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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

#291

Post by barkingtoad »

zdragnar wrote: post #250
panzagl wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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...

As an engineer looking, it's rather depressing how many places have job requirements that are just a wishlist, or a resume-whittling strategy.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#292

Post by eikenberry »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #11
gsich wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

date of birth is illegal? Probably one of the more irrelevant things, as it is easily deductible from the rest of the entries.

Not always. Folks can obtain a degree later in life to throw off the ageism detector.

If applying in a market with rampant ageism why not just leave specific dates off altogether. Just list degrees received and durations of employment.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#293

Post by bryanrasmussen »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #179
tannhaeuser wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm baby-sitting Java devs as "senior" atm. They don't know much, but what little they know they're defending with fervor, like "REST", Spring crap, and rubbish pseudo-modularization using "microservices". Worst, taking random architecture astronaut blog posts as dogma, incapable of reflecting whether something makes sense for a given task ("SQL is too old-school and low-level (!)"). Makes you really think about what…

I'm sorry, do you have a specific issue with REST or microservices? Like all things, they have their place and purpose. Simply throwing quotes around them and using the fact that a junior dev recommended them as evidence against them is pretty weak, especially here on HN.

I was a very early proponent of REST in the Danish Government, for about two years before Gartner announced SOAP was dead and made a co-worker nearly cry to me at lunch and I had to make him feel better instead of doing my well-deserved victory dance.

That said when young people blithely get their smart faces on and start talking about REST I cannot avoid the old fogey suspicion that they don't know a damn thing they're talking about.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#294

Post by zdragnar »

barkingtoad wrote: post #291
zdragnar wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

As an engineer looking, it's rather depressing how many places have job requirements that are just a wishlist, or a resume-whittling strategy.

To be honest, I would treat them as a wishlist. If you've got a solid handle on at least some of the requirements, it literally won't hurt to apply.

More often than not, those job requirements are not written by the person who is doing the hiring, or the people you will be working with. Just be honest about what you know, what areas you are willing to grow in, and what excites you about the job position.

Some companies "hire only the best". A good company for a junior developer will look for a person's "trajectory"- i.e. is a person willing and worth investing in to help them grow.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#295

Post by zdragnar »

YZF wrote: post #268
zdragnar wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

There are companies that will check a resume for employment and education details. You also can and should do reference checks. In my experience outright lying is rare, there's definitely some embellishment. The person who sent in the MS word doc was a CS/Engineering graduate with significant experience in respectable companies? Hard to believe. Any software development job requires training. Every project is differe…

> The person who sent in the MS word doc was a CS/Engineering graduate with significant experience in respectable companies? Hard to believe.

This is a bit of a fun story to tell in person; this was the same person who claimed to be the second coming of Christ, and tried suing us for religious discrimination when we didn't hire him.

Fortunately for us, the people in the interview didn't respond to his claims at all, didn't mention it in the feedback we gave him when we declined to hire him, and (edit: the company) lost only lawyer fees fighting the lawsuit.

That said, hiring is damned expensive, and I have a hard time faulting companies who make the process difficult for potential candidates.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#296

Post by the_new_guy_29 »

United857 wrote: post #249
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.

Its not about buzzwords but time ranges.

Currently new frameworks are created in dozens and few are required for everyday work and they change each year.

The amount of information newer programmers have to keep pace with is HUGE...

Thats why some companies stop hiring ppl after 30s because they are simply not able (statistically) to keep with all of it. Its also more about not having other responsibilities - family, kids, friends, home, groceries, hobbies, health etc

I really hate that part of IT because its not what we have seen in our hearts when our first "Hello World" did run..

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#297

Post by gist »

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.

> He has severe dementia unfortunately.

Sorry about that. I have this theory on dementia that part of the cause (stress among other things) is a change from an intellectually demanding career or a life involving thinking and a change to either retirement or not having to do much thinking. The delta in other words.

So my question is does any of this relate to your father? Did he remain active in thinking past his retirement?

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#298

Post by jshevek »

imesh wrote: post #254
smithmayowa wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be very cool if he could though, as I do believe he will much rather work on something he loves doing and is good at rather than being committed to a nursing home, besides it will definitely be a sight to see, a 92 year old man hacking away on a system, debugging, writing code, and joining up in meetings, He was literally alive when computing was not a thing or worth much and he got to not just see it grow bu…

Is this a troll?

I don't think this is a troll. A lot of young people honestly don't understand many of the realities of aging.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#299

Post by account2 »

the_new_guy_29 wrote: post #296
United857 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Its not about buzzwords but time ranges. Currently new frameworks are created in dozens and few are required for everyday work and they change each year. The amount of information newer programmers have to keep pace with is HUGE... Thats why some companies stop hiring ppl after 30s because they are simply not able (statistically) to keep with all of it. Its also more about not having other responsibilities - family,…

>Thats why some companies stop hiring ppl after 30s

This is a huge generalization. Some people's careers start in their 30s. Would you think some 30s something ML researcher that just got a PhD is over the hill? Not everyone is married and has kids in their 30s either.

Re: My dad’s resume and skills from 1980

#300

Post by y4mi »

twblalock wrote: post #276
y4mi wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

knowing about security concepts is quite a bit different to knowing the details about the currently established standard of encryption and its next iteration.

We're talking about the changelog of TLS 1.2 to 1.3, not the general attack vectors for web applications.

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