS, a variety of cross-site stuff, etc. It's simply dangerous if they don't.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#278

Post by ThenAsNow »

RLN wrote: post #43

Very striking for me is listing of height, health and birth date. I would never put these on a CV. All irrelevant.

In his position at Convair, he lists "Flight Test Engineer" as one of his roles. If he performed these duties onboard an aircraft (as many FTEs do), these could be relevant parameters. If he listed them for that reason, he probably just left them there in 1980 out of tradition (see docdeek's comment).

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#279

Post by kgwgk »

ajmurmann wrote: post #168
whatsstolat wrote: post #51

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.

The thing that stuck out the most to me in the resume is that he went to university to learn programming languages. That wouldn't happen today. Today you'd either get a book and definitely work through some online materials. How do you proof competency this way? You'll have to point at projects you did and talk a little more about what you did. I'm pretty sure that the set of potentially required skills has exploded.…

It does happen today:

https://extension.ucsd.edu/courses-and-programs/java-program...

https://www.pce.uw.edu/certificates/c-plus-plus-programming

https://www.uclaextension.edu/digital-technology/programming...

https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academics/professional-gra...

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#280

Post by account2 »

curuinor wrote: post #264
throwaway0255 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

In my experience, bachelor's in CS counts more than master's in CS, which in turn of course counts more than bootcamp. It's just time spent in front of a computer. I hope your pay and total comp is actually competitive, in which case you're grousing over something you could fix in a jiffy.

>In my experience, bachelor's in CS counts more than master's in CS

This discounts people that transition to CS from another field like mathematics, chemistry, physics, etc. Just because you didn't major in CS as an undergraduate doesn't mean you can't program. That is a bit of gatekeeping. Plus, I'd argue someone from a field like mathematics and physics might be more suited to do certain types of programming jobs due to their background skillsets.

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