[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)