Subj : Re: Resume questions, how convey? (was: How much should I charge fo...) To : comp.programming,comp.lang.java.programmer,comp.lang.lisp From : rem642b Date : Sun Aug 28 2005 02:38 am > From: Tim X > ... zimmer frame! I have no idea what you're talking about. > How could you not know where something you wrote was published? How would I find out that information? I tried searching online but I haven't been able to find the right free database where it'd show up. > All the papers I've had published required be to do things like sign > off copyright or sign a statement that the work was mine etc etc. I don't remember anything like that happening. In any case, my boss asking me to sign something like that still doesn't tell me where the paper would actually end up when published. > Surely you had to submit the paper to a journal/publisher? No, my boss handled all that, except for the abstract I submitted myself behind the back of the supervising professor who didn't think it was a good idea. As best I remember, that abstract was in the 1970.Oct issue of Notices of the AMS. My copy burned up in a warehouse fire in 1972, so I can't easily look it up to verify if my memory is correct. In that case, my original full paper was submitted, by my supervising professor, to various journals that dealt with differential algebra, such as Annals of Math, but no journal would accept it because it was a specific result in a field where there were only about ten people in the whole world working in that field who might like to see the result, so the math department made photocopies of the manuscript and mailed them to those ten people. In the case of the NMR research, the paper was by my boss, whose name I don't remember, but based on a recent online search I believe it might have been Olav Jardetsky. I contributed my description, which his secretary re-wrote, or somesuch. I never saw the final copy of the paper. I was promised a re-print, but never got any. I have no idea what journal it might have been in. In the case of the instructable robot research, the journal was one I never heard of before and can't remember now. For the rest of my work, I have no idea whether my boss published any of my work or not. > Were you the sole author of these papers Good suggestion. Here's the info: NMR - contributing author Robot - primary author DiffAlg abstract - sole author Others - unknown if any paper or not > Its the only explination I can think of why you wold not know where > your paper was published. What if my supervisor did all the publishing arrangement? Can you think of that? > > I'm trying to show my versatility of experience, showing my ability to > > adapt in the past and have a variety of experience possibly useful in > > the future. > That may be relevant if you had worked recently on different > plaforms. However, your experience is so outdated its not worth > cluttering up and possibly distracting from points the employer may be > very interested in. Which of the following computer systems/platforms, which I listed in my resume (Unix/Linux shell, MicroSoft Windows, Macintosh, CGI) are so grossly obsolete that no current employer would want to know whether I had ever used such a system to develop software or not? Note that I didn't include any of the following on my latest resume: WAITS, ITS, Tenex > > > Why Unix+CGI - there is no specific relationship here - you can do CGI > > > programming on any platform which has a web server. > > Not true. > What do you mean "Not true" Lots of Web servers don't allow CGI, or allow only Perl for CGI, not arbitrary programs. Having CGI that allows arbitrary Unix runnables (both native binaries and scripts that use native binaries) is different from Perl-only WebServers such as Tripod, and no-CGI-whatsoever WebServers such as Geocities. > they shallow level of description you have made me think you had next > to no database experience at all. And what kind of description would fit on one or two lines of a one-page resume that would convince you I had enough experience to do a job you wanted me to do? Or just forget the 1-2 line restriction. Let's say half my page is stuff about relational databases. What could I reveal in half a page to convince a skeptic that I really know how to write JDBC software? > MS Access is barely a database in the terms of what employers think > of when talking about a database. MS ACCESS is the only DB available via JDBC at De Anza college. Oracle was available, but only manually via keyboard/SQL interface, with no way to make tables or find out what tables were already in the database it connected to, hence no way to play with it either manually or via JDBC. > Get yourself an instance of postgres to learn with ... If you require me to do that, you'll have to provide the money to buy it for my Macintosh with only 17 megabytes unused disk space, or for my laptop with no working modem or diskette drive or CD-Rom drive, hence no way to install it without first fixing the modem. If you won't provide the money to do what you want me to do, then don't order me what to do. > stop referring to ove 20 years experience. You don't have over 20 > years experience That's a fucking lie! I do too have 22+ years experience at writing computer software. > the only experience that counts is paid employment experiences. Fuck you! Most of my best work was unpaid. > your skills don't match those of someone who has been doing it full > time for 20 years. You don't even know what my skills are! The total time I've spent writing computer software is at least equivalent to 22 years fulltime. > If it was "the best" on the net during that period, then some of us > who have been here for a while should remember it If you were reading PACS-L in 1991, you'd be well aware of it. > what was it called? The two files were MaasInfo.TopIndex and MaasInfo.DocIndex. The first was a list of various indexes/lists that were around at that time, and the second was a list of important documentation about the InterNet that was around at that time, in both cases telling the exact FTP site and filename etc. where to find each such. > Just for interest, what web server was it being used with back in > 1991? It was on a server in Taiwan, in Texas, and in Tasmania, all FTP servers except the Texas one also had e-mail fetch commands. > Also, if it was the first, the techniques used to build the > index must have been pretty impressive - how did you do it? I did it all manually, using a text editor to build the text and assemble the FTP data. Most of the raw data was posted to PACS-L, where every few weeks somebody would announce they had found such-and-such list or index and tell where to find it. I merely collected all these pointers into my master index so that there'd be a single place everyone could go to find all the important lists/indexes and documents. I did a search just now, and I see that after I had been passing word privately to various people, I still wasn't ready for a full public announcement but I cited my index in response to a need 1991.Oct.12: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.mac.digest/msg/cb0a1875451e5c1e Message-ID: <9110122059.AA06364@sumex-aim.Stanford.EDU> then somebody else included reference to my index in her posting of various useful resources 1991.Nov.04: http://groups.google.com/group/alt.education.distance/msg/8529d3bc37d05a98 Message-ID: <1773@sousa.ltn.dec.com> then when I felt comfortable the index was in good enough shape my first formal public announcement on PACS-L was 1992.Jan.03: http://groups.google.com/group/bit.listserv.pacs-l/msg/d03e8a6c6b9fc3eb Message-ID: See also announcements of multiple FTP locations 1994.Feb.22: http://groups.google.com/group/bit.listserv.pacs-l/msg/eb83631e99f8f06e Message-ID: <2ka7kd$793@openlink.openlink.com> and 1994.Apr.07: http://groups.google.com/group/bit.listserv.pacs-l/msg/365b52adc8dc453d Message-ID: <199404070905.AA23072@btr.btr.com> also 1994.Nov.21: http://groups.google.com/group/bit.listserv.pacs-l/msg/fdca6ca2c0219ebd Message-ID: <199411200500.AA19496@btr.btr.com> also for e-mail access, 1995.Jan.03: http://groups.google.com/group/bit.listserv.pacs-l/msg/cfe4d9b87298e44a Message-ID: <199412242154.AA19654@btr.btr.com> > Of course they are methodologies - but you cannot claim experience or > proficiency with a methodology unless you have used it in real world > situations (as opposed to contrived learning environments). Spam is a real-world problem costing more than 50% of the total e-mail resources in recent years, therefore fighting spam is a real-world application. Not having control over a SMTP server, and not having access to the court for suing spammers for $1000 per spam per California law, my only active option was automating the process of collecting CTW (Complain To Whom) data and validating it, and using it to automatically complain about each new incoming spam just a few seconds after it was noticed by my program that checked my inbox once per minute. In that way the ISP, if it cared to reduce its outgoing spam, could catch the spammer in the act. Lots of people used my computerized pseudo-typesetting (precursor to desktop publishing) software before Knuth did his TeX. This was a real-world task for people who had no other practical way to edit their manuscripts that had complicated mathematical formulas. (Even after TeX, some people preferred my software because with Gosper's macros it automatically converted MacSyma output to nicely formatted output, something TeX can't do.) Do you want more examples of my software solving real-world problems (college payroll, college class assignments, for example), or have I made my point with those first two? > applying the methodology to something other than trivial problems. I've written software to solve a large number of non-trivial problems, not all as real-world practical as described above, but still not trivial in any way. How about if I describe the purpose of five of my nontrivial problems, and you see if you can write software to solve all five of them in less than one day of effort? I bet you can't do them all in even a month of effort, but if they were trivial as you claim you'd be able to do all five of them in 24 hours. With such a wide gap between my claim and your claim, it should be easy to see if they are trivial (maybe it takes you two days because you were busy one of the days), or very very non-trivial as I claim (it'll probably take you a full month or two just to do *one* of them completely, but taking even half a month to get the first completed would show for sure I am correct and you are wrong). > I said I could not tell what job type/class/catagory they were > "customized" for. If I couldn't determine that, its unlikely any > employer would see anthing which would get their attention. An employer looking to fill a particular job, and getting resumes labeled for that particular job, already knows which job the resume is for, and merely has to check whether it is or is not suitable. He doesn't have to guess, from the thousands of jobs offered by hundreds of companies, what job each resume might be for. So your failure to do a very difficult guessing task is no proof the employer wouldn't be able to do that much easier task of noticing that I have a lot of different qualifications including the ones needed for the job. .