[HN Gopher] My dad's resume and skills from 1980 ___________________________________________________________________ My dad's resume and skills from 1980 Author : metadat Score : 979 points Date : 2022-10-25 14:25 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (github.com) (TXT) w3m dump (github.com) | mrpippy wrote: | Just curious, did he get the job at CDC? Where did his career go | after 1980? | ilaksh wrote: | If I remember correctly it was General Dynamics and then CSC. | orsenthil wrote: | Good to see your dad's resume. Good recollections of the | programming languages COBOL and FORTRAN. Hope your dad enjoyed | and continues to enjoy whatever he does. | | I was born in 1981, learnt programming in college in 1999-2000. I | learnt COBOL and FORTRAN too. To me, at this moment, all | programming languages are almost the same. I am doing go now, | will pick up rust by the end of this year. | | We have to the solve the problems they keep changing. | still_grokking wrote: | > To me, at this moment, all programming languages are almost | the same. | | COBOL, Fortran, Go, and Rust are all the same language... ;-) | | Have you tried out OCaml, Scala, or Idris? | | Or maybe something exotic like Mercury? | gbourant wrote: | what font is used? | alexjray wrote: | The fact that he lists his height and health cracks me up | pepy wrote: | old fella made it to 90s so, joke is on us. | alberth wrote: | It's sad how a fraudster can abuse knowing a persons full legal | name, date of birth, past home address and phone number. All of | which was on this resume posted to the internet, and should | probably be masked out. | | As an aside: loved reading the resume. | fwr wrote: | It struck me as comforting to actually be able to post it all | online without a major worry, I imagine a person of that age | living with close supervision of their family can get fully | disconnected of this paranoia and just enjoy actual life, sans | administration and connectivity. | drewg123 wrote: | I really need to post something like this about my mom. She had a | BS in math and was sent to learn how to program computers in the | late 50s in her first job. I have a photo of her in a skirt | moving jumpers around on a room sized computer. She programmed in | Fortran for most of her career. She retired in the early 90s and | passed away soon after. If anything, I followed in her footsteps. | I still remember playing colossal cave adventure on the | minicomputer (Harris?) in her office in the late 70s. | KerrAvon wrote: | So did he get the job? | freedomben wrote: | Two thoughts immediately jump out to me: | | 1. As much proprietary stuff as we still have to deal with, we've | really come a long way. | | 2. The approach that our parents took of working at one company | for many years (or a whole career) (and retiring with a pension) | really disappeared quickly. | znpy wrote: | Regarding 2. : I'd stay at a company many years no problem if | that meant i could get a livable wage, start a family, buy a | large enough house, save money AND save for a pension... all on | a single income. | | The reality though is that nowadays if you want to reach a | salary level where you can start thinking about some of such | things you have to do quite a bit of job hopping. | smm11 wrote: | Impressive! Given today's resumes, everyone will look up what | React or Node is, in 2064. | poisonborz wrote: | And logging in monthly to a crumbling government website that | still uses them. | remind_me_again wrote: | otras wrote: | A LaTeX template for this style (from the last time this was | posted): https://www.overleaf.com/read/cqscsqsqmskm | [deleted] | haunter wrote: | Restricted, you don't have a permission | otras wrote: | My mistake, left over from the ShareLaTeX -> Overleaf | transition. Updated. | sunjester wrote: | Your Father is a Gangster. | snowwrestler wrote: | Caught my eye: | | Listing gender, height, health on the resume (!) Can't imagine | getting a resume with that info these days. | | Listing corporate training under education. Again, wouldn't | expect to see that today. Not sure if that is because no one does | employee training anymore, OR, if it's just expected and | understood that you'll learn new stuff constantly as a programmer | these days. | ingenieros wrote: | Perhaps not in the U.S due to labor laws and the EEOC, but in | some countries you must also attach a head shot. Not only that, | but HR can casually drop by your house unannounced to inspect | your living conditions and make a note of anything "unusual". I | know it sounds straight out of Severance, but that's how things | would be stateside if unions and others hadn't drawn the line | somewhere. | dottedmag wrote: | What are the countries where this is practiced? | bobsmooth wrote: | I know in Japan head shot and blood type are expected with | a resume. | unsignedint wrote: | Headshot yes, blood type typically not. They do require | to reveal a bit of other information including age, | number of dependents, marital status, expected length of | commute, etc. | | Funniest aspect is that a lot of employers expect | applicants to handwrite their resumes and some actually | goes as far as rejecting non-handwritten resumes. | Wohlf wrote: | Blood type is weird but in Japanese cultural it's similar | to adding your Myers-Briggs type. | ingenieros wrote: | All throughout LATAM, look up "visita domiciliaria" in | Colombia. | cratermoon wrote: | Blue collar mechanical work during the war, used the GI Bill to | get some college, went right to work for IBM, probably recruited | by big blue. | | The Greatest Generation had both the worst and the best. | 0x445442 wrote: | Looks like he also got quite a bit of training at what I assume | is UCSD Extension program. I received a certificate in C | programming from there in the early 90's. I wonder if they | still offer similar programs today. | Discordian93 wrote: | It would appear so, albeit now it's an online program: | https://extendedstudies.ucsd.edu/courses-and-programs/c-c- | pr... | no-s wrote: | > resume and skills from 1980 | | Wow, I had a resume (with several years of experience) in 1980. | Now I'm feeling really auld. | | My mom has roots in the era of programming where the program was | entered by wiring a plugboard... | xrd wrote: | He lists telemetry on his resume. I haven't seen that on a resume | before. I bet Microsoft (and the other FAANGs) would really value | that experience. | js2 wrote: | Previous discussion: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17787275 | malsheikh wrote: | Hah. I used to live 2 doors down from your dad. Small world. | rbanffy wrote: | 96 years old and still cooler than the current kids. | | Who else can say they used a computer with two ROUND screens? | Andrew_nenakhov wrote: | If Moto 360 smartwatch counts as a computer, I used two. | lwoo wrote: | Unfortunately he passed away shortly after [1] but your point | stands. | | [1] | https://github.com/runvnc/dadsresume/issues/1#issuecomment-1... | no-s wrote: | > Who else can say they used a computer with two ROUND screens? | | Hmm, that takes me back, heheh. I remember using some spanking | new equipment in the late 60's with round screens. I was just 8 | or 9 then so my recall is unsure but think it was Digital. I do | recall learning how to read and enter memory locations with | toggles so I could cheat at Lunar Lander. | [deleted] | nimajneb wrote: | That's cool. I may have worked in former IBM buildings in | Endicott that he might have worked in. I worked there a few | summers in the early/mid 2000's when it was Endicott Interconnect | Technologies. I loved exploring those old buildings, lots of | tunnels, abandoned sections, old equipment. I wish I took photos. | mrzool wrote: | We wish too! | avisser wrote: | I was born and raised in Endicott. My only cool visit was going | into the quiet room in the IBM Glendale facility. It was | covered with that angled studio foam. It was disconcertingly | quiet. That sense of "oh this is a big room - I can tell by the | echo" starts reporting strange readings. | sizzzzlerz wrote: | When I graduated college with a EE degree in 1977, my resume was | damned sparse on experience, mainly because I didn't have any. | All I could throw out were the EE and engineering classes I'd | taken in school. Somehow, I got hired by a company in S.V.. By | the time I retired after 43 years, I had so much experience, it | wouldn't fit on 3 pages. Fortunately, I didn't need a resume any | longer. | enw wrote: | > My dad is 92 and we just put him in a home. | | Can you stay healthy enough to die of old age in a regular home? | "Put him in a home" sounds so ominous and forceful. | TrackerFF wrote: | Our neighbors just moved to a home, both in their mid 90s. | Unfortunately the wife got dementia, so the husband moved with | her. | astura wrote: | People only get "put in a home" when they require around the | clock skilled medical care. Visiting nurses and the like exist | for people who need ongoing medical care but not as often. It's | usually not anyone's first choice. | yamtaddle wrote: | Dementia and/or serious motor issues will mess that up every | time, unless you've got a close family member who's willing and | able to be a full-time caregiver for years on end. | | But sure, some people avoid that through some combo of luck, | genes, and clean living. Or just die before it becomes an | issue, I guess. | Sohcahtoa82 wrote: | Yeah, my grandma has dementia, can't walk without assistance, | and basically just shits herself all the time. She lives with | my mom, but she doesn't have the energy or mental fortitude | to be the full-time caretaker she needs. She wants to put her | in a caretaking facility, but just doesn't have the energy to | research options, not to mention the money. She wants to call | my uncle and ask him to pay for it (Grandma and the uncle are | on my dad's side, but my dad passed 3 years ago), but has | basically been avoiding making that call. | | > Or just die before it becomes an issue, I guess. | | If I ever get to the point where I'm no longer living, but | merely surviving the way my grandma is, I'd sign a DNR and | make it my solution. | sandyarmstrong wrote: | My generous interpretation is that dad needs full-time care | that the family can't provide in-house. For example, | alzheimer's and dementia patients often have very particular | needs. | ilaksh wrote: | runvnc is my github. Yeah maybe I didn't word that the best. | The short version is that after my mother passed away, myself | and my sister were there full time for several months, but at | some point we couldn't handle it anymore. His memory was almost | completely gone, bodily functions often seemed to be like | torture to him, but the big issue was that he started yelling | every time we tried to move him. The hospital said it was | apparently a type of vertebral compression fractures or | something. | bee_rider wrote: | I'm not sure it is a matter of health. An relative of mine in | her upper 90's recently passed away at home -- fortunately a | number of relatives were well off enough to move nearby and | help out, and hire a nurse to check in occasionally, etc etc. | | If anything I suspect dying at your home would be easier if you | weren't very healthy. | Beltalowda wrote: | My grandfather died in his home after a short but severe | illness with round-the-clock care from the family. It was | relatively easy, as far as these sort of things are ever | "easy". | | My grandmother died a few years before that, after spending a | year in a nursing home with a less severe illness. It just | wasn't feasible to keep her at home: she couldn't really walk | any more and half the family would have to pause their lives. | I don't really know her opinion on that as we never really | had that kind of heart-to-heart relationship, but I would | certainly much rather be "put in a home" than be such a | burden. My grandfather was very happy that his end was a | swift one, so the family wouldn't have to put through a long | drawn-out ordeal again. | dlandis wrote: | Yeah, genuinely curious for how many people in their 90s that | are "put in a home", does that change end up being the right | move for them. Kind of wish the question was studied so people | could make more informed decisions. | snapetom wrote: | My dad was an electrical engineer in his home country. When he | immigrated to the US in the Seventies, he had to basically start | over because his certifications weren't recognized. He took it as | an opportunity to try and change careers, and he looked at | everything from locksmithing to programming. | | Several years ago, long after he passed, I found the C book he | used. "Hey, I know C!" I thought. It was a weird feeling to have | independently ended up in the field he strived to be in. | [deleted] | gchaincl wrote: | love the format! | jll29 wrote: | The interesting bit about this post is that with that resume, you | can still feed a family in 2022 (okay, you won't need any | assembler, and one from the set { Fortran, COBOL } will do). | | I wonder if Python and JavaScript will get you that far 50 years | from now? | bee_rider wrote: | I must be looking in the wrong places, but I don't have the | feeling that Fortran on my Resume has really helped me a ton. | Fortran is a fine language and of course "real programmers can | write a Fortran program in any language," but it is hard to | compete with the breadth of C++. | jcadam wrote: | There'll be plenty of legacy Java EE apps in need of | maintenance. Not fun work, but it'll pay. | taude wrote: | Python has been in use since before I graduated college. I | supported a code base written in Python at event Microsoft back | then (they acquired a company that wrote their product in | Python, and then ported it over to C++/COM). We all had one of | the something like 1.4 O'Reilly books, even. | | And I think one person from the team went on to | write/support/somehow be involved in Subversion SCM (which was | heavily written in Python). | | ....so Python has been around, used in product, by large | companies, for a long time. I don't see it going anywhere in | the next 20 years. | mfuzzey wrote: | I think you probably mean mercurial (hg) which is indeed | written in python. Subversion (svn) is written in C. | | Mercurial actually wasn't a bad choice at the beginning of | the DVCS era on Windows as git didn't work well on that | platform initially. | Lio wrote: | Hard to say for sure but I'd bet that Unix/Linux/Posix and SQL | skills might still be relevant. | gautamdivgi wrote: | Java probably will for application development. Python should | to with all that ML code. I don't see anyone in a hurry to move | it to Julia. C++ also, if you're in the embedded space. I know | Rust is coming but I don't think c++ is going anywhere for a | while. | arecurrence wrote: | There's so much production code in C++ that it will have a | long tail like Fortran even if people were to stop launching | new products with it. | sbf501 wrote: | Probably not. Lots of "critical" software is re-written | frequently. I met the head of IT at Target during a | presentation he gave on how they switched from PHP to NodeJS | (~2012). I took a year to migrate the entire ERP solution to | NodeJS (plus frontend). | | Just like that, PHP was gone. | | If the entire ERP can be re-written that quickly, then if a | better language comes along, it will displace the Node infra. | | What didn't change? SQL. | utexaspunk wrote: | SQL is pretty darn perfect for its purpose. As long as | databases exist, SQL will exist. It is also super easy and | intuitive to learn- I taught myself and it has been my bread | and butter for the ~17 years since . | wyattpeak wrote: | One day, long after I'm gone, people will finally accept that | Python and JavaScript are no longer young languages. | | JavaScript is 26 years old, Python is 31. They both continue to | grow in importance year-on-year, JavaScript because there is | nothing on the horizon which will plausibly replace it, and | Python because a large number of industries and programmers | genuinely love it. | | I think there's a nontrivial chance they'll both still be | languages of primary importance in 50 years, but I'd bet my | bottom dollar that they'll at least remain as relics yet | needing support the way Fortran and COBOL exist today. | greyhair wrote: | Python3 yes, but Python2 will have faded away. | | Perl! Oh, poor Perl. | | Python 3, or its children, will be around a long time. As | will some version of /bin/sh | kjs3 wrote: | Yes, Perl certainly took an odd turn on their 'next gen | version of the language' journey, but I'm willing to bet | there will be a Perl community running 5.247.2 or some such | decades from now, alongside sh, awk & sed. | still_grokking wrote: | > As will some version of /bin/sh | | I hope not! | | That's one of the things I pray every day to go away. (Even | I don't believe in any gods, and am a Linux-only user for | the last 20 years). | | The Unix shell language is one of the most horrific legacy | technologies that are still around. I really wish it dies | soon(tm) and gets replaced finally by something sane! | sergiotapia wrote: | Why did Python win the war with Ruby? Was it purely the math | community deciding this is where we throw our weight and left | Ruby the runt of the litter? | Shorel wrote: | Performance. | | So many people say it doesn't matter. Until it does. | | Python works around it by having so many libraries built in | C or C++. | still_grokking wrote: | > Python works around it by having so many libraries | built in C or C++. | | Which works quite fine, until it doesn't. | | By than the needed rewrite in some language that delivers | decent performance and safety all over the place in one | package will be very expensive. | | I'm not saying that you should avoid Python (and its | native code kludge) altogether but when using it just | pray that you never reach that point mentioned above. | It's a dead end and will likely require an almost full | rewrite of a grown, business critical (and already | heavily optimized) application. | Sohcahtoa82 wrote: | I knew Python decently well before I ever played with Ruby. | | Ruby to me feels like a very ugly version of Python. It's | like Python and Perl had a baby, and I have very strong | negative opinions of Perl's syntax. It baffles me how a | language that people jokingly refer to as a "write-only" | language ever got any sort of ground. | yamtaddle wrote: | The libraries. Ruby has Rails. Python has... everything | else (plus Django, so it also _kinda_ has "a Rails"). | You'll likely be using something less well-maintained and | shakier if you use Ruby outside of Rails stuff, than if | you'd picked Python. Python's basically the modern Perl. | | Why _that_ all happened, IDK. | | I write that as someone with a soft spot for non-Rails Ruby | (after much consideration and repeated encounters, I kinda | hate Rails). But it's rarely the best choice, | unfortunately. | systemvoltage wrote: | I genuinely love Python. Not in a shallow feature-to- | feature way. But deeply that it has enabled a career and | provides a livelihood to me and my family. It puts bread | on the table. It taught me how to program and it taught | me the power of computers. | | Life changing tool. No other tool in my house comes close | to what computers + python has done in my life. | yamtaddle wrote: | Oh, I like it too. It's got problems like most languages | that see any actual use, but it's totally OK, even good. | I didn't intend my post as a put-down of Python, so if it | came off that way--whoops, not what I was going for. | chestervonwinch wrote: | > Why that all happened, IDK. | | I'd reckon the parent's suspicion about the scientific | community is correct in that it was a large influence. | When ML and deep learning blew up, the academic Python | community was in a great position -- you had numpy and | scipy early on (both optionally BLAS and LAPACK btw), | then scikit-learn for ML, matplotlib for plotting | results, open CV ports, etc. As for why Python was | adopted so early by the scientific community, I'm not | sure. Maybe because it was a scripting language that was | also very friendly for hooking to C and Fortran? | mattbillenstein wrote: | I kinda hate Django (ducks). The data model being so | intricately tied to the business logic makes it | impossible to refactor. | bushbaba wrote: | Python is easier to use if you come from a C/C++ style | coding background. | azangru wrote: | Could you point out specific parts of python that are | easier for someone with C/C++ background as opposed to | Ruby? I remember starting with Ruby (after rudimentary | CS50-level C), and finding it quite reasonable and | logical, and nicer than python. I still think it's nicer | than python, although I've long since stopped using it. | shagie wrote: | I believe the issue isn't so much "vanilla python" vs | "vanilla ruby" for a developer coming from a C background | but rather that ruby's programming style leads to a | significant bit of meta programming which (aside from | being a bit of a challenge to get one's head around) | leads various shops and frameworks having built their own | DSL for writing ruby. | | Open classes give me the security heebie jeebies. | irb(main):001:0> "foo".bar (irb):1:in `<main>': | undefined method `bar' for "foo":String (NoMethodError) | from /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/3.1.0/gems/irb-1.4.1/exe/ir | b:11:in `<top (required)>' from | /usr/local/bin/irb:25:in `load' from | /usr/local/bin/irb:25:in `<main>' | irb(main):002:1* class String irb(main):003:2* | def bar irb(main):004:2* "foobar!" | irb(main):005:1* end irb(main):006:0> end | => :bar irb(main):007:0> "foo".bar => | "foobar!" irb(main):008:0> | | On one hand, that's really neat. On the other hand, the | ability to add or modify a method in a system class is | not something that I'd want near production code. I'm | sure that other orgs have sufficient checks and style | guide to prevent something from creeping in... but that | sort of flexibility in the language is something that I'd | prefer to stay away from if I want to be able to reason | about ruby code. | | See also Ruby Conf 2011 Keeping Ruby Reasonable by Joshua | Ballanco https://youtu.be/vbX5BVCKiNs which gets into | first class environments and closures. | adriand wrote: | I also think it is easier to use, period. I've used Ruby | professionally since the Rails 1 days, and still program | in it most days. A couple of years ago, while working at | an AI company, I helped out on an ML project due to a | time crunch, and I needed to use Python to contribute. I | wasn't asked to do anything ML-specific, but rather help | by building out infrastructure and data processing | pipelines, i.e. the stuff that used the ML models. | | I'd never used Python before but within a couple of hours | I was writing code and in less than a week I'd engineered | a pretty slick, very robust pipeline. I was quite | honestly fairly astonished at how quickly I became | productive in the language. | | I could be wrong about this (my experience with Python | started and stopped in that one week) but the impression | I got was that Python is smaller, more constrained (i.e. | fewer ways to do the same thing), and syntactically less | complex. | choppsv1 wrote: | Python is easier to use if you come from almost any | background, programming or not. I believe this is | primarily b/c there isn't a lot of "special syntax" in | Python, it's all very explicit and common. The same is | not true with Ruby. | bredren wrote: | Growth of data science and AI/ML saved Python from being | over leveraged on web dev backends. | | I'd say also it was more at war with node until data | science took off. | Izkata wrote: | Node didn't even exist yet when python and ruby were in | competition. | eesmith wrote: | It was already in wide use for scientific computing by | 2000, due to the comparative ease of writing interfaces | to C code. The main idea was to use Python as a glue | language to "steer" high-performance computing. | | The Python/C API was easy to learn and use, Python's | reference counts worked well for C-based objects, and it | was easier to build non-trivial data structures than Perl | or Tcl, which were its two main competitors at the time. | | (Tcl extensions required manual garbage cleanup, I | remember Perl's extension API as being rather complex, | and I had to read the Advanced Perl manual to understand | something as simple as having a list of dictionaries.) | tech_tuna wrote: | It's funny, you don't hear much about the Python/Ruby war | anymore. Python was more of a general purpose language and | had decent web frameworks (Django and Flask primarily). | Ruby's main claim to fame was, and still is, Rails. Rails | has lost a bit of steam over the years, partly due to | node.js and the microservice revolution, so to speak. If | anything, Sinatra is a better fit for microservices and | yes, sure microservices aren't a perfect fit for all use | cases, but they do exist now and are reasonably popular | compared to when Rails first came out. | | Additionally, Python made significant inroads as a | teaching/academic language and a scientific/math/ML | language. | | Way back in 2004, I had been using C/C++, Java and Perl and | was ready for something new and useful. I'd heard about | Ruby and Python at that point and tried both. Ruby felt too | much like Perl for my tastes (no surprise, it's kind of | like OO Perl) and while I didn't love the significant | whitespace in Python, it just looked cleaner and simpler to | me. | | I have been using Python off and on ever since. I have | worked with Ruby a bit as well. What's funny is that they | are fairly similar and I've long argued that the two | language communities would be better and stronger if they | "joined forces". | | But of course people have strong opinions about programming | languages. Myself personally, I like Python a lot more than | Ruby, but I've been using Go for a few years now and it's | my current language of choice. | azangru wrote: | Ruby was very much general-purpose. Homebrew was written | in Ruby. Vagrant was written in Ruby. | tech_tuna wrote: | True, but Python became more popular as a general purpose | language. For example, Python starting shipping in most | Linux distributions sometime in the late 2000s, Ruby did | not. | | I didn't mean to imply that Ruby isn't or can't be a | general purpose language. | jacobr1 wrote: | > there is nothing on the horizon which will plausibly | replace it | | I'm not going to be making any bets - but the one project | that has possibility is WASM. A mature, polyglot ecosystem on | top of WASM runtimes with web-apis seem like it could | displace JS in browser as #1. | chrisco255 wrote: | Probably not. Unless you're rendering to another target | besides the DOM (ie canvas) I doubt you see JS displacement | as #1 in the browser. JS is not the performance bottleneck, | the DOM itself is. And in the meantime, you've got 25 years | of example code, component libraries, talent development, | dev productivity tooling, browser integration, etc built up | around it. | | And unlike other operating systems, the browser does not | give you any kind of standard library of reasonably good | components to build on. So the sheer size and volume of | components and the ecosystem built up around npm well be an | uphill battle for any WASM target language to compete with. | still_grokking wrote: | Almost no languages run as WASM. | | This is not likely to change anytime soon (if ever), as | nobody is working on this, and there is even quite strong | opposition to get features in that are fundamentally needed | to run anything else than the very few languages that | already compile to WASM. ("Nobody" is interested in | invalidating their investment in JS ;-)). | | Also WASM is actually slow, or better said, "it does not | deliver its full potential". | | It will need advanced JIT compilers to keep up with the | other two mayor VM langues. But in this regard WASM is | behind around 20 years of constant development and | improvement. | | My strongest hopes in this regard are currently with | Microsoft (even I don't trust this company at all!), who | are indeed interested to run their CLR stuff in a WASM VM, | and could probably deliver on the needed features. But | then, when you would run a CLR-VM (or a JVM) on top of a | WASM VM, you know, you're building just the next | Matryoshka... There are no real benefits to that besides | "look mom, it runs in the browser". | dspillett wrote: | > people will finally accept that Python and JavaScript are | no longer young languages | | > JavaScript is 26 years old, Python is 31 | | I can't speak for Python, but Javascript has changed1 | massively in recent years, more so (I expect) than Fortran or | COBOL every did in their active history. It could be argued | that what we have now is a younger language with the same | name. | | > but I'd bet my bottom dollar that they'll at least remain | as relics yet needing support | | This I definitely agree with, though I suspect less so than | Fortran/COBOL/similar. It is much cheaper to rebuild these | days, and so many other things change around your projects2, | and there are more forces pushing for change such as a legion | of external security concerns. That will add up to there | being far fewer projects3 left to be maintained that haven't | been redone in something new, because they fall into the | comfy gap between the cushions of "it still works, don't | touch it" and "it is far more hassle to replace than to live | with as-is". | | ---- | | [1] the core language is still the same, but there is so much | wrapped around it from the last decade or so that I suspect | someone who learned it fresh recently would struggle | initially on EcmaScript 3 or before/equivalent. | | [2] where a Fortan/COBOL project might live for all its | decades on the same hardware using the same library versions. | | [4] no _absolutely_ fewer of course, but relative to the | number of people capable of working on them - much of the | price commanded by legacy COBOL work is due to very few | having trained on the language in decades and many of those | that did earlier being fully not-coming-back-for-any-price | retired or no longer capable at all (infirm or entirely off | this mortal coil), so those remaining in appropriate health | and available are in demand despite a relatively small number | of live projects. | shagie wrote: | Fortran77 vs Fortran90 were fairly different languages that | required a substantial revision to the numerical methods | assignments that I had in the early 90s as the department | shifted from one to the other. | | https://www.nsc.liu.se/~boein/f77to90/f77to90.html | | > There are now two forms of the source code. The old | source code form, which is based on the punched card, and | now called fixed form and the new free form. | | > ... | | > A completely new capability of Fortran 90 is recursion. | Note that it requires that you assign a new property RESULT | to the output variable in the function declaration. This | output variable is required inside the function as the | "old" function name in order to store the value of the | function. At the actual call of the function, both | externally and internally, you use the outer or "old" | function name. The user can therefore ignore the output | variable. | ndr wrote: | > but Javascript has changed1 massively in recent years | | Does anyone have any good resource to learn modern | JavaScript? Not any of the weekly js framework, but the | updated language, capabilities and patterns. | lancebeet wrote: | I can recommend Gary Bernhardt's execute program[0]. One | of the courses offered is "Modern Javascript" which goes | through additions in ES5 and ES2020. There are also | multiple courses on typescript. It does cost some money, | but there are occasionally special offers. | | [0] https://www.executeprogram.com/ | lelandfe wrote: | I have found https://javascript.info/ to be a good | resource for both learning and reference around modern | JS. I visit it instead of MDN with regularity for | practical examples of JS features. | | The grammar can be a bit spotty in places - but it is | open source and has gotten a lot better. | kjs3 wrote: | Yes...Fortran at least has changed a _lot_ since inception. | There 's been Fortran 90, 95, 2003, 2008 & 2018 standards | since to keep up with the various industry fads of the time | (You want OO Fortran? Sure thing.). You can get a good | overview of Fortran features from inception through the | 2008 standard in the paper "The Seven Ages of Fortran" by | Michael Metcalf or on the Fortran wiki | (https://fortranwiki.org/fortran/show/Standards). | latchkey wrote: | I've been writing code professionally for over 25 years now | (and I'm 49). I feel like I could keep writing code for the | rest of my life. | | 50 years doesn't sound like that long. | dn3500 wrote: | I wrote code professionally for 40 years before retiring. | Toward the end I was also doing a lot of non-code crap but I | always resisted the push toward any kind of management. I am | quite happy at how my career turned out. | bitwize wrote: | It's not. | | Hug your parents, spend time with your family. If you must | code, do so on something you really feel strongly about from | here on out. | latchkey wrote: | Funny enough, I did exactly that. During covid, I bought | the dip and moved to a place that is 100' away from my dads | house. I get to see him every day now. I feel very lucky. | shubhamjain wrote: | > I wonder if Python and JavaScript will get you that far 50 | years from now? | | AngularJS itself singularly powers surprisingly large number of | Enterprise applications. So even assuming the unlikely scenario | that those languages are dead, and the only useful work is from | dinosaurian companies who was too slow to switch, the answer | would still be yes. :) | sergiotapia wrote: | Excellent thank you so much for sharing this glimpse into our | past. | karaterobot wrote: | I have a similar one for myself, let me scan in it: | Front-end ninja 2006-2010 Full-stack unicorn | 2010-present Follow me on twitter | | Times have really changed I guess. | jenscow wrote: | Junior Developer 2020-2021 Senior Developer | 2021-present GitHub repos 387 | Test0129 wrote: | Ah classic mistake. This will never pass the automated review | because you forgot "like, comment, and subscribe!" | atmosx wrote: | Amazing :D | | thanks for sharing! | edfletcher_t137 wrote: | This is lovely and extremely interesting, thank you for sharing. | Thinking of your father and your family. | mud_dauber wrote: | I nearly switched from EE to CS, but decided against it after my | first Fortran class. I had the semi-mythical shoebox of | punchcards too - walking to the other end of campus was an | exercise in fear. | purpleflame1257 wrote: | It's a shame he just went into a home, because we could always | use some COBOL programmers. | spywaregorilla wrote: | Why does he call out that he is 5'4" I wonder? | | The "Health: Excellent" seems amusing in today's context too. | AlmostAnyone wrote: | I've been to a military museum few days ago and I was surprised | how incredibly small some of the cockpits are. I'm 6'3" and | wouldn't fit in most of the fighter jets and other vehicles. | Not that I wouldn't be comfortable with my legs pushed to | something - my shoulders are literally too wide to get in, my | thighs/ass are too wide to even try sitting there. Might be a | problem for aerospace tech. | | And don't get me started on spaceships/capsules - I don't have | any particular fear of confined spaces but this was a little | too much (too less?). | FredPret wrote: | One day the cockpit will be the size of a microchip and then | nobody would fit in there! | ericbarrett wrote: | The New Mexico Museum of Space History has a Mercury capsule | you can sit in. Even with most of the equipment removed (just | the control panel and a bench) it's incredibly | claustrophobic. To be strapped into that thing with full | equipment, in a flight suit, on your back over tons of | explosives, and launched into space for day or even a few | minutes...I can't imagine. | taude wrote: | Your comments made me wonder if there were height | restrictions, found this verbiage on US Airforce site: | | "For pilot and aircrew positions, height specifications vary | by aircraft and most applicants can successfully pursue a | career in aviation with the U.S. Air Force. Applicants who | are significantly taller or shorter than average may require | special screening to ensure they can safely perform | operational duties. Applicants of all heights are encouraged | to apply." | mtnops wrote: | Former USAF pilot candidate: there are physiological | reasons specific to high-G maneuvering in fighter jets that | taller people are disqualified for as well. Shorter people | have less challenges with GLOC or loss of consciousness. | aidenn0 wrote: | Yes, but it's the military. They recruit people by | convincing them they all will be fighter pilots and then a | lot of them end up ground crew. | onychomys wrote: | When I was an undergrad I thought about seeing what it | would take to be an astronaut. Turns out that the largest | spacesuit they made back then was 6', so even if I had Buzz | Aldrin's CV I wouldn't have been able to go. | tbihl wrote: | If you think much about the different platforms, it makes | perfect sense that there are specific and varied | requirements. Presumably they're pretty flexible about who | flies a C-5, considering it's big enough to carry Chinooks | or M-1 tanks [0]. OTOH, ejecting out of a fighter jet | probably doesn't go very well if your knees are smashed up | against the dashboard. | | [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_C-5_Galaxy | aidenn0 wrote: | Sitting height is just as important for safe ejections as | leg length. My dad was 5'10" but with a tall sitting | height and he was just barely under the safety line for a | seat in an S-3. | metadat wrote: | Having short limbs and a long body can indicate the | presence of a medical condition known as | "Hypochrondroplasia". | | > Hypochrondroplasia is a genetic disorder characterized | by small stature and disproportionately short arms, legs, | hands, and feet (short-limbed dwarfism). Short stature | often is not recognized until early to mid childhood or, | in some cases, as late as adulthood. | thesuitonym wrote: | There were in the 80s, my dad wanted to join the Air Force | as a pilot but was told he could never be one, he was too | tall. | dijit wrote: | In my youth my mum said that I need to eat all my veggies | to become tall and strong which would be required if I | wanted to be an astronaut. | | I found it extremely amusing that in reality there are | height _restrictions_ for astronauts, and there is no | height minimum. | emptybits wrote: | 1. This is an "old" resume. I'm not as old as OP's dad but I | definitely recall putting my gender, height, probably weight, | definitely "health: excellent", etc. on my resumes in the | 1980s. Different times. Times of discrimination? Probably. :-/ | | 2. As others point out, this gentleman was in aerospace and | even though he wasn't a pilot, here's a fun fact for the | morning ... I watched a documentary on the early years of | fighter pilot selection and grooming. Russia apparently | recognized and exploited the value of a short heart-brain | distance in its pilots. If I recall correctly, pilots with | shorter distances between heart and brain can pull higher G's | (or maybe negative G's) before browning or blacking out in | certain maneuvers. It makes sense when you think about it. So | if you're an air force looking for every edge you can, you | might select for this trait. Shorter men (specifically, shorter | sitting height: reasonably correlated with heart-brain | distance). Also some women, I would expect. Anyways, this is | probably not why OP's dad shared his height, but sharing a | possible TIL as it was for me... :-) | jean_tta wrote: | This is pure speculation, but I would guess it was simply | expected information at the time. In some countries, it is | still expected or at least common to see information such as: a | portrait ; date and place of birth ; marital situation and | number of children ; and so on. | j33zusjuice wrote: | What!? Some countries force you to state your marital and | familial situations!? That's insane. It's illegal for | companies in the US to ask about that stuff. | | That said, some other people pointed out he had a | military/aeronautical background, so height and health might | come into play for certain jobs. That makes sense to me. You | probably can't work in the cockpit of a plane if you're 7 | feet tall. | uri4 wrote: | jefftk wrote: | In the application process? | jean_tta wrote: | It's not _forced_, but it is common that applicants include | this information. | inanutshellus wrote: | Friend worked for the military overseas. Locals would send | in resumes and include details such as their social caste | and were horrified (or delighted, depending) when that | information was redacted before being sent to hiring folk. | | On the upside, it apparently became an upward mobility | avenue for "low caste" folk who would otherwise not be | considered for valuable positions. | spywaregorilla wrote: | > On the upside, it apparently became an upward mobility | avenue for "low caste" folk who would otherwise not be | considered for valuable positions. | | I mean... yeah. Absolutely. That is a huge obvious | upside, and as far as I can tell, there are no downsides | to this at all. | inanutshellus wrote: | The downside is clear if you're upper-caste, but my point | was to reinforce the (challenged) statement that over- | sharing in other cultures is both commonplace and | intentional. | snorkel wrote: | If we were to modernize that "Health: Excellent (for sitting in | front of a screen all day)" | daveslash wrote: | I've been reviewing a lot of resume's lately that call out the | candidate's exact date of birth and marital status. Many even | call out their parents' occupation. I've seen more than one | that say _" Mother's Occupation: Homemaker"_. | | Although I now realize this is a cultural difference issue, it | caught me off guard at first. | noodlesUK wrote: | Which country/region are these resumes from? I would be very | surprised to see something like that on a U.S. or UK | resume/CV. I know that it's quite common for photos and | personal details to be on CVs in parts of continental Europe | though. | aasasd wrote: | My bet is on India or thereabouts. | daveslash wrote: | You are correct. | chrisseaton wrote: | > Many even call out their parents' occupation. | | Are those German resumes? Very odd. Can't be used for | anything except discrimination. | morelisp wrote: | I've looked at a ton of German resumes and never seen this. | Only once on someone from (and at the time of writing, in) | South Asia. | | (German resumes frequently do have familial status though, | and of course always with the fucking photographs...) | chrisseaton wrote: | For example | https://german.dartmouth.edu/opportunities/working- | germany/w... mentions family info, which seems bizarre to | British and US people, as it's not something a candidate | can control, so it seems unfair to discriminate based on | this. I know German culture is different of course. | still_grokking wrote: | The provided link was fun to read (as a German). Personal | highlights: | | > German employers simply don't know what to make of an | Art History major who wants to take a temporary job in an | accounting firm before going on to medical school. | | I'm still laughing. | | I guess actually nobody knows what to make of an Art | History major in the first place. That's one of the | typical things one would study if your only plan in live | is to become "a wife" (OK, today maybe also "a husband"), | or when you have absolutely no clue what you want to do | and need additional time to orientate. | | Also nobody would hire an Art History major to do an | accounting job. Never ever! | | That's just ridiculous. You need professional training in | accounting if you like to do accounting. | | And going to medical school _after_ getting an Art | History major? Alone the idea is even more ridiculous | than the idea that you could do an accounting job with an | Art History major... You need almost teen years to become | a full medic. Also getting into some of these | universities require that you stand in line for quite | some time, and have absolute top grades form school. The | people that consider going for Art History study aren 't | the ones that would have any realistic chance to ever | attend (a German) medical university. | | So alone that sentence above is actually a kind of joke. | But that's not everything funny in there. | | > They may neither know what the Ivy League is nor know | which university is more prestigious than another. | | > In Germany, where you went to school is largely | irrelevant. | | Jop. And that's a _big advantage_! | | Maybe not out of the perspective of some Dartmouth | scholars, but most people on this planet agree that the | anglo-saxon system for higher education is just complete | madness. | | The whole Bologna Process BS (which is modeled by the | anglo-saxon madness) _significantly_ decreased the | quality of German 's higher education, and at the same | time almost invalidated the achievement of possessing an | university diploma. Now everybody can get some "Art | History Bachelor" degree, or some crap like that... | | I strongly hope that we'll stop that madness at some | point before our education finally hits the lows of the | anglo-saxon equivalent! | | There was a time that a German "Dipl.-Ing." or "Dr." | title had some meaning. What you get nowadays with most | "master" students are people that would _miserably_ fail | at "Vordiplom"... Also, "everybody" and his dog has a | "bachelor degree" which makes it actually useless (and | made just "regular school" out of university). | mardifoufs wrote: | This makes no sense. If anything, "anglosaxon" countries | are much less obsessed about prestigious schools than | places like say, France. So to portray it as a uniquely | anglosaxon trait doesn't make sense. | | Also, german higher education is meh at best. Even beyond | rankings, german universities are usually well in the | middle of pack at best, in almost every quantifiable | metric. Though putting the blame on the anglos for that | is... very typically german I guess. | still_grokking wrote: | > Though putting the blame on the anglos for that is... | very typically german I guess. | | I'm not putting blame on anybody. (I wouldn't be here, or | wouldn't have even learned the language if I wouldn't | enjoy being with the "anglo people" as such ;-)). | | I've said that the standards were undoubtedly much higher | before the "Bologna Process", which adapted the German | system in most parts to the anglo-saxon model, for net | negative gains, imho. | muffinman26 wrote: | Amusingly enough, my German-as-a-foreign-language teacher | had a degree in Art History and made great use of it. Of | course, the relevant part for her resume was that she had | a Art History degree from a German university conducted | in German as a US-native. It demonstrated a much higher | degree of language proficiency than the average foreign- | language teacher at a high school in the US and gave her | classes a unique twist. | | The US (although not the UK) college system values taking | multiple paths early on, especially for MDs and JDs, so | an Art History major isn't completely absurd. At the | university I went to, pre-med was a list of classes, but | you couldn't select it as a major. Most students would | major in something related, like biology, to maximize the | overlap in classes, but a Classics major (with a heavy | focus on learning Greek and Latin to help with medical | terms) was considered a rare but very viable option. | | That said, I think the greatest strength of the German | education system is its trade schools. The US trade | school system is much more ad hoc. Most jobs/problems | don't need the heavy theory of a graduate degree, and | honestly I think both the US and Germany could use fewer | PhDs and more people with practical skills. | chrisseaton wrote: | I did a CS degree in the UK and took Latin in my first | year! | chrisseaton wrote: | > I strongly hope that we'll stop that madness at some | point before our education finally hits the lows of the | anglo-saxon equivalent! | | Don't British and US universities significantly | outperform German universities according to most | rankings? I think there's just one Germany institution in | the QS top 50 and it's... 50th. | zwaps wrote: | Family info in this context means whether you are married | and have children or not | chrisseaton wrote: | What relevance does that have to do on whether you can do | your job or not, though? | | And here's another example of specifically parent | occupation: | | https://qz.com/1055416/americans-would-be-shocked-by- | common-... | morelisp wrote: | While that site is basically correctly, "not that long | ago" should be interpreted more like "within post-war | era", not "a few years ago". | | Photo yes, Familienstand yes still today for conservative | companies, parents occupations not since probably the 80s | in most places that would consider foreigners at all. | | (It is, as you say, all fairly obvious bullshit designed | to make sure the right social class gets preferential | treatment...) | gsich wrote: | Paid parental leave maybe? | | Also if you have children you might be absent because | they are sick and whatnot. | | So yes probably discrimination. | elteto wrote: | He is coming from an aerospace/military background so I assume | he is providing this information in case the job requires | working in confined spaces and/or lifting weights or other | physically strenuous exercise. | ghaff wrote: | Health: Excellent was also just pretty common to stick on | resumes in that era. | jakeinspace wrote: | Military | larrywright wrote: | Going back a little farther it was not uncommon to list your | religion and what church you were a member of. Going back a | little farther than that, if you were a candidate for an | executive position at a company, they might interview your | spouse as well. | jpmattia wrote: | My first real job was 1986: Having a "stable" personal life was | something employers would "need" to know. And god help you if | there was a gap on your resume; it was advertising your | deviancy. | | Such attitudes all changed drastically just around that time, | not in small part because the demand for EE and CS people | started outstripping the supply. | quijoteuniv wrote: | On my greatgrandfather inmigrations documents it stated that he | could drive horse wagons. He was not able to drive a car yet :) | bradhe wrote: | Imagine the changes they saw between 1956 and 1980...that'd be so | amazing. | coss wrote: | Sorry must be at least 5'10. | rmnclmnt wrote: | Can we bring back this form of resume, please? Information is | clearly organized, easy to read, easy to remember. | | No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colored backgrounds, | unreadable fonts, and whatnot... | jimmaswell wrote: | My experience from around 2017: Today's employers just don't | like good simple resumes for some reason. They expect you to be | a graphic designer to even look at it. I had a clearly | formatted, simple resume and had a 0% success rate (besides one | offer for 30k which was an insult) after hundreds of | applications coming out of college to places far and wide or | local, until a recruiter for a consultancy company cold | contacted me. People online lombasted my resume for not being | fancy enough. I still think it's an example of a perfect resume | personally. Doesn't matter anymore thankfully now that I have a | great job I want to stay in. | | Found a picture of it for reference, plus or minus minor tweaks | depending on the company: https://external- | preview.redd.it/Sfx4gvcEZXKXr8cxBseyyW2ycGP... | | Certainly far above average chops for an entry level applicant | so I don't know what every employer's problem was. Much harder | world for junior developers than anyone would make you think if | even I had that much trouble. I was legitimately scared I had | no future outside of fast food for a while there. | Firmwarrior wrote: | Ah, I had the same experience as you when I graduated | | People will offer all sorts of wacky feedback about resumes | when prompted, but the real issue is that recruiters just | don't look at or care about resumes that much. For my last | few jobs I just sent an unformatted text file as my resume, | one that would make dist1ll's eyes bleed. The most recent | recruiter was actually angry at me for how "unprofessional" | he thought my resume was, but the decision was out of his | hands. | | You have to network your way into a job. Put out feelers to | friends, family, friends' families, professors, professors' | friends, etc. A referral will jet you past the recruiter's | filters and get you a real shot at a job. | jimmaswell wrote: | > You have to network your way into a job. | | Not necessarily, but it does make it easier if you have | that opportunity. Places like Tata are good for someone | with no connections to get a footing. | Bakary wrote: | You don't need it to be fancy, you just need to be one step | above the raw Word appearance you have there. It's the | equivalent of having the same pair of pants but it fits you. | But as you've said it's moot now that you have a job. | jimmaswell wrote: | The OP resume looks like a raw typewriter document to me. I | don't understand what value it brings to go beyond - it's | nothing but a tool to convey your skills and experience. | Bakary wrote: | Dumb things such as having a tiny bit of color or a | slightly less basic format can make or break you when the | recruiter/hirer is sifting through the pile. Besides, it | takes all of ten minutes to do this and be done with it. | | It's like fashion. Arbitrary but just having the basics | understood goes such a long way professionally and | socially compared to the effort expended | jimmaswell wrote: | Maybe this is a good use case for AI. Write your resume | then let AI rewrite it to be aesthetically pleasing to | resume readers. | | People like my interior decorating, I can appreciate | other things that are aesthetically pleasing, and I've | made my share of actual art. I just don't think I have it | in me to understand whatever in the world is going | through someone's mind when they're displeased with this | resume. It's a missing faculty like blindness or tone | deafness. When I get a resume or an email I just read it, | I don't sit there and hem and haw over how many pixels | the bullet point is indented or whatever it is. | | This is why resumes should be abolished entirely and | replaced by a standardized database you put your | experience and skillset into. Anything an employer wants | to know has to go in a standardized field. No | discrimination can possibly occur based on your ability | to format a piece of paper according to invisible, | unpredictable metrics that you might have no faculty for | and have no bearing on your ability to do the job. | dist1ll wrote: | There are many problems with your resume, and lack of fancy | design is not one of them. | | - Half of your CV is empty space | | - Dates are formatted really badly, no one would be able to | get a good grasp on your project and work timeline quickly | | - You have a game project that spans several years, and you | sum it up into one sentence. Why are you doing that? It's one | of your main selling points, and you don't expand enough on | it. | | - The prioritization is not sound. I'm reading about your | proficiency with vim (pretty much irrelevant) before I even | know your work history. | | - You mention Linux administration. That's pretty broad. You | should specify more. Did you deal with network config? | systemd? FUSE? | | Overall your resume looks lackluster, unprofessional and | bare-minimum. It's been more than 7 years now, and you still | see nothing wrong with it? Sorry if that sounds harsh, but | I'm doing you a favor by giving you a reality check. | jimmaswell wrote: | If I got this resume from a junior I would hire them | assuming the interview went decently. | | Half is empty - just graduated, can't expect that much | stuff to put there. | | Maybe I should have expanded more on the game but I was | getting the impression nobody cared that much about | personal projects. | | The very first two things you do with a resume are match up | the list of technical skills with the list of tech in your | position requirements, and check the education requirement. | That's why those two go at the top. | | I'd dealt with a lot of config issues running Debian on | various hardware in high school as well as installing it, | dealing with apt, understanding chron, a lot of basic | things. I don't think systemd was much of a thing yet. | | I still fundamentally disagree that the resume is bad. | Again, I'd hire this person, and I'm saying that as someone | who's done interviews and hired people now. | PragmaticPulp wrote: | > No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colored backgrounds, | unreadable fonts, and whatnot... | | I read a lot of resumes. Honestly, the number of quirky over- | designed resumes I see is probably 1 in 50. | | The vast majority of people do submit clearly organized resumes | based on a template they found. | | The reason those quirky over-designed resumes get shared on HN | or other social media is because they're different, not because | they're common. | jcadam wrote: | I eventually gave up on Word templates and now keep my resume | in LaTeX. Neat and organized - not unlike this example only | with more detail and nicer fonts :) | | Occasionally a recruiter will ask/demand I give it to them in | MS Word - I've learned it's always a bad idea to give | recruiter a resume in an easily editable format. | mmmpop wrote: | googlryas wrote: | I got that request once - I just took a screenshot of my | tex rendered resume and made it full page in word. | | I actually got an interview - I never followed up, but I | thought maybe they had a security policy against opening | PDFs or something. | oslem wrote: | I'm assuming you're concerned with resume manipulation? Or | is there another reason you prefer to submit your resume in | a non-editable format? | dsr_ wrote: | I see obviously not-the-original resumes from basically | every recruiter. If you tell a recruiter "we need someone | with senior FOOlang experience", the next day there will | be six resumes, one of which has an organic "brought in | FOOlang to orchestrate object frackers, reducing | development time" and five of which have "N years | FOOLAND" inserted into a Skills section in a different | font. | lake_vincent wrote: | This is interesting...what do you suspect is behind this? | Do recruiters just tell candidates "Hey, make sure to put | FOOlang on your resume before you apply to this job." | dsr_ wrote: | No, I'm strongly implying that many recruiters will just | change resumes with minimal regard for the truth. Note | the difference between FOOlang and FOOLAND, among other | things... | lake_vincent wrote: | Woah, that is way more insidious than I was expecting. I | get what you mean now, and that just seems really stupid | on the recruiter's part. Doesn't it come out during the | interview process if there's BS on the resume? | | But I'm guessing that's your point, right? Because the | hiring manager should notice, and the interview process | should screen for it, so this must be a symptom of much | larger scale dysfunction in the tech recruiting/hiring | space. | dsr_ wrote: | In the best case scenario, the recruiter called up twenty | prospects and said "Quick question -- have you worked | with FOOLAND?" | | "You mean FOOlang? Yeah, a little." | | "And what jobs did you have when you did that?" | | "Uh, I learned a little about FOOlang in the job I had | from 2010-2012, and then it came up again in the job in | 2015." | | "Thanks! I think I'll have something for you tomorrow." | | And then the recruiter edits "Skills" to include six | years of the still-misheard FOOLAND. | | Everything else is worse. | xeromal wrote: | Resume manipulation is actually more common than you | think if you go through a 3rd party recruiter, the ones | that cold call you for jobs. | | They usually strip the content from it and drop it into a | container resume that has their details so that they get | credit from the hire I assume. lol. That being said, | whatever the poster was doing to stop the resume from | being edited is moot. They will just copy the content | from the PDF and paste it into a new one. | jcadam wrote: | Yep, I've been surprised by the contents of my resume at | an interview set up by a recruiter once. | | "It says on your resume you have extensive experience in | X." | | "I do not." | | They also have a thing for stripping your name and | contact details out and pasting their ugly letterhead | over the top. Which I suppose they could still do with a | PDF if they have Acrobat Pro. | bitwize wrote: | They only "came across" your resume -- similar to how San | Franciscans come across turds. 99 times out of 100 they | didn't even bother to read it. | Beltalowda wrote: | > They also have a thing for stripping your name and | contact details out | | This makes some amount of sense because they want to | avoid the company bypassing the recruiter and their | commission. I was once hired like this (although I didn't | know it until much later, when the owner told me). I | think it's a realistic and reasonable fear. | | I have a "redacted" version of my CV for this purpose | which removes the personal information, but I can't | recall I ever actually used it since I haven't really | used recruiters for a decade. | quadrifoliate wrote: | Yeah, I usually move on from these recruiters. | | "Can you send it to me as a Word file?"-style recruiters | have always been correlated with a poor experience for me. | AlbertCory wrote: | I just downloaded the MS annual report (don't ask why) | which is in Word, naturally, and it was marked "Final" just | to discourage / prevent editing. | | I have no idea how hard it is to get around that, but | probably too hard for most headhunters. | rr888 wrote: | Sounds like you dont have a culture where docs with "2022 | Budget FINAL v2 - my copy (3).xls" aren't normal :) | AlbertCory wrote: | No, indeed I don't. | | So enlighten me, since I don't use Word much: if you mark | your resume "Final" and a headhunter wants to "improve" | it, what do they need to do? | AlbertCory wrote: | I just answered my own question, since I had the MS | report in Word. | | I was hoping I'd have to supply a password to edit it, | which would be a somewhat reasonable level of security. | But no; you just click "edit anyway." Duh. | LtWorf wrote: | Unmark it? :D | | In some pdf readers there is an option "respect | limitations"... by disabling it you can print even when | print is disallowed and so on. I guess it's the same with | word documents. | version_five wrote: | I think certain schools or career programs must tell their | students to do resumes that way (with gauges and stuff) | because I have encountered big clusters of them, even if on | average they're rare | j33zusjuice wrote: | In my experience looking at resumes (mostly for entry-level | tech roles), fancy formatting is 100% an attempt to cover for | a lack of skill. I haven't seen one that had good content. | Intuitively, this makes sense to me, and seems to fit with | the old adage, "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, | baffle them with bullshit." Imo, your experience should speak | for itself. | conductr wrote: | > your experience should speak for itself. | | When it does, you have trouble fitting it all on 1-2 page. | You quickly go to text only, and organize things | accordingly. When you lack experience, you try to make | things look like an infographic so as to fill space with | trivial information. | Ultimatt wrote: | Then there are the people who dazzle you with both their | brilliance and the shiny stuff. They get the job over just | the brilliant person... | robertlagrant wrote: | I would do your best to fully ignore anything like this. | It's bound to be incorrect sometimes. | [deleted] | 2ICofafireteam wrote: | >Imo, your experience should speak for itself. | | What's wrong with saying, "May I draw your attention to my | experience? They have something to say." | nogridbag wrote: | This resume has better UX than 80% of the resumes I've seen - | which is particularly frustrating especially if it's a FE | resume. These days I'm happy if the candidate can correctly | spell the technology they claim to have been using the past N | years. Most are full of bullet points with every other word | bolded. If the bulleted skills list is greater than 5 lines | chances are it has the same skill duplicated multiple times. | I'm not sure if the candidate is fully to blame as I'm sure the | recruiting companies manipulate the resume format. But | ultimately the candidate is responsible for the quality of the | resume. | eastbound wrote: | I need React devs but I've dropped the ball -- I just hire | Java people and they're better at front-end. Usually more | savvy about libraries, they at least ask who did the lib and | what license it uses. | | I'm sure thousands of competent frontendists exist but | they're drowned out by people from bootcamps who can't even | spell "bartender" properly (and I have a bartender who's the | best of the class in my team, so again, nothing is set in | stone, but I was losing my time with front-endists). | Prcmaker wrote: | I'm a big fan of these. I maintain both a simple text resume, | and a 'fancy' one in a pretty latex template. I've gotten jobs | from both, and have even (successfully) submitted both in | separate parts of the same job application. Sometimes people | want to see the 5 star skill ratings, though I'll never | understand why, but having it as an option has unfortunately | helped. | kypro wrote: | Something I was surprised by was the amount of white space and | the straight to the point job descriptions. Whenever I send my | CV to recruiter I'm always asked to add a little more about | some language or skill. | | Over the years my CV has become super dense with text, not | because I have more experience to list but because I've been | told repeatedly to list all the languages I've used and details | of the projects I've worked on. | conductr wrote: | I think that's correct method. Being a software engineer at | Google could mean anything, so job titles alone don't | communicate enough by today's standard. In 1980, this guy's | job titles alone told you enough to know if you wanted to | meet him for your job opening. There's probably a volume | aspect too. The hiring manager in 1980 wasn't getting 1,000 | resumes that looked like this where project information would | help differentiate. | [deleted] | smcl wrote: | With the amount of people who can put "duties involved: | computer programmer" in their CV today, you're asking to | receive dozens of near-identical applications. Hope you enjoy | interviewing every single candidate because you can't evaluate | ahead of time whether their programming experience involved, | say, pottering around with VBA or implementing their own | compiler. | hef19898 wrote: | I struggle with getting a good CV, one that I do feel | comfortable with. So, as a reference, I just saved this resume | as a reference to use as soon as I get to rework mine. It is | straight forward, not overburdened with details and covers the | essentials. Great stuff! | rr888 wrote: | Presumably it was typed out by hand, one for each job? Maybe a | photo copy. Its a good reason to keep it simple. | ghaff wrote: | 1980 was not the dark ages. Photocopiers though not personal | ones were widely available and used. But yes it was probably | typed on a typewriter initially. (There was typesetting but | you probably wouldn't have used it for a resume.) | seanw444 wrote: | I concur. It has the bonus of a retro feel. | macintux wrote: | Mine is still plain text. Basho at least found that charming. | mattbillenstein wrote: | Mine too - works for programming gigs - also, searchable. | https://vazor.com/resume.txt | Kostic wrote: | You can use something similar, even today. My CV isn't *much* | different than the one in the link and it seems that it does | stand out as I've been complimented about it, twice. | rmnclmnt wrote: | I do too, but I see way too many people "over-thinking" their | resumes, especially in the presentation layout: if the raw | data is clearly organized, the layout should be minimal, not | the other way around | yupper32 wrote: | I don't see many 5-star skill ratings, dual colored backgrounds | (?), or unreadable fonts. Where do you see those? I would turn | people away from that format if they asked my advice. | | My resume, and the resumes I've seen aren't too far away from | this format. More bullet points and a bit more detail than | this, I guess. But otherwise pretty similar | 2ICofafireteam wrote: | As someone who has been through several government vocational | programs in Canada, I will say that when your Case Manager or | Instructor says to write your resumes and letters a certain | way, you do it. | DMell wrote: | My girlfriend is a biologist with the National Parks | Service and all of their resumes are expected to be three | to five pages long. It hurt my soul when she told me that. | astura wrote: | That's something specific called a "federal resume" | required for most jobs with the US Government. It's more | akin to a job application than a resume. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Resume_(United_Stat | es) | Spooky23 wrote: | Government resumes are different as they rely on | documented experience as a substitute for a civil service | exam. They want completeness more like a dossier than a | marketing document. Your catalog of skills and experience | is critical, as "X years of Y" rules the day. | | It's actually easier - you just tag on whatever you do | every one in awhile. "Normal" resumes are like ads for | you, and the positive/negative usefulness of your resume | is more about your ability to produce compelling bullshit | for an audience, miss the mark, or land in the middle of | the bell curve. | onei wrote: | I see them a lot for interns and new grads. I think there's a | bunch of templates that have these 'features' and when people | are first starting out they don't know better. No interviewer | I've ever met thought 5-star ratings were a good idea. | smcl wrote: | Yep 100%, and I did the same to be honest - I have a memory | of painstakingly deciding which languages or technologies I | was "experienced" in and which I was merely "intermediate" | in, without realising it was wasted effort :) I think | people tend to be quite forgiving of graduates or those new | to the industry, it's hard to know what's expected of you. | DMell wrote: | I graduated last year and one of our final classes required | a resume be submitted using the professors format which was | colorful, differing fonts, and used "confidence | percentages". I wouldn't dare use it in the real world but | I'm wondering how many of those new grad resumes are | similar. | ghaff wrote: | And new grads are probably often looking for something | anything to stand out if they haven't done any projects | that really stand out and have a middling GPA from a | middling school. | jstx1 wrote: | All of these things are generally frowned upon already. | youngNed wrote: | I got made redundant in 2008, i signed up for unemployment | benefit (UK) and part of the requirements was i had to attend | a cv writing one day workshop, in the basement of a | particularly dingy pub. | | The guy leading it was spectacularly useless from the get-go, | training us in how to use word in the most wonderfully | terrible way, one particular nugget i remember him coming out | with was: | | 'bold is particularly good for standing out, in fact I would | even go as far as putting the entire document in bold' | | I asked him about all caps, but stopped short of asking him | if i should sprinkle it with glitter for fear i would 'fail' | in his assesment of me and cut my benfits. | mindcrime wrote: | _' bold is particularly good for standing out, in fact I | would even go as far as putting the entire document in | bold'_ | | Jeeeeeebus. That sounds like something right out of an | episode of BOFH! | Beltalowda wrote: | > 'bold is particularly good for standing out, in fact I | would even go as far as putting the entire document in | bold' | | What a muppet. Clearly you should use the Header Font. | ryandrake wrote: | Also: I kind of like the concise wording when the writer | doesn't feel they need to adhere to STAR. "Duties Included" is | the only meat I want to see when I read a resume. I don't care | what the specific challenge you faced was, or if your hard work | transforming protobufs from one format to another resulted in | "23% year over year revenue growth and 3 industry awards" for a | product that uses your protobufs 5 layers up the API stack. Yet | resumes are all moving over to including this cruft. I admit I | use STAR on my own resume because every resume coach insists | it's the only way to get noticed. It's just yuck. | quacked wrote: | I've had the opposite experience--if you don't list | accomplishments you don't get a call back. Job duties alone | are considered an insufficient resume. | jcadam wrote: | I have an MBA, which I don't really use as a working software | engineer, but nowhere else will you learn to take a clear, | concise, one page paper (i.e., this is what we did and this | is the result) and expand it to 10 pages of BS-laden | corporate-speak nonsense. | | It's a real skill, I tell you. | tenpies wrote: | MBA is still the junior leagues. To learn to take one line | and turn it into a whole page you have to go to law school. | | And even then, I would daresay that those are _applied_ and | therefore _lesser_. If you want to be able to expand one | word into one entire paper, you need to go deep into | academia. | robertlagrant wrote: | My guess is if you sum all of the money saved/revenue gained | listed in each MBA CV you'd end up with a number bigger than | the GDP of the history of the world. | logical_ferry wrote: | Oh I've got a buddy that'll laugh his pants off when he | reads this. I know I am. | lizardactivist wrote: | Interesting to read. Also interesting: 14 people have forked the | repo (???). | a4isms wrote: | My mother was a systems analyst in the 1960s. She got a contract | as part of a team installing a brand-new IBM/360 at the | University of Ibadan in Nigeria, her job was to write | administration software. | | She told me it was a top-of-the-line model with 64K of RAM. At | some point, it had a malfunction and they had to replace one of | its memory "boards," which were lattices with ferromagnetic cores | suspended on filaments. She brought the defective board home for | me to play with. | | Although I went on to write software on punch cards, and built a | PC in the 1980s, I think the moment that I held core memory in my | hands was the closest I've really gotten to "the metal" in my | life. | syntaxing wrote: | Anybody knows what the "sd" means after his signature? | [deleted] | mbadros wrote: | Perhaps the initials of the person who typed it. In most | business contexts at the time, something like "ABC/jed" at the | end meant a secretary/assistant with initials "JED" typed | something for a manager/employee with initials "ABC." | [deleted] | [deleted] | fm2606 wrote: | Initials of who typed up the letter. | | Standard practice back then. I learned about it in H.S. typing | class in the late 80s | | Edit: s/resume/letter/g | glonq wrote: | Ditto! We had big dumb noisy electromechanical typewriters in | my Typing 9 class, and then upgraded to some kind of semi- | smart typewriter for Typing 10 that had a small buffer so | that you could type+correct one line but it wouldn't print | until you pressed the return/enter key. They only taught us a | couple weeks of word processing on computers. Microsoft | Works, if I recall correctly. | smrtinsert wrote: | I just wanted too say, this is a beautiful thing. I'm not sure | why, but it seems so pure and wonderful. | izzydata wrote: | It's curious that anyone would put their health or height on a | resume. It doesn't seem particularly relevant to anything. | tabtab wrote: | During the early 2000's there was an IT slump in CA due to the | dot-com crash, so I spent a lot of time sending out resumes. | Eventually I created a script to quickly customize them for a | given job ad. | | It had topic meta-tags, and each topic had four levels: high, | medium, low, skip. The level would control the placement and | amount of detail given to each topic. Medium would default to | "low" if there were no medium-level content/detail. Thus, I | didn't have to always type 3 variations per section+topic. There | were other switches I won't go into. | | A found that highlighting applicable domain experience helped a | lot: "billing", "budgeting", etc. | | I still did some hand customization, but the script allowed me to | send out roughly 1,000 resumes and/or CV's all over the nation | without getting carpel tunnel. (I preferred to stay in CA, but | the market was really dry at the time. Plus, location mattered | less if it were only a contract.) | | When feeling trapped, a programmer always "writes a script". | butz wrote: | I'm going to borrow this layout for my new resume, also I'm | definitely using typewriter font. | cryptozeus wrote: | Health = Excellent :) | SnooSux wrote: | Interesting that this is like a cover letter and resume in one. | no-s wrote: | > Interesting that this is like a cover letter and resume in | one. | | Pre-email that was pretty much how it went. There was no point | in overcomplicating things. People had to type these cover | letters and resumes up, over and over. Or they would pay for a | service which used one of those "word processor" gizmos. | Fortunately for me in '80 I had a selectric-like printer and a | CRT, the very next year I got an IBM PC and could ditch the | mainframe. As a result became tres marketable and enjoyed | substantial career enhancement. | metadat wrote: | Direct links to the resume: | | https://raw.githubusercontent.com/runvnc/dadsresume/master/I... | | https://raw.githubusercontent.com/runvnc/dadsresume/master/I... | tingletech wrote: | should have [2018] in the title? | | previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17787275 | walnutclosefarm wrote: | When I first entered the working world as a programmer and | administrator of an "academic computing center", in the early | 70s, you met men like Ray - ex-military, GI-bill educated, | learned computers from the electricity on up in their mid-career, | rather frequently, either as customer engineers for one of the | big mainframe manufacturers (there were 7 or 8, depending on when | and how you counted), or from the minicomputer upstarts who were | then assaulting the mainframe world of computing with their | smaller, cheaper, 12 and 16 bit newcomers. Sometimes you'd get | the privilege of a lunch or dinner with one sent out "from the | lab" who was actually designing and building the machines you | were working on. | | It's hard to explain just how new it all felt, then. But in 1973, | even though we were sitting on the cusp of the single chip | microprocessor and personal computer revolution, the commercial | computer was less than 20 years old, and college recruiting | materials might well brag that at their institution, there were | not one, but two computers on campus. I remember the day the | total RAM at our institution passed the megabyte mark - closer to | the end, than the beginning, of the 1970s. The ability to | "program" was a rare skill - even the people who taught it were | still just learning it. | drummer wrote: | > even the people who taught it were still just learning it. | | Still true today. | still_grokking wrote: | And this will likely never change as the most skilled people | land eventually in leadership positions or become | entrepreneurs. | | By the day we didn't even invent some best practices or std. | tools everybody in the field would agree on. | | CS is still like electrical engineering around 1850. ;-) | tabtab wrote: | > _college recruiting materials might well brag that at their | institution, there were not one, but two computers on campus._ | | Our community college highlighted their Vax minicomputer by | having a special window that showed all the flashing LED's to | passers by. But when PC's became the "in thing", they felt | embarrassed and covered the window with PC posters. Poor Vax, | lots of memories together. It was an early lesson in IT = star- | today-washup-tomorrow. | walnutclosefarm wrote: | We had one of the first class of HP3000 minicomputers, which | was both highly advanced, with it's stack architecture and | variable length memory segmentation, but also very | disappointing. But on the flashing lights front, the first | design class did not disappoint (see console in upper right | quadrant - lots of LEDS - which were new and only red in | those days - and paddle switches): | http://www.hpmuseum.net/images/3000_2615A_1973-25.jpg | acjacobson wrote: | My grandfather was like this. Full stint in the Marines and | then worked on computers. I remember him telling the story of | how exciting it was (and what a big deal it was) when one of | their systems got upgraded to 4k of RAM. | sircastor wrote: | A few years ago in school I had to read a paper that was | written by a guy who happens to also be a part of my local | electronics hobby group. I mentioned this to a friend and he | noted that, unlike a lot of fields, Computer Science is still | young enough that many of the pioneers are still around. | skeaker wrote: | They're often on this very website, in fact. | tomcam wrote: | I worked at Microsoft in the late 90s and methodically went | around to all of them, from the creator of MS-DOS to the | creator of Turbo Pascal/C#/Typescript, and asked them all the | questions that I couldn't find in the computer history books. | robterrell wrote: | Would love to read these if you've collected them | somewhere. | TedDoesntTalk wrote: | Where can we read it? | shafoshaf wrote: | It reminds me of "Mel"in 1983 which was in response to "Real | Programmers write in FORTRAN." | | https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html | drewzero1 wrote: | This comes up on here every few months, and I can't help but | read it every time. We had a few Mels in the earlier days of | my employer's history and I can't help but be a little bit in | awe of the stories I've heard from and about them. | dqpb wrote: | > the IBM salesmen stood around talking to each other. | Whether or not this actually sold computers was a question we | never discussed. | notfish wrote: | Which is, of course, included as "The story of Mel" in the | jargon file: | | http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/ | a1pulley wrote: | I was a physics major until I stumbled across the jargon | file online. It was an, "aha, my people!" moment. It was | already showing its age then--nearly 20 years ago!--but | sucked me into CS where I was much happier. | ExtraE wrote: | Direct link: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of- | mel.html | still_grokking wrote: | I was fascinated by this story as teenager. | | But looking back on it, I would say out of my current | perspective this Mel guy was not a genius, but one of the | worst programmers you could probably hire: | | He written unmaintainable and even _unchangeable_ "write- | once" code that was so complex that nobody else could | handle it either. He refused to do what he was payed for | and just went away as he lost interest. | | One of this kind of dudes on your engineering team and your | company is in real deep trouble... | | It's a given that you will need to throw away everything | they did and start form scratch should any changes be | necessary later on. However there's one fundamental | constant in software engineering: Your software is going to | need to change over time! No mater whatever somebody told | you upfront. So in case you've got software built by some | "Mel" you're completely screwed at that point, especially | as changes to SW are usually needed the most at some | critical period in time for your company. | alar44 wrote: | Nah, those were different times when bits and bytes | mattered. Everything was written in assembly/,machine | code. Mel's tricks were just how things were done back | then. There was no repo, code didn't need to be | maintained or added onto. The lifecycle of software was | much much shorter. | still_grokking wrote: | > Nah, those were different times when bits and bytes | mattered. | | Obviously not. We're talking about mundane business | software. | | Also the "optimizing compiler" that couldn't reach such | levels of "perfection" wouldn't be a thing if this would | really matter. | | > Mel's tricks were just how things were done back then. | | Obviously not. Otherwise there wouldn't be any point in | this story. | | It points out, with a lot emphasis, how _exceptional_ Mel | 's code was! | | > There was no repo, code didn't need to be maintained or | added onto. | | VCS dates back quite some time... | | Also maintaining code was _of course_ not any less | important for a company as it is today. Simply as | companies back than also relayed on their software to | operate. | | > The lifecycle of software was much much shorter. | | No, _of course_ not, as nobody would throw away some very | expensive asset for no reason. | | If anything, lifecycles of software were much longer than | today (when you can deploy changes every few minutes if | you please). Stuff written in the 70's is still running | on some mainframes today! | | As changing software was much more dangerous with much | higher risk of breakage, less experts around, and | everything much more difficult in general, it was _more | usual_ to try to not touch an already running system. | (Maybe you even heard some quite similar proverb coined | back than ;-)). | | But "not touching" it does not work, as there is only one | truly constant thing: Change. | LordDragonfang wrote: | >VCS dates back quite some time... | | Let's see. From the story: | | >I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee | Computer Corp... [The firm] had just started to | manufacture the RPC-4000 | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGP-30#RPC_4000 | | > the General Precision RPC 4000, announced in 1960 | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control#History | | >IBM's OS/360 IEBUPDTE software update tool dates back to | 1962, arguably a precursor to version control system | tools. A full system designed for source code control was | started in 1972, Source Code Control System for the same | system (OS/360). | | The events of the story predate the _precursors_ of VCSs | by two years, and the earliest true VCS by a decade. | still_grokking wrote: | As you like to discuss this detail: | | I can't find any definitive info when this computer got | actually manufactured ("announced in 1960" doesn't mean | strictly the same). But this was the time Mel was met | _first time_ by the author. | | The story plays likely some time thereafter. | | I guess some significant time, because it takes time even | for a genius to become familiar enough with a machine to | do all this kind of trickery described in the story. | | I think it may make sense to assume even some years | passed between when the author met Mel the first time and | Mel's _departure form said company_. | | So I wouldn't be even so much off with the VCS statement | --which actually doesn't state any relation between the | usage of VCS and the story. I've only said that "VCS | dates back quite some time". Which is obviously true. ;-) | | But, all this actually doesn't matter. | | The more important statement was the following. Which is | a direct reply to "code didn't need to be maintained", | which is in my opinion just not true. | | I did not say VCS was used back than for that purpose. | | I guess they preferred more a sort of solid hard copy. | :-) | triknomeister wrote: | What are you smoking? :-P | still_grokking wrote: | I won't tell you. | | But it's quite strong. B-) | IggleSniggle wrote: | He can be a genius to be admired while also being one of | the worst programmers you could hire, at the same time. | Someone to appreciate, but not to emulate. A highly | optimized human being, optimized for the "wrong" thing. | More in the realm of art than anything else. | still_grokking wrote: | Ok, take your up-vote. I think I can agree on that | perspective. | | Maybe that's even the point that makes me like the _story | as such_ very much. | dusted wrote: | nah, when you're constrained enough, you rarely to never | sacrifice anything in the name of future changes. You | figure out what needs to be done, then you write a | program that does it. If it needs to change, you write a | new program. Part of why that's not as bad as it sound is | exactly because of those constraints, you're not dealing | with megabytes of source code. | | There are lots of problems that are specific and simple | enough to solve, that it's easier to write a C program | from scratch, than it is to find, install and then learn | how to do it with some existing package... The same | concept goes for programs.. At a certain scale, it's not | worth the extra | infrastructure/overhead/rigidity/complexity that it takes | to write software that's optimized for change. | | That said, today, in 2022, it's more or less the | opposite, codebases are huge enough that most of software | "engineering" is about plumbing together existing | libraries, and at that scale, it's an entirely different | thing. | still_grokking wrote: | No, not even given the historic context this makes any | sense. | | We're not talking about embedded software with special | constrains here! | | This story is about _mundane enterprise software_. | | Nothing in the story justified this insane level of over- | engineering and _premature optimization_. | | Just using the "optimizing compiler" was deemed "good | enough" for all other needs of the company, likely... | | Also nobody _asked_ for that over- "optimized" throw-it- | away-and-start-over-if-you-need-to-amend-anything- | _crap_. | | I have still this warmth nostalgia feeling when looking | at this story, but when thinking about it with quite some | experience in real world software engineering I'm very | sure that this kind of programmer would be one of the | worst hires you could probably run into. | | Finding any valid excuses for "write-only" code is hard, | very hard. This was also true back in the days this story | plays. | | Sorry for destroying _your_ nostalgia feeling, but please | try to look at it from a professional perspective. | dleslie wrote: | > Your software is going to need to change over time! | | Not so for anything shipped on ROM. | marcodiego wrote: | My father was a physicist. He learned to program in FORTRAN in | the university in the 70's. | | Decades later I, still a teenager, asked him something like | this: "Dad, you were a FORTRAN programmer and physicist in the | 70's, you could be a very well paid developer anywhere in the | developed world... why didn't you?"; he answered me: "I didn't | thought this thing about computers would go too far." | pjdemers wrote: | As recently as the early 90's, making a lifetime career out | of software development was considered impossible. When I was | starting out in the late 80's all the developers were taking | classes or had a side business, with the goal getting out of | "programming" before it was too late. Even those who wanted | to stay in the industry took every opportunity to talk | directly with clients so they could get into sales or | marketing. | sunjester wrote: | I love this so much. | insane_dreamer wrote: | It was very niche. My dad (also early FORTRAN programmer) | graduated in the very first undergrad CS class at UCLA, | around '69 or `70. I think very few universities had a CS | course at that time. | insane_dreamer wrote: | It looks like the first CS department was at Purdue (wasn't | expecting that); they introduce a CS degree program in `67. | UNC was another early adopter. | govg wrote: | What is interesting is that the IITs in India (the first | 5 at least) were setup a decade prior (late 50s), and | some had very heavy support from American and European | universities while setting up. So much so that IIT Kanpur | actually had a CS department that started in 1963! | nervousvarun wrote: | We probably are close to the same age. My dad was an engineer | who also learned to program FORTRAN in the 70's. | | When I asked him a similar question his reply was (quotes are | paraphrased): "It was way too tedious to do. You'd spend | hours getting the cards just right. We used to put them in a | shoebox and mark them with a pen in case we dropped them on | the way to the lab. Then you'd wait until the next day to get | your results. If you had a mistake you'd repeat the whole | process". | | Basically it was considered tedious, grunt work in his | opinion (at the time...he later of course has come to | understand the importance). | spaetzleesser wrote: | I enjoyed programming in the 90s and early 2000s but I feel | it's turning again into tedious grunt work with scrum, | agile, yaml configuration files and needlessly complex | systems. | mitchdoogle wrote: | This is one industry where reinventing the wheel is quite | the norm. It's good for all the developers - it keeps | them working. Older devs can work on legacy systems, and | newer devs (or devs picking up new skills) can recreate | systems with the new tools and languages. | aj7 wrote: | I learned Fortran 4 in high school in 1967-1968. That's how | good the NYC exam schools were -- Stuyvesant in this case. | We had our own 1130. This came in handy in college, I did | the programming in a physics group, immediately. But it | seemed too tedious to do as a career. I still feel that | way. | apurtbapurt wrote: | So what you gonna do when you grow up? :-) | tomcam wrote: | Switch to COBOL and REXX | lambdasquirrel wrote: | > "I didn't thought this thing about computers would go too | far." | | I almost didn't major in Computer Science because in the | late 90s, there were so many negative articles in the New | York Times, vis-a-vis software. People don't remember it | now, but the media and the culture were utterly hostile | towards us, and loved to say our jobs were going to India, | that everything there was to know about Computer Science | could be studied in railyard switching, in existing | abstract math textbooks, etc. | | By a combination of luck, and my dad's insistence, I ended | up at Carnegie Mellon, and while I was there, I saw what | folks at Google were doing, and I thought to myself, no, | this stuff is hard, and this is just going to be the | beginning. | | > "It was way too tedious to do. You'd spend hours getting | the cards just right. We used to put them in a shoebox and | mark them with a pen in case we dropped them on the way to | the lab. Then you'd wait until the next day to get your | results. If you had a mistake you'd repeat the whole | process" | | Even what came after that, e.g. in C / C++ was considerably | tedious compared to what we do today. Folks sometimes had | to do objdumps of compiled binaries to debug what was going | on. We had to get coredumps, load them up, and try to | determine what memory error had caused things to crash | (this is an entire class of problems that doesn't exist | today). You used to legit need that CS degree in order to | code in your day-to-day because you had to understand the | function stack, the network stack, basic syscalls like wait | and poll, etc. | | It was a lot of work, for relatively little product, and I | think part of the reason why software is paid more today is | in part because of 1. faster processing speeds and 2. | better tooling and automation, and higher-level programming | languages - all of which were enabled in part by cheaper / | faster CPU speeds (e.g. people don't have to care about how | slow Python is - you can optimize it after you find | product-market-fit), and 3. a better understanding of how | software should be developed, at all levels of management. | [deleted] | shiftpgdn wrote: | We're probably about the same age. I decided against comp | sci at the turn of the century because of exactly what | was being said. The dotcom bust just happened and if the | media was to be believed programmers were taking jobs | flipping burgers and there were enough programmers | without jobs to cover the world's programming needs for | the next 50 years. | | I wound up going to school for economics and then later | found my way into the IT world by circumstance. | cowanon22dhhf wrote: | > I almost didn't major in Computer Science because in | the late 90s, there were so many negative articles in the | New York Times, vis-a-vis software. People don't remember | it now, but the media and the culture were utterly | hostile towards us, and loved to say our jobs were going | to India, that everything there was to know about | Computer Science could be studied in railyard switching, | in existing abstract math textbooks, etc | | I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers this - | whenever I try to explain it to someone they look at me | like I'm crazy. In the late 90s and even early 2000s the | common wisdom with guidance counselors and even local | recruiters was that programming and software design were | dead end in the U.S. I remember one article literally | said "the bud is off the blossom". I wound up majoring in | electrical engineering instead of computer science as a | result. | | It all worked out in the end, but not following my | instincts at the time is one of my few regrets. | stephenhuey wrote: | It was hard to figure out at the turn of the century when | the career fair was literally cut in half after the dot | com bust. Although websites had been around for years, | web apps were still pretty clunky and it felt like the | world of internet-based possibilities still had a long | way to go. I decided to try doing application development | for pay because it seemed interesting and I figured I | could easily switch to something else down the road. | Plenty of relatives and acquaintances did inform me that | my job was going to be outsourced abroad, though. :) And | things looked dire again with the financial crisis but I | was shocked that a few years after that, I discovered | when recruiting at my alma mater that CS had become the | most popular major whereas it was one of the smallest | ones when I was studying it! So, lots of predicting that | turned out differently... | mgkimsal wrote: | OT, but when I search for "the bud is off the blossom" | the only references I get from google are 2 links to | hacker news comments... There's 0 in bing for that | phrase. Never heard it before ever. | nsxwolf wrote: | The idiom is "bloom is off the rose", maybe that's what | GP recalled. | peter303 wrote: | In the early days computer programming was considered a | clerical job one learned in trade schools. I think people | looked down on it partly because many of the early | programmers were female, beneath the dignity of a male | profession. | | It rook my alma mater MIT until 2018 to recognize | software worthy of a department in itself (after a huge | financial donation). Before then it was a step child of | Electrical Engineering. This is kind of ironic because me | and most of my classmates ended up writing software for | money, though almost none of us majored in that field. | yourapostasy wrote: | _> ...and loved to say our jobs were going to India._ | | They weren't wrong, though; they just omitted delimiting | that assertion. | | Back in those dark ages, mainframe jobs were still | considered by career "experts" the "adult in the room" | jobs of programming. It is hard to convey to people who | never studied that era or grew up in that era just how | much microprocessor-based computers were considered "not | _real_ computing " in vast swathes of the industry. The | proprietary Unixes thrived under that lay perception, as | a "serious business" microprocessor-based computers | market segment. | | And the mainframe jobs did by and large up and wholesale | decamped to India from large chunks of the mainframe | account base. Those career experts were right in a way. | | Just not quite the way they thought. The scope they | thought in was too absolute because they lacked the | technical (and business, and financial...) perspective | and context to understand why the same wouldn't happen to | quite the same extent to sectors outside mainframes, nor | of the explosion of re-invention of the wheel of many | mainframe tech stacks that would drive the industry | forward even to this day and beyond, along with the rapid | recombination of new ideas. | tomcam wrote: | Very interesting. I am from that era, teaching myself to | program starting in 1983 (which I thought was quite | possibly too late to catch the microcomputer gold rush | ;). I was self-taught and learned from popular computer | magazines and well-written, carefully selected books. But | now that you mention it I remember looking at course | catalogs from good schools and being shocked at how | retrograde it all was. Those guys at the universities | totally did not get microcomputers for years after they | should have. | nomdep wrote: | > ...in the late 90s, there were so many negative | articles in the New York Times, vis-a-vis software | | In retrospective, the New York Times is _always_ wrong | about everything. Maybe it should be adopted as a useful | heuristic | cultureulterior wrote: | I have a reference somewhere to a NYT article explaining | that stealth technology is impossible | drewg123 wrote: | I was using objdump and cordumps to debug a kernel crash | just last week. Not tedious at all. More like working a | difficult puzzle. And very rewarding if you figure it out | and fix the crash. | p_l wrote: | objdump and coredumps today are way less tedious than | getting a compiler error the next day (if not few days | out!). | | At least with punched cards if you kept them sorted (line | numbers in front a'la BASIC really helped with that) you | could easily edit in place - just replace that one card | that was incorrect, because each card = one line. | | TECO (which begat EMACS) started out because paper tape | which was preferred storage on DEC machines was harder to | edit in place than card stacks and instead of retyping | whole program you'd summarise your changes (that you | dutifully copied on fanfold greenbar printout - or | suffered) into few complex commands then used the | resulting 4 tapes (TECO load tape, TECO commands tape, | incorrect program, fresh unpunched tape) to get one | corrected. | | For maximum efficiency, the OS/360 team had to work 24h - | the programmers would write their changes on first shift, | then teams had to prepare cards, submit them for | compilation, night shift reprinted modified | documentation, and when you'd arrive at work you'd have | fresh documentation and results of your compile (unless | you had the luck to work on-line that day with more | immediate feedback) | muaytimbo wrote: | You say it like negative articles about Comp Sci/Applied | Programming/Really any Tech Co from the NYT is a thing of | the past. It's with a sense of irony that articles | denouncing Tech is easy, routine clickbait for them now. | fragmede wrote: | Oh yeah, no and low-code is going to put all of us | programmers out of work any day now. | hnlmorg wrote: | Universities are always several years behind the curve. | At college in the 90s they were still teaching token ring | networking despite Ethernet already being common place. | The same college told me that programmers didn't design | any of the code they write; they only transcribe code | from flow charts. | | Just yesterday I was talking to a grad about DevOps. He | said the field sounded boring from what he was taught at | uni. Then when we discussed it more it turned out his | "DevOps" course was actually just teaching them how to be | a scrum master and didn't include a single thing about | automation, infrastructure as code, etc. | | I also remember just how garbage general publications | were with regards to IT. And to be fair they still are | now. But there was always a wealth of better information | in specialist publications as well as online | (particularly by the late 90s). | walnutclosefarm wrote: | That may well be true of some universities today. In | 1970, they were pretty much the only place you could get | hands on experience with a computer unless you somehow | slid into a programming job in the financial industry, or | a one of the few other areas that actually used them. And | they were not behind the curve on the technology, | although they tended to have lower end hardware than | industry, because any compute was very expensive. The | invoice on a 64k byte HP3000 in 1972, which on a good day | could support half a dozen users actually doing any work, | was over $100K. Memory upgrades to 128K ran you about | $1/byte installed - maybe $8 in today's money. It was a | big deal to be allowed hands on use of them. | hnlmorg wrote: | I was talking about 90s to modern era. Not just modern | era. | | And having computers doesn't mean any of the lecturers | understand the modern (for that era) trends in computing. | More often than not, it's computer clubs rather than | cause material that hold the really interesting content. | | I don't doubt there will be exceptions to this rule. But | for most people I've spoken to or read interviews from, | this seems to have been the trend. | znpy wrote: | In 2015 or 2016 o was taking the computer architectures | class at my local university... the processor they based | the whole course upon was the motorola 68000. | vkou wrote: | And why wouldn't they base it on that CPU? If you're | trying to learn the basics of shipbuilding, you don't | start by going on a deep dive into the construction of an | aircraft carrier. | | It's a simple chip, with a simple instruction set, that | can actually be taught to you in the time allotted over a | three-credit class. | sangnoir wrote: | As far as introductory courses go, the older/simpler the | processor,the better it is for everyone. My class groused | at being taught "old tech" because we taught the 68k, but | very few of us had done any assembly before, I think most | of the class would have failed if started of on amd64 | mgkimsal wrote: | I was having to deal with token ring in '96-'97, and have | not touched it since. Seems like it went away quite | quickly. Cue up someone replying that they're still | maintaining a token ring system in 2022... :) | mitchdoogle wrote: | It's highly dependent on school. The Ivies, including | "public Ivies" will teach you proper comp sci. A lot of | other big schools will do you well also. When it comes to | smaller regional universities or junior colleges and | community colleges, then it's hit or miss. Your intro CS | course may be great if you manage to get an instructor | who knows it well themselves and wants their students to | know it, or you may get someone who teaches students how | to do Microsoft Office without a shred of programming. | sgerenser wrote: | I went to RIT in the early 2000s. I remember the CS and | CE departments were quite good (although the prevalent | Sun workstations were already getting outdated). Somehow | I ended up taking 1 elective from the "Management | Information Systems" department and the instructor kept | mixing up search engines and web browsers. I think I | dropped the class shortly thereafter. | TedDoesntTalk wrote: | I dumpster dove at RIT to pull out a discarded VAX (in | think an 11/70) and serial terminals. Probably about 1989 | or 1990. | marcodiego wrote: | This is something my father told me too. He said he spent | some time writing the code on paper, thinking a lot about | it; then when he was somewhat sure about what he had | written it was time to punch the cards. He used to leave | the batch on Friday and went back on Monday to ask the | "computer operator" about results and sometimes the result | was "syntax error on line 1." | drittich wrote: | This is exactly how I first learned to program. Waiting a | whole day to find out you had a bug was just way too | frustrating for me so I completely wrote it off, as much as | I enjoyed writing code. Once the first PCs came on the | scene, though, everything changed and I was all over it. | Still am. | tannhaeuser wrote: | I find it astonishing that only a couple years later the | basic Unix development environment (ttys and full-screen | terminals instead of cards, cc, sh, make, ...) came into | existence, and has basically prevailed. | peter303 wrote: | In one of my early scientist-programmer jobs I was assigned | an assistant to keypunch, submit jobs and pick up | printouts. The other scientists thought I was odd for | wanting to do all this myself. I had much more productivity | than them. | rjbwork wrote: | My dad is an accountant who took some punch card FORTRAN | programming classes in the early 70's as well. After 3 | semesters he told his professor he wouldn't be returning to | the computing department - his professor was shocked, for | he was a star pupil! - for much the same reason. He and my | mother still tell stories of Saturdays and Sundays spent | organizing his punch cards and applying patches (literal in | those days!) in the campus computer labs so he could have a | more rapid debug cycle than was available during the week. | emmelaich wrote: | What is forgotten sometimes is that there was (for men) a | severe prejudice about working with a keyboard. The image | pre-1985 or so was that keyboards were almost exclusively | associated with typing pools. Those typing pools were were as | far as I know 100% female. | | To be honest, this prejudice still exists. I heard a C-suite | exec mocking "those guys with the ticky-tacky machines". | tomcam wrote: | Also many of those guys were EEs who had no degrees. They | always seemed cheerful and happy with their jobs. It was one of | the things that inspired me to teach myself programming. | kasajian wrote: | I'm at the age where the college I went to required us to take | JCL, but it was already on its way out. I also took IBM 360 | assembly language, which was WAY MORE high-level of a language | than I was expecting it to be. Before then, my impression of | assembly instruction set were from 6809E and 6502. In comparison, | IBM 360 was a dream. But I never worked with it. It was just a | class. | | The other thing that was interesting is that unlike the rest of | our assignments which we could do in the lab, this one we had to | send the code to a computer in a different city, which ran the | job, and came back with results 4 hours later. You had only 4 | runs to get your code to work. | | The most interesting about part of this story is that the every | next semester after me, the same IBM 360 assembly language class | use an IBM 360 emulator that ran on IBM PCs (this is at time of | real-mode 640K DOS). So if I had just waited a semester, I could | have done my assignments using an emulator on the PC. | lordnacho wrote: | That job market seems like so long ago. See job ad, type out a | letter with your CV, wait for them to write back, somehow | organize a time to meet, more rounds, and so forth. At least it | must have been hard to spam out CVs. | | The guy seems pretty hardcore from my perspective. University | training for all those techs. Of course hardware back then cost a | lot of money so you wanted people who knew what they were doing. | | What did people do for interviews back then? Reverse-a-linked- | list? That would have been a relatively recent publication in | 1980. Kadane's algo didn't arrive until 1984 IIRC. Was K&R | published yet? | coldcode wrote: | My first interview for my first job in 1981 consisted of the | manager asking me general programming questions ending in a | description of an errant program which I had to explain how I | would figure out what was wrong, and what it was likely to be. | No whiteboards, no coding, nothing. That was the only | interview, and I was hired on the spot, despite having 0 work | programming experience and 0 college education in programming | (was chemistry major, programmed for fun on an Apple ][). | Highly unlikely to happen so easy today. I retired recently | after nearly 40 years as a working programmer. | [deleted] | deeblering4 wrote: | Up until the mid-late 2000s tech interviews consisted of a few | conversations, followed by checking references. | | CS trivia interviews were largely introduced by Google, with | other companies cargo culting that into their interview | practices. | mikestew wrote: | Microsoft was known for "why are manhole covers round" and CS | trivia before Google was even a company. | jcadam wrote: | Yep, I blame Microsoft. Now these sorts of interviews are | done even by companies writing pedestrian web apps that | don't require hard-core CS knowledge. Yet they test every | applicant on it anyway. | dspillett wrote: | _> Yet they test every applicant on it anyway._ | | If you have enough applicants, why not filter out so you | have the best of them? (well, maybe not quite the best, | there is some value in having someone less likely to get | bored and move on PDQ). | marcosdumay wrote: | One reason, besides the obvious lack of respect, is that | the more you test for things you don't need, the higher | the odds that you select somebody with false positive | results on the things you need. | nsxwolf wrote: | I've never seen any evidence these interviews accomplish | finding the best or even a competent candidate. | | In my opinion the best interview process involves simply | looking at the work history and having a conversation | about it. If it sounds pretty good, you go with your gut | and hire. A bunch of different people paid this person a | lot of money for 5, 10, 20 years and you really think | there's a chance they were all fooled? The conversation | and your gut figure that part out with a decent success | rate. | post-it wrote: | That reminded me to reread "If Richard Feynman applied for | a job at Microsoft" | | https://sellsbrothers.com/12395 | Test0129 wrote: | I am 100% fine with CS trivia interviews. I am fascinated by | CS and can talk your ear off about it. | | What I am not fine with is that you're judged entirely on | that. My biggest complaint about this industry is not the CS | trivia, it's that my entire job history is irrelevant. I have | a decade in this industry and a staff title and I am still | treated like a junior developer with no experience when I am | interviewed. It's degrading and insulting. I can understand | rigor in an interview at our average salary but the market is | still firmly controlled by corporations despite what the | media says about job prospects. Given that there are | approximately 10-20 jobs per engineer in the industry right | now, if we really cared, all we would have to do is just | collectively say "no". | Beltalowda wrote: | I really struggle with this, because on one hand I don't | want to be the arrogant special snowflake kind of person, | but on the other hand I also have a 15 year job history and | 100k lines of code on GitHub, including some fairly widely | used stuff. If you want to establish basic competency it's | not hard. | | So basically my solution is to just ghost people when they | ignore the subtle "maybe look at my GitHub that you asked | for to establish basic competency?" and start asking for | coding tests because I neither want to do the test nor come | off as a twat, and this seems like the "least bad" option. | The truth of the matter is I have the time and _can_ do it, | I just don 't feel like doing it; nothing more. | | And I also consider it as a bit of an indication whether I | want to work for them in the first place. "Rules must be | followed, at all times" with zero flexibility or common | sense is not really something I deal well with. | ricardobayes wrote: | I've brought that culture back in our company. Hasn't failed | us yet. Turns out for a CRUD web app you really don't need | top hackerrank skills. In my humble opinion, people who excel | in algorithmic code interviews want to overcomplicate | everything and get burned out super fast with 'real world' | tasks. | yamtaddle wrote: | I'm deeply skeptical of claims that you can't suss out | "fakers" like this. For one thing, people who were _that_ | good at faking could be making a lot more money leveraging | that skill directly rather than trying to sneak into mid- | paying software jobs. | | I think a far more likely explanation is that lots of | interviewers are very bad at interviewing, and that | interview anxiety, _especially_ given the kind of shit that | gets thrown at you in programming interviews, is a lot | worse and more widespread than one usually supposes. | Result: interviewers are convinced they 're constantly | catching "frauds" that they couldn't have caught otherwise, | but they're frequently wrong about both those things--that | the person was a "fraud"; that the interviewer couldn't | have caught actual "frauds" with an ordinary interview. | ricardobayes wrote: | You are right, it happened once, but that's what | probation periods are for, in my opinion. Also I'd add we | don't hire a lot, so this approach probably doesn't work | for places which are hiring a lot of people regularly. | bmj wrote: | The last "tech" interview I had was in 2007, with my current | employer. It was not an algorithmic interview, but rather a | deep dive into how much I knew about SQL (which was a | critical part of my position at that time), and a bit of | general web knowledge. I definitely hit a point where I said | "well, I don't know," but managed to get the job anyway. | | I had two previous "tech" interviews prior to that. The first | was for a Perl shop. All Perl-specific questions, and the | interviewer even gave me a copy of the Camel Book to thumb | through if necessary. The second was for an MS-based web | shop. They sat me down at a computer and told me write a | relatively simple C#-based CRUD app. I was allowed to Google | whatever I needed. The Perl interview was fairly challenging | (I knew parts of the language, but was not an expert), the C# | one not so much, but I'm sure it weeded out a lot of | applicants. | | I've also had three other jobs where there was not a "tech" | interview at all, mostly just chatting about projects and | whatnot. | varjag wrote: | I had a test assignment at an interview in 1997. | ddulaney wrote: | They were definitely influential, but it's way more | complicated and probably has as much to do with The Guerilla | Guide to Interviewing, which was Microsoft-based. | | Here's an article that digs into this specific history: | https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/ | baus wrote: | Tech interviews were definitely around prior to Google. I | went through multiple tech interviews in the 90s | robterrell wrote: | My copy of K&R belonged to my dad and was from the early 80s! | | My job interviews in the 80s and 90s (college summer jobs, or | the one time a company tried to get me to leave college for a | job) had no whiteboard-coding-style technical skills | components, aside from demos of software I'd written and | general discussions of implementation details. | | One job I interviewed for was at Davinci Email. This was | probably 1990-ish? They made a LAN email product that ran on | top of Novell NetWare. There were a couple of hours of general | interviews, including a lunch on-site. The last interview was | with someone very technical, who had printed out a few pages of | listings of the obfuscated C contest. He asked me to go through | them and tell him what each program would output. I did not get | the job. | idontpost wrote: | > The last interview was with someone very technical, who had | printed out a few pages of listings of the obfuscated C | contest. He asked me to go through them and tell him what | each program would output. I did not get the job. | | It's nice to know that stupid interview questions are not a | modern innovation. | jcadam wrote: | Got a job working on an old Ada system during the Great | Recession (I was unemployed and desperate enough to take | _any_ job). Mom was kind enough to give me all of her old Ada | books - apparently her employer (defense contractor) had sent | her to training when the language was first introduced. | | > The last interview was with someone very technical, who had | printed out a few pages of listings of the obfuscated C | contest. | | That's cold. The worst I've had was otherwise normal code | with a few deliberate bugs introduced: "Tell me what's wrong | with this code." | gwbas1c wrote: | My mom passed about a month ago, and when going through a closet, | my dad handed me some papers she wrote for a college course. | | Turns out she was the same age as me when her father died a | similar death, and she wrote about similar feelings. | zackmorris wrote: | If the minimalist resume is appealing, can we also bring back | walk-on hiring? | | In warehouse and construction work, if someone shows up at 7:30 | AM on a Monday morning, odds are quite good that the foreman will | have something for them to do. Maybe not that day, but maybe | tomorrow, or maybe someone on the list above them won't show up | that week and they'll get called. I made rent doing that in my | early 20s and they even let me leave early sometimes to work on | my internet business because I didn't have a family to support | and maybe someone else had a bill they needed to pay and wanted | my shift. | | Why again does boutique startup need to interview 500 | overqualified people? Hire someone right away and let them quit | if they want to and hire someone else. It's just business for | crying out loud. | eigenhombre wrote: | We had a fellow just out of college walk in off the street, | maybe 2015 or 2016. "I heard you guys do Clojure programming | here, is that right?" We said yes. He said I'd like to | interview. We interviewed him that week and hired him. | | We were a small-ish startup and he had done his homework, | showed interest, and could write code to our standards. He | stayed for a year or two and then moved on. | brianobush wrote: | If software was so regular like construction, we could automate | most of it. | Spooky23 wrote: | We do. 80% of the tasks that I did as an engineer in 1999 are | fully automated today. | [deleted] | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | Interesting. Almost nothing I've done as a programmer since | 1985 seems automated today. | | What do you mean by "fully automated" ? | mperham wrote: | ORMs didn't go mainstream until Hibernate in 2001 or so? | Before that, everyone was writing custom SQL and DB | access by hand. | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | I implemented "an ORM" at amazon in 1994. None of the | code outside of the library used SQL, everything pushed | and pulled C++ objects. | LtWorf wrote: | No? You had valgrind to find memory bugs in 1985? | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | I would not consider that "full automated", but YMMV. | enraged_camel wrote: | Same. It's fair to say our tooling today is far superior, | but "fully automated" implies virtually zero input from | humans beyond the initial configuration. | [deleted] | mylons wrote: | then why isn't construction automated? i think if your | company's processes are so specialized and nuance, you should | really take a step back and ask if they should be. | thaeli wrote: | Construction in the US is highly mechanized, the vast | majority of laborers have been replaced by machinery. | [deleted] | chuckster563 wrote: | Are you saying the fortune 500 are bad at business? | ClumsyPilot wrote: | A. Bank caused the financial crisis of 2008 | | B. Are you saying top banks are bad at banking? | end_of_line wrote: | That's the convenient myth to think banks caused crisis. | Money printing and credit rates lowering by government | caused this. Free money? Sure, why not. Please watch | princes of yen documentary where they speak about "credit | window guidance" conducted by Japanese national bank for | more than decades | indigochill wrote: | We automate tons of software. That's what compilers and | interpreters are. And now we're even entering the era of | plausibly-deniably-stealing-other-people's-code-from-Github- | as-a-service. | Gordonjcp wrote: | That reminds me of one of my dad's favourite jokes. | | A guy goes up to the shipyard gates and asks to see the | foreman. When the foreman comes along he asks "Hey, any chance | of a job in your yard?" | | "Yes, of course", says the foreman, "if you're prepared to | start at the bottom and work your way up. Are you any good at | making tea?" | | "Yes", says the man, "I can make the tea!" | | "Great!", says the foreman, "do you know how to drive a | forklift?" | | The man squints at him quizzically, "How big is your f***** | teapot, then?" | Aeolun wrote: | I can totally see why this one would be someone's favorite. | Sprocklem wrote: | Any chance someone could explain this to me? I think I'm | missing something. | IggleSniggle wrote: | The joke is that the would-be worker assumes the forklift | question relates to the previous question, and thus that | the teapot is so large that it requires a forklift. | UncleOxidant wrote: | > can we also bring back walk-on hiring? | | This used to happen in the 80s. I went to interview at a | startup company in Mountain View in 1987. There was some chit- | chat then the interviewer asked me to wire-wrap a circuit | (diagram was provided) and power it on and connect it up to the | logic analyzer - he went away for about 1/2 an hour while I did | that. He came back and complemented me on my neatness. Then he | took me over across the room to talk to the VP of engineering | who, after a few minutes of chit-chat, asked me when I would | like to start. Those were the days. | eastbound wrote: | Pretty much my interview process. I ask them to program a | contains(string, substring), then come back 30 minutes later | to code scattered all over the place, sometimes with "// 54 | upvotes http://stackoverflow.com/...", code not compiling, | and I'm still wondering whether I should accept them. | | I wonder what's so hard with my interview. 5 years ago, even | interns could do it, one of them could even tell the | difference between UTF-8 and UTF-16. | IggleSniggle wrote: | Maybe the problem is that nobody needs to solve that | problem in their jobs anymore? For the last few months I've | had the joy and privilege to really get to know the TCP and | TLS stack intimately, and find myself looking for the | patterns that are going to be most useful for handling data | bit by bit. But prior to that, I really needed to care much | more about the semantics (and the engineering culture | around them) and the large scale structure of my code. I | might get more hung-up/distracted by `contains(string, | substring)` vs `string.contains(substring)` than what the | actual operations to achieve it might be. And also, "surely | this problem is already solved, optimally" aligns with one | of the 3 great programmer virtues: A Great Programmer is | Lazy. 30 minutes is unfortunately exactly the wrong amount | of time if somebody has fallen into this trap. | | Anyway, I guess it depends what compute layer you're | interviewing for, but it doesn't necessarily sound like | your interview process is broken, exactly. Like, it could | be testing for the right thing, but in the absence of that | thing, maybe you just need to find another thing that is | substitutable. | eastbound wrote: | Our real algo: We save a bunch of objects, but some of | then exist in the DB, so you need to intersect what's in | the DB with what's in memory before saving, except you | can never hold all of the db at once. | | It should be our real-life test, but it's too long. It's | our most complicated algo, and honestly it's very simple | in the end. But given all the variables scattered around | in a string.contains() (I don't even look whether the | result is correct, I look whether it's structured for | intelligibility and how they debug the off-by-1 errors), | I can't suppose a more complex algo will be done cleanly. | | Maybe I'm mot giving them their chance - It might have | taken time for me to output clean algorithms. | virtualwhys wrote: | `upsert`, not sure how having someone implement | `contains` is going to help solve your IRL problem | optimally, but I guess the interview process is more | about testing cognitive strength vs. practical | experience. | PragmaticPulp wrote: | > Hire someone right away and let them quit if they want to and | hire someone else. It's just business for crying out loud. | | This is missing the point of interviewing. The goal isn't to | find any warm body to fill the chair, the goal is to find | someone qualified to do the work who also has a history of | doing good work at previous employers. You also don't have | unlimited headcount and hiring budget, so it's worth making the | investment to find the top 10% of your applicants rather than | picking first-come first-serve. | | One of the things you don't realize about the hiring market | until you've been reviewing resumes for a while is that problem | employees are over-represented in the candidate pool. The most | qualified employees spend the least time job searching because | they're given offers right away. The most problematic and | underqualified employees are frequently searching for jobs | after being fired or let go. If you sample applicants at | random, they're far more likely to be in the underqualified | and/or problematic group than in the great employee group, | statistically. | | The other thing that isn't obvious is just how damaging a | single bad hire can be to a team. Hire someone who clashes with | their peers and fails to deliver any good work and you'll find | yourself losing the _good_ team members very shortly. Nobody | likes working with painful coworkers. | | That said: The analogy of a "walk-on" job isn't dead in tech. | If you pick a company you want to work for, find someone on | LinkedIn, and send them your resume with a short pitch about | why you want to work there, there's a good chance they'll at | least strongly consider your resume. Nobody is guaranteed a job | this way, but it's one route to getting your foot in the door | even when you don't see the exact job posting you want on the | website. | ChrisMarshallNY wrote: | I actually very much agree with this comment. I was a manager | for 25 years. A bad "team fit" was not good. | | I never had a _technical_ failure in my hires, but I did have | a couple of "bad cultural fits." These usually weren't toxic | people, but people that couldn't handle the responsibilities | and pressures (we were a small, high-functioning team, and | everyone's visibility was fairly high). | | But this: | | _> who also has a history of doing good work at previous | employers._ | | makes me wonder how LeetCode tests can tell you that, as they | seem to be the single most important component of all | software engineering hires, these days. | | In my experience, they just drive out the qualified people | that can see projects through, and leave you with ... the | ones that are really well-practiced in short, academic | exercises. | lordnacho wrote: | I'll second that. I never hired anyone who couldn't do the | work. The only times things went badly were times when the | person basically didn't want to do the work, due to some | personal hangup. No amount of interviewing is going to weed | out that guy who can code perfectly fine but deep down is | yearning to be a psychologist instead. Like any other job | that pays bills, you are vulnerable to paying his bills | until they find what they really want. | | > In my experience, they just drive out the qualified | people that can see projects through, and leave you with | ... the ones that are really well-practiced in short, | academic exercises. | | Yeah beats me how anyone thinks LC is useful, other than | for weeding out the most unqualified people, like people | who genuinely have never coded. I suppose what it really | does is finds you people who are willing to put in the time | to study all the hundreds of questions. | ianlevesque wrote: | >I suppose what it really does is finds you people who | are willing to put in the time to study all the hundreds | of questions. | | Yes, this is it. | ChrisMarshallNY wrote: | As opposed to putting in the time to learn how to write | and release ship software. | | I won't study LC, because I'm _waaaaaayyyy_ too busy, | learning Swift, UIKit, AppKit, WatchKit, SwiftUI, DocC, | MapKit, SiriKit, device SDKs, networking, USB, etc. | | I _literally_ work every single day (like seven days a | week), and _learn something new_ every single day, yet I | am barely keeping up. I would be _nuts_ to sacrifice | _any_ of this time, studying schoolboy questions that | have little to no relevance in the software that I write. | | These technologies result in actual applications that you | can sell and market. | | Just another way to look at it. | primeblue wrote: | mixmastamyk wrote: | The GP was using the proxy of "shows up at 7:30AM, ready to | work" as signal for motivation and a lesser extent, | competence. Not a morning person, but would prefer this to | leetcode hazing. | primeblue wrote: | dkurth wrote: | As Seymour Cray said, "The trouble with programmers is that you | can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late." | | It can be months (at a high salary) before you really know | whether a hire is likely to work out. I think it makes sense to | invest more effort in screening applicants in this case. | LtWorf wrote: | But I don't think there is research showing that those | strange hiring processes actually do work. | intelVISA wrote: | I've seen many variants of the recruiting process from the | cute product feature disguised as a take-home to 6 stage | interviews with two engineering(!!) interviewers per round | that cost the company a few thousand per (un)successful | candidate in man-hours. | | Which is hilarious in an industry that is pretty binary | ("you can build it") || ("you can't build it"). Doubly so | when the majority of dev jobs are in web which is easily | explored in the candidate's language of choice with basic | CRUD / RESTful concepts. | david422 wrote: | I know a company that hired a contractor, who (probably) sat | on his ass for months, then went AWOL with nothing delivered, | and said company had to start over from scratch. Probably a | little too much trust there. | indymike wrote: | I've hired hundreds of developers over three decades, and | this is completely wrong: | | > It can be months (at a high salary) before you really know | whether a hire is likely to work out. | | It's only that way if you make it take that long. You should | know if you have a good programmer 2-3 weeks after the hire. | Here a couple things that make making great hires hard: | | * Making it difficult to learn and understand your system. | | * Having slow and expensive employee onboarding. I've seen | companies spend $3-4K (not including the actual laptop) just | getting a laptop to a new employee after IT gets done with | it. If it's super-expensive to make a hire, the incentive | will be to keep people that aren't getting the job done. | | * Not looking at work output for extended periods. In short | give new people tickets that can be done in a few days at | most so you are able to look at work output in six days | instead of measuring at six months. | | > I think it makes sense to invest more effort in screening | applicants in this case | | There's only so much you can really screen before error in | your hiring process exceeds 50%. Every step you add to a | screening process has an error rate, and some are very | subjective and error prone. The more screening you do, the | slower you go, and honestly, the worst candidates you have to | pick from. Why? Because a good programmer will be on the job | market for 1-14 days (I'm not saying you are bad if it takes | you longer to get hired, it's just what we're seeing in our | recruiting software right now). | deltree7 wrote: | Have you built a successful growing software firm? | | Does your software systems scale to Millions? | | What about counterfactuals? | | Without that data, your 3-decade hiring process means | nothing. | | I'm sure someone working in IBM, TCS, AT&T, Booz can all | claim that they have been hiring people for 3-decades and | give an opinion | noptd wrote: | Not sure why this is downvoted. Considering the parent | led with | | >I've hired hundreds of developers over three decades, | and this is completely wrong | | in order to argue from a position of authoritative | experience, these questions are entirely fair game. | mixmastamyk wrote: | Because it's self-evident that designing a quick-ramp up | process and modular system/good docs makes this a lot | easier. It's 2022, you should be able to review checkins | on gitlab the first week with a couple of basic tickets. | | If folks are too green for that then they can be put thru | an internship first. If an obscure language, have them do | checkins on a tutorial. | intelVISA wrote: | "The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what | a programmer is doing until it's too late." | | the meta-halting problem | CamperBob2 wrote: | That's an awesome saying -- I'm surprised I've never heard | it. It remains true after a LOT of mutation. | | _The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell | what a programmer is doing until it 's too late._ | | _The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell | what a program is doing until it 's too late._ | | _The trouble with programs is that you can never tell what a | programmer is doing until it 's too late._ | | _The trouble with programs is that you can never tell what a | program is doing until it 's too late._ | myhf wrote: | The trouble with aphorisms is that you can never tell what | an aphorism is saying until it's too late. | 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: | I hear it's worse in those languages where the subject | comes last. | nonethewiser wrote: | > In warehouse and construction work, if someone shows up at | 7:30 AM on a Monday morning, odds are quite good that the | foreman will have something for them to do. Maybe not that day, | but maybe tomorrow, or maybe someone on the list above them | won't show up that week and they'll get called. | | That's hard to do when there are so many strings attached to | employing someone. It's a double edged sword which makes the | decision to hire someone a lot bigger." Yeah, I have stuff I | need help with right now" is not enough. | itsoktocry wrote: | > _It 's just business for crying out loud._ | | Umm...there's some administrative and legal overhead related to | hiring, firing or otherwise replacing an employee you seem to | be overlooking. | VancouverMan wrote: | Pretty much all of that is completely artificial, and only | exists because it's imposed by government. | | Things would function just fine, if not a lot better, without | such unnecessary burdens being forced on employers and | employees. | emiliobumachar wrote: | So true, but the government is a fact. Walk-in hiring got | unintentionally killed off when we intentionally killed | GTFO firing. | Aeolun wrote: | > Things would function just fine, if not a lot better, | without such unnecessary burdens being forced on employers | and employees. | | Oh yes, 'at-will' states are absolute front-runners in | employee happiness. | stepanhruda wrote: | This is such a terrible take worthy of not making it past | Econ 101. Yes in theory a completely free labor market is | cool. In practice, centuries of labor exploitation and | history of workers' right show that this will quickly | devolve in employer's favor. | yieldcrv wrote: | Entertainers still have that capability in many places | | Offbrand for this site but I've seen women audition and work | and get paid the same day, this year | | Is what it is | | They sign all forms and its W-2 employment some places as well | | I agree we should reduce friction to that level for more kinds | of work, some people are working on that | jimhi wrote: | Can you clarify, are you talking about modeling, standup, | acting? What role exactly? | yieldcrv wrote: | all of the above | | the main point is how it is in direct contrast to how other | sectors will interview for weeks and _months_ , before any | resolution at all, _then_ require negotiating an offer, | just to get to a two-week notice at a _minimum_ and then | require another 2 weeks to a month to get paid, with | deposits taking several more business days (up to 5 actual | days) to be available | | paid instantly when you realized you might need it, versus | paid 4 months from now hoping you planned and forecasted | correctly | tomcam wrote: | This question makes me wish I hadn't retired. It would be a | totally cool experiment if I still had my own company. | time_to_smile wrote: | > bring back walk-on hiring? | | This make sense for highly productive labor, that foreman | hiring people for just showing up generally got a positive | expected return for this. In fact, this is still how a lot of | (sometimes illegal) day labors go about getting work: truck | comes by, picks up people ready for work, work get done and | everyone makes money. | | > Why again does boutique startup need to interview 500 | overqualified people? | | Because these startups _lose_ money as a matter of principle. | The people working there aren 't actually performing productive | labor. All of that hiring is about creating a large illusion in | the market place. | | Most of my labor has gone to waste. More projects than not | never ultimately shipped, but even the most valuable projects I | did, still made money for companies that ultimately lose more | money than they take in. Many of my best projects are for SaaS | companies that don't exist any more. | | The guy picking up a bunch of people in the back of his truck | is about to go build something real and is going to get paid in | cash, and the more people he can get in the back of the truck | the more jobs he can get done in that day, which means more | cash for everyone (and if you're on the paying end, it means | that project you wanted done is done faster). | | > It's just business for crying out loud. | | I don't think this has been true in tech for over a decade. I | had a COO once excitedly proclaim that if the company made more | money than it cost to run, we would have unlimited runway. The | COO seriously thought he had stumbled upon some brilliant | realization about a company making more than it costs to run. | | The guy with the truck knows _far_ more about business than | most execs at tech companies today. | llanowarelves wrote: | I can't wait for the economic downturn. | | Washes most of the nonsense away. | UncleOxidant wrote: | > Most of my labor has gone to waste. More projects than not | never ultimately shipped | | Same here and I've been in the biz for ~35 years. An | architect can drive around a city and point to buildings he | designed. It's a bit disillusioning to think that the vast | majority of the work I've done has just sort of disappeared | because either a startup didn't make it or got swallowed up | into a larger organization that had other plans. | | > The guy with the truck knows far more about business than | most execs at tech companies today. | | Yep. The guy with the truck can't lose much money for very | long. A lot of tech execs have gone years without needing to | worry about that because there was so much easy money around. | mbreese wrote: | _> An architect can drive around a city and point to | buildings he designed_ | | I was under the impression that architects also did a lot | of spec work, or designs for RFPs that don't ever get | built. Or maybe only get built as a model. | | I'm not disagreeing with your premise -- there is a lot of | programming work that is hidden, lost, or wasted. However, | it's not a trait that's exclusively a programming thing. | pishpash wrote: | Is there also a lot of custom rebuilding of pipes or | nails, either the exact same ones or in a new shiny | material? | VancouverMan wrote: | > An architect can drive around a city and point to | buildings he designed. | | I don't think that the situation is really that much | different for building architects. | | In cities that are experiencing rapid densification, it's | not unusual to see numerous buildings from the 1950s, if | not much later, being demolished to make way for newer and | larger structures. | | Even when structures aren't totally demolished, it's not | unusual for them to be so extensively modified that the | original building is virtually unrecognizable, or even | completely obscured by the work of other architects. | | It's also quite common for building projects to be canceled | before construction starts, but after designs have been | prepared, and other architectural work performed. | | Many projects that do eventually get built often go through | numerous revisions, with the final product being almost | nothing like the earlier designs. | golergka wrote: | > Hire someone right away and let them quit if they want to and | hire someone else. It's just business for crying out loud. | | You're not hiring construction workers, you're hiring | architects. It often takes more than 3 months to get used to a | new codebase and understand how and why things are done the way | they are. | jacobr1 wrote: | And sometimes you are hiring construction workers, and | sometimes trade-specialists. I've hired contractors to | address specific tech-debt, or accelerate QA on project, to | implement a CRUD type stuff for things with well-known | approaches that just take time. | eromReven wrote: | I dearly miss my adoptive father, and his close friend, who | introduced me to computers in the early 1980s, in a dreary | backwater town of a backwater Middle-Eastern country, starting | with a Sinclair ZX-81, soon followed by a ZX Spectrum :) | | We were always behind the rest of the world in everything; to get | new software or books and magazines we had to wait for someone to | make a 10-12 hour trip to the nearest major city, which happened | once every couple months, so we had to prepare wishlists in | advance ^^ | | Those 80s computer mags were the best part of my childhood: Your | Sinclair and specially ZZAP! because those were all I had access | to when someone else was using the TV, or the computer, or just | waiting for the electricity to come back on (something which that | part of the world still struggles with) | | I graduated to a Commodore 64 and fantasized about getting a | Commodore Amiga, but by the time we could afford a new computer, | the world had moved on, and I got my first "IBM PC" in 1993: a | 286 with a 40 MB (megabyte) HD :) | | My dad's friend, my uncle, was pretty much a genius who had | taught himself electronics, repaired his own TVs etc and even | built his own audio equipment and other simple devices for his | friends. He tried to teach me programming in BASIC but none of it | stuck with me (I try to make up for that by learning Z80 and 6502 | coding these days) | | The guy died relatively young, and his genius was never | recognized outside our small town, but the children he influenced | and instilled a love of technology in, always remember him and | owe their skills to him. | phamilton4 wrote: | How amazing it would have been to work for Convair or General | Dynamics during that time! | | The absolute heyday of Convair! The B-58 Hustler would have been | introduced around the same time your father worked there! One of | my favorites! | | I wonder how many return calls you'd get if you used that resume | format today!! | | I hope you (or whoever owns that repo/resume) gets the chance to | talk to him about working there and what it was like to watch | computers shrink in size while getting more powerful! Thanks for | sharing! | gomox wrote: | Whoever can type a resume of that length in a typewriter with no | errors I would instantly hire. Such level of attention to detail | is extremely rare these days. | president wrote: | Sadly, communication and writing skills takes a backseat to | algorithm interviews. I understand the company benefits | massively from hyper-focusing on hard skills but quality of | life suffers for your average IC mired by the daily failures of | miscommunication. | hondo77 wrote: | Back in the 80s I would type up a resume and make corrections | with correction paper (big upgrade from liquid paper!). Then I | would go to a print shop and have them make copies of it but on | nice paper. The copies would not show any signs of the | corrections. The same thing could have been done with the cover | letter in this case, since only the date and addressee at the | top would need to be changed for each company. | aidenn0 wrote: | Most likely, someone with the initials "sd" typed out that | resume rather than Ray Livesay | glonq wrote: | Can confirm. The convention back then was that the typist | puts their initials at the bottom of letters or memos. | sswaner wrote: | That resume reinforces the argument that the GI Bill is the best | legislation every passed in the US. | UncleSlacky wrote: | Shame it wasn't available to everyone who qualified: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill#Racial_discriminatio... | davedx wrote: | Poor fella never got to use React | nsxwolf wrote: | It is so simple. There's no "Experienced software architect with | a proven track record of delivering high quality and performant | blah blah blah" shit. | | What were the interviews like back then? | todd8 wrote: | The interview that resulted in my first real job as a | programmer was in 1976. In that interview I was asked quite | detailed questions about writing an interrupt handler and the | rest of a device driver. Despite having a new MS in Computer | Science, it was a stressful interview. However, I did get hired | and actually did do a project that involved writing the drivers | for a new piece of hardware. | insightcheck wrote: | > "Experienced software architect with a proven track record of | delivering high quality and performant blah blah blah" | | What's wrong with that? Each part of the phrase sounds like | something an experienced developer should strive for, and is | objectively testable (e.g. delivered projects in a work setting | or not, well-written code or not, the software runs quickly or | not, etc.). | | Junior developers in particular may lack the track record part | when starting out, so it's a good indicator that a person is | applying for more senior positions. | nsxwolf wrote: | Well, I don't think there's necessarily anything "wrong" with | it (It's actually from my own resume), I just cringe when I | read it. It reminds me that I operate within a world obsessed | with jargon and eye-roll inducing business speak. It all | feels so unnatural to me. | scruple wrote: | When I see things like that on a resume I instinctively | smell bullshit. Right or wrong, that's my reaction. | "Proven?" Show me the proof. "High-quality and performant?" | I better not be able to quickly and easily find end users | complaining about your companies software. | nsxwolf wrote: | There's so much suspicion in this industry. Is it so in | other industries? We see a 20 year work history, and we | assume you must be lying so we LeetCode you in front of a | couple recent college grads. And now we're going to go | after end user complaints as well? | | I guess its good I work on the back end, I can always | blame poor user experience on the front end and "UX" | people. | scruple wrote: | I'm suspicious of people that need to dress up their 20 | years of experience with business speak, yes. It is the | business speak specifically that makes me suspicious. | nsxwolf wrote: | Everyone does this because everyone thinks they need to. | So you're suspicious of everyone, but the only thing you | can legitimately suspect is that they're the kind of | person that does what needs to be done. | morelisp wrote: | > What's wrong with that? | | You said it yourself: "Each part of the phrase sounds like | something an experienced developer should strive for". Nobody | will ever write the opposite. So it signals nothing. | insightcheck wrote: | But as I also wrote, at least one occurrence of this in a | resume is still a good signal that the candidate | understands what a hiring manager is looking for, and also | signals that the candidate isn't totally junior. | | If a candidate is totally junior and still writes that they | are are a junior an "experienced software architect with a | proven track record of delivering high quality and | performant..." but fails to back it up, they end up being | judged next to people who actually do have this experience. | | In that case, it could be better to emphasize the "willing | to learn quickly"/"excellent team member"/soft skills | aspect to set expectations right, and/or develop better | technical skills so a candidate can actually claim that. | So, it's only really beneficial to write if you actually do | have experience, and thus could be a worthwhile signal to | include at least once in the resume to show you're at that | level. | Test0129 wrote: | The problem is it's already given by the extensive job | history. Typing that is just a dance we have to do to get | past automated filters that look for keywords. By my | estimation we are now in the "black hat SEO" phase of resume | design. Soon, not even that will work. | | Back in OP's Dad's day actual humans who actually cared | looked at _every_ resume and more often than not treated the | interviewee like a human. For us, we just get fed into a | machine and if we make it out of it _maybe_ a human will | glance at it. | insightcheck wrote: | This may not be an accurate worldview of mine, but I've | actually completely given up trying to apply to jobs that | have application portals/likely keyword filters (though I | may be willing to if I search for public sector work in the | future). | | I try to find work through past coworkers and often by | reaching out directly to the hiring manager if I think I | could have skills that they are looking for. My friend of | mine who took the standard volume approach got over a | hundred rejections before receiving one offer, often with | radio silence. The human approach is nice because it | bypasses the filters, and you're far more likely to at | least get responses along the way during the job search. | vidarh wrote: | I started doing my MSc in large part to get past automated | filters in the aftermath of the dot-com bust. The irony is | that I could have left it at that: Just adding "Studying | towards an MSc in ..." got me a marked uptick in responses, | and recruiters asking about it. | udev wrote: | The interviews were just like the Peter Griffin skin color | chart meme. [0] | | [0] https://imgflip.com/memetemplate/237132471/Peter-Griffin- | ski... | todd8 wrote: | Not really. | jabroni_salad wrote: | It's my understanding that the interviews consisted solely of a | firm handshake | haxorito wrote: | In 1980 - I'm expert in those 3 areas In 2020 - I'm aware of | about 10000 different technologies but not expert in anything | karmakaze wrote: | In 1985 I learned and shipped products using IBM Assembler, | Cobol, JCL, TSO, and some others not listed. | | It was a bit of an unusual mainframe software spinoff company | where I did my 1st year and later co-op work placements. My | next co-op placement was more conventional embedded C. | aasasd wrote: | Eh, I was pumping out PHP+MySQL and a bit of Python until the | early 2010s, when a) I went to work on a larger site where | disparate specialized tech was used to optimize every part of | it, and b) hipster explosion of devops happened. | nathanvanfleet wrote: | Height: 5'4" Health: Excellent | | I really need to add this to my resume. | mussum_cacilds wrote: | Metadat your photo has metadata on it. "...Norwich.." Ironic with | your username btw | mussum_cacilds wrote: | If this was a job advertisement ... | major505 wrote: | Seens like beetween 60's and 80's every dev in US would | inevitably ending up working for us military. | [deleted] | machiste77 wrote: | Ok... but can he traverse a binary tree on a whiteboard? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-10-25 23:00 UTC)