Subj : CV, work-history, 91C, CompSci?, Applet? (was: Software Job Market Myths) To : comp.programming,comp.software-eng From : rem642b Date : Mon Aug 22 2005 02:51 am > From: "Phlip" > Everyone knows brits use "CV" to casually mean "resume". Did you > actually not know that? I don't know any such thing. I checked on the Web, using Google to find relevant Web sites, and everything I read said that America is the only place where people use one-page resumes to apply for professional jobs such as software. Other places such as Europe, they really do use CVs, so if somebody in UK, which last I heard had joined the EU and gotten connected with the continent by under-channel tunnel and converted to Eurpean currency, and says CV, it's natural that I would expect them to actually mean CV, not resume, same as anyone in France or Germany that uses the term CV would mean that, not resume. But I asked just to be sure, and apparently my merely asking got you so upset you had to flame me about it. Next time somebody says something that is wrong, or seems wrong, and I ask them for clarification, please don't butt in if all you can say is something demeaning and rude toward me. > Do you have a resume out there that _excludes_ the non-recent material?? With what cutoff point? (5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years?) > If I want a senior, I will look for >8 years from early > projects to major works. I had major works in 1963-66 (but that was math, not software), 1970-71, 1975-76, 1978, 1986-91, 1991-95, and 2001-04. I don't think it's possible to twist that to match your spec. > why did you say "currently unemployed"? Hasn't anyone told you this > is the number one trigger HR looks for when shortening their resume > stack? Good point. Tell me where I wrote that and I'll delete it. Hmm, I did a grep of my local copies of those resumes. I see: Files/Resumes/Resume.91C:currently unemployed and available for work immediately That was three months after I became unemployed, when I wanted to emphasize that I had recently gotten laid off so I am immediately available to start work today, you don't have to offer me a job then wait a month or two or even longer for me to give notice at my present job, so if you need somebody immediately I'm a better choice than somebody very busy with another job who can't work for you until the current job is finished next year some time. It's moot now, but was that a huge mistake way back in 1991.Dec? Should I have sent my resume in response to job ads but made like I wouldn't really be available to start work until next year (1992) sometime?? I don't see the phrase "currently unemployed" in any more recent resume, so that one mistake, if it was a mistake, way back in 1991, is pretty much moot for my current unemployment, wouldn't you agree? > Why "for self, unfunded"? Who gives a rat's ass? If something was > good for you, write about the good things! % grep -i 'for self, unfunded' Files/Resumes/* | more Files/Resumes/Resume.91C:- Uploading&downloading software and text (for self, un funded) Files/Resumes/Resume.91C:- Optimizing diets for nutrition and cost (for self, un funded) Files/Resumes/Resume.91C:- Sort/merge of variable-length records (for self, unfu nded) OK, let's just agree that very first resume I ever attempted was not very good. I included that honest but foot-shooting phrase three times way back when I was a true novice at writing resumes, but never made that mistake again in later resumes. But thanks for being the very first person to ever tell me what specifically was wrong with that first resume I ever wrote in my life. > About the hirability issue, you seem to have zillions of "computer > science" certs, and not much visible "software engineering". I have no idea what you're talking about here. I have never taken a course in computer science in the pure sense, i.e. finite automata, turing machines, NP complete and other complexity issues, etc. and I've never written any "paper" on any such topic, although I've taught myself some of those topics and have discussed them in sci.math or comp.programming in recent years. I have never mentionned any such topics in my resume, not ever, not even in that 1991.December firstie. > Software Engineering is the process of efficiently _avoiding_ > computer science research, while adding value to useful software. That's a curious definition I've never heard of, not even slightly close to that, in all the years since I first started seeing the terms "Software Engineer[ing]" in job ads. I like it! I'll have to think about whether anything I ever did would rightly be classified as computer science research. Would A.I. research, which I did for one paid job at IMSSS (English language interface for instructable robot) count as comp.sci. research? That's the only paid job I ever had that would possibly be considered comp.sci. research. All my other paid jobs were directed toward immediately-practical software, either to support physical science (not comp.sci.) research or mathematics research, or to support software development, or to support education, or to interface and utilize new hardware devices for precursor to "desktop publishing", or to support geological surveying and exploration via satellite and aircraft remote-sensing to enable staking claims for mining valuable minerals such as gold or uranium in Nevada/Utah desert (are you curious as to the secret knowledge my boss had 25 years ago that allowed him to use multispectral IR ERTS/U2/P3 imagery to somehow tell him where there's gold or uranium a few feet underground in desert regions that had never been previously explored for such minerals?). I did unpaid work developing software to support mathematics and game theory and practical game-playing research, none of which should rightly be classified as comp.sci. research. I did both paid and unpaid work in developing practical data compression. Shannon did all the comp.sci. research in that area before I was born. I was just applying his theory in novel ways to achieve a practical algorithm which everyone, including McCarthy and Knuth, told me was impossible (generating less than a bit of data per compression event per a short-left-context stochastic model, *without* cheating by using block coding and whole descrete bits per block) even after I had a working program. Gosper was the only person I described my algorithm to who actually understood it, but he wasn't able to convince Knuth it could possibly work, and Knuth wouldn't ever give me an audience to try to explain it to him in-person. He only gave Gosper an audience because Gosper was famous at the time for his HakMem stuff, which apparently impressed Knuth better than anything I had done. (Or maybe he saw my MRPP3/POX, which was better in some ways than the TeX which he later invented and sold commercially, as competition, so he didn't want to get involved with me in any way. The only concessions he ever made to me were: (1) including a very very tiny part of my fractal work in one of his books, only that tiny bit that was directly relevant to his -1+i base, and (2) paying me $25 for spotting a mistake in one of his books. At least he's honest about that spot-mistake-get-money policy!) Also without pay I've written a whole bunch of parsers and semi-parsers and one general parser-engine, all of which is Soft.Eng., not Comp.Sci. What did you see in any of my resumes or any of my Web pages or any of my newsgroup articles that seemed to indicate I had ever done any work in Comp.Sci. research other than that one instructable robot job? > what HR _should_ look for. Stuff like "I wrote a cute window with a > slider, and linked it to a database." Idiotic stuff that's accessible > to a hirer, and helps them think "Ah, you are one of us". You mean worthless toy crap like that, stuff I did for the GUI part of my Java class, would impress recruiters and get me a job?? AFAIK there's no relational database available on my Unix shell account, but I have an extensive s-expression database regarding sources of spam and where to file complaints about each source. Would it impress somebody if I set up a Java applet that somehow explored that database, if I could figure out a good way for the applet to conduct HTTP/CGI transactions to retrieve the data. Unfortunately applets don't work with most browsers in most environments, if my experience at DeAnza college is any example. My simple applet I wrote for the first Java class in 2004.Spring worked in IE in the campus lab, but not in Netscape, and not in either browser in the classroom nor either browser in my instructor's office. http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/Java/Lab7.html Please try that in all the browsers that you have there, and tell me in which if any it actually works (when you press a button the event causes an action to happen), compared to seeing a form on-screen, and you can type in a text field, but nothing happens when you click a button, or if your browser doesn't have JVM available so you don't even see an AWT form on-screen. (I used AWT instead of Swing for the form because I was told that AWT works in all browsers, even very old ones, whereas Swing requires extra support that isn't working yet in some browsers. But I had to use Swing for the JOptionPane because there's no such easy-to-use modal dialog available in AWT.) .