Subj : Re: CV, work-history, 91C, CompSci?, Applet? (was: Software Job Ma...) To : comp.programming,comp.software-eng From : rem642b Date : Tue Sep 06 2005 11:04 pm (Regarding MicroSoft Word and documents of its format:) > From: Chris Hills > The use of plain text simply says you can not use the current standard > tools of your profession. I have never programmed in APL, which requires a special character set. All the langauges I've programmed in, both assembly langugage and higher-level, have used plain ASCII text files as source files. Not one of them used MicroSoft Word format files as source or as library or as object or as executable or as anything else associated with it. Lisp documentation strings are in plain text. JavaDoc is in plain text. Neither is in MicroSoft Word format. There is nothing in my profession, writing software, that requires or uses MicroSoft Word format in any way. I have never claimed expertise with MicroSoft Word. I am not seeking a job using MicroSoft Word, such as word-processing, or receptionist/secretary, or advertising copy, etc. Accordingly what you said, that MicroSoft Word instead of plain text is a tool of my profession, seems to be completely wrong. > >- References are names of people who know me personally and are well > > acquainted with my recent work. > There are standard ways of laying out references. It's not a good idea to include references in a resume, nor even to say "references available on request", so I'm going to ignore your remarks. > >- I don't know the correct term for list of citations for published papers. By the way, I believe the correct term for a list of published works is "bibliography", but I'm not sure. I didn't happen to think of that word when I was writing my earlier article in this thread. Anyway there are multiple formats for items in a bibliography and I'm not sure which format is best in a resume. > Look in any book, technical paper etc. If this is in regard to a list of citations of published works, each journal or book-publisher has its own standard for such citations. They're all similar to each other, but not identical, and I'm not sure which of the variations is best in a resume. > with the inducement of money or fame there is very little a LOT of > people won't do. See TV most nights of the week. :-( What a sad world > we are becoming. I'm not one of those criminal wannabes who would commit any crime if given enough money. There are things I would only if given a lot of money, but there are some things I'd rather not do at all regardless of the money. Last night I was switching channels and happened to see somebody lying in a container half full of water with lots of bloodsucking leeches, and the winner would be the person who could stay in there the longest. I think that is totally sick. I also think it's sick that people will give money to the hurricane relief fund *only* if children starve themselves, the more hours of starvation the more money, as if they enjoy seeing children suffer so much they'd pay money to watch hour by hour. I'd rather learn that the children are manually editing Web pages that list missing people and people looking for missing people, attempting to find matches among the several different Web sites that host such lists, doing something actually useful rather than just submitting to torture to get contributions from voyeurs. > >A > >vast majority of people aren't willing to even try learning how, even > >if offered free instruction. > It depends who offers the free instruction. So like if somebody "famous", like a movie/TV star or sports star, offered cruddy instruction, they'd accept, but a non-famous person offering quality instruction, they couldn't care less? That is another thing so sick about our society. Eric Estrada is famous from TV, so he can be used to advertise for a scam of selling real estate in really bad locations. Robert Young played a doctor on TV, so he could be used to give medical advice to buy certain commercial products that were paying him to do the ads, while the same people who followed his advice would ignore advice from really competant doctors or nutritionists such as Michael F. Jacobson. > You are NOT seeking work for which > you are qualified if you do not have basic literacy and numeracy for > writing reports, designs, requirements specifications, resumes etc. > using standard tools like word. Your premise is invalid, so your conclusion is unproved. I do in fact have basic literacy and numeracy for all of those kinds of tasks, although I've never been required as part of a job to fit the requirements into any standard form, but I did learn UML diagrams in one of my recent classes, and wrote several using a drawing program that was available on MS-Windows. I'm quite capable of writing a first draft of technical reports or designs or requirements, providing that I know the basic information needed (such as if I'm documenting software that I wrote and/or designed, or I'm writing up requirements that I conceived or which I brainstormed with somebody such that sufficient notes were taken). But when it comes to converting my first draft into a polished document (nice formatting, nice layout, nice artistic balance, pretty colors in the opinion of the advertising department, etc.), I would leave that to somebody who specializes in document production. I'll stick to software and preliminary technical documentation. (Where I do a better job all by myself than whoever wrote the Java API JavaDoc that's on their Web site, which has many technical errors and lots of bad punctuation.) > Someone who can not use their mother language is not likely to be > trusted working in another language. If you're referring to English, I do about as well as you do in writing complete sentences with correct spelling and grammar. That's a lot better than an awful lot of people who are posting in newsgroups. However your remark is actually completely stupid in this context. I just communicate in a normal way in English, but in computer programming languages I do exceptionally well at implementing algorithms far beyond what an average person can do. So I would rate my English writing as good (appx. 90th percentile among English-speaking people) but my programming as excellent (very top percentile). > you appear to be out of synch with your peers. I don't have any peers. > > >> Why have you been unemployed for 10 years? > >Because was unemployed ten years ago, and nobody changed that status > >quo by hiring me since then. > why has no one hired you in that decade? I'm not privy to the mental processes within the brains of each person who decided not to hire me, so I don't have the information necessary to answer your question. > What work did you go for and (if known) why didn't you get it? I have several megabytes of such information. Please arrange to drop by some time and browse it. > >> Try a change of career. > >I'm already doing that. > to what? Commercial software (what I did before was in-house custom software). > >includes designing the data > >structures and algorithms to be used, then writing code and performing > >unit-testing > sounds good Thanks for approving some of my skills. Do you know of any employment available which can use such skills but which does not require me to have specific experience I don't have? > > and writing in-sourcefile technical documentation > Not good. What about the requirements spec, design notes etc (in a > standard format which is NOT ASCII) I do not have access to any text format other than ASCII (plain or HTML), and I don't have money to purchase such facilities, so your attempt to harass me in this regard is a waste of your typing effort. I've written requirements spec and design notes, in ASCII. But most of the work I've done was research or R&D where I didn't know from the outset what techniques would be most effective and worth putting into production, so in those cases there was no requirements spec at the start. Would you like to see design notes for one of my projects, in plain ASCII? If so, which one? > send me a word or pdf of something you have done. I don't currently have the resources to do that. Will you provide me with a free (i.e. your expense) copy of whatever software, for my Macintosh Performa 600 running System 7.5.5, is needed to produce the something you want me to send you? (Note: I have less than 17 megabytes of available disk space for whatever software you send me plus the actual work you want me to produce for you.) > I think you have been asked to supply a resume in a standard file > format first. MicroSoft Word is a proprietary product of MicroSoft Corporation. It is not an industry standard unless you believe MicroSoft is the only company in the world. They try to dominate everybody else, they even commit crimes to cheat other companies out of their work, and by such means they destroy other companies, running them out of business. They bribe government officials to induce them to avoid prosecuting them except in a token way to make it look to the general public af if the government were doing its job when in fact MicroSoft has made that impossible. Recently I have received a large amount of Joe-job spam from e-mail servers owned&operated by MicroSoft Corporation. MicroSoft owes me tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of dollars per California anit-spam laws, but I can't afford to hire a lawyer to sue MicroSoft to get what they owe me. > >You have a stupid attitude, just like that person who interviewed me > >for the position writing CAD/Lisp software for one-of-a-kind test > >vacuum chambers, who kept remarking how the job would be boring, and > >then he just assumed I wouldn't want the job and never even offered it > >to me, even though I had expressed an interest in it, and I would have > >accepted it if offered. > It sounds like he was trying to dissuade you from the job. Why? If you > can work that out you are half way there. It's obvious to me that he had an belief that people who programmed in Lisp at Stanford must be some kind of Ph.D. student at Stanford, interested only in A.I., who would refuse to do any sort of "boring" work such as he offered me. He was completely mistaken. I was helpless to change his mind. Do you believe that you, in my place, could have changed his mind, deprogrammed him from his stupid belief? Or was there nothing I could have done different from what I already did? > EVERYONE in this thread has offered advice and most of it is to > change your attitude. Think about that. My attitude is that I have 22+ years experience programming computers, that I still can program computers, that I'm available to perform paid work programming computers, and I wish somebody would offer me a job, either programming, or something else that I can do. What part of that attitude needs changing? By the way, since this discussion is very specific to *my* effort to find employment, not of general interest in the entire topic of computer programming or software engineering, why don't you join my Yahoo! Group and discuss my personal employment search there? http://groups.yahoo.com/group/helprobertmaasfindemployment/ .