[HN Gopher] My dad's resume and skills from 1980
___________________________________________________________________
My dad's resume and skills from 1980
Author : metadat
Score : 1423 points
Date : 2022-10-25 14:25 UTC (1 days 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.
| rossjudson wrote:
| Most "modern" resumes I see could learn a thing or two from this.
| Tight and to the point.
| 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.
| n_cusan wrote:
| Love the aesthetic of the letter.
| luispa wrote:
| This is great. Thanks for sharing.
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I keep looking at small round displays and think about
| building something with them. If we could get our hands on a
| legally available disk image for, day, DtCyber, it'd be
| feasible to build a cyberdeck-style laptop with 2 round OLEDs
| (or, more practically, a cheaper rectangular one and a with
| two circular cutouts.
|
| I am looking at https://www.panelook.com/VLT236-RDP-600-23-6i
| nch-848x848-ROU... right now and thinking about making
| something cool (the resolution is crap, sadly)
| lwoo wrote:
| Unfortunately he passed away shortly after [1] but your point
| stands.
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/runvnc/dadsresume/issues/1#issuecomment-1...
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's expected, but still very sad to hear. He seemed like a
| very cool guy.
| [deleted]
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The PDP-1 could be fitted with one (I believe you can play
| with it at the Computer Museum in Mountain View). The
| CDC-6xxx series had a magnificent console with two round
| screens (and vector graphics, although they weren't direct
| view storage tubes like the supercool Tektronix were). There
| were two such consoles at the Living Computer Museum in
| Seattle.
|
| And, BTW, it's not always that I meet a fellow Elder Thing. I
| am myself from 1968, so I didn't get near an interesting
| computer until much later.
| [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.
| screwgoth wrote:
| Why would you check-in these CV pics rather than creating a
| Medium article or a personal blog?
| 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.
| dboreham wrote:
| "What's a resume?", said in the voice of Maggie Smith ;)
|
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhfpBW-nUWk)
| 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.
| Jolter wrote:
| My mom used to joke that in our family, we don't end up in
| homes because we all die of cancer before retirement.
|
| Well, joke's on her, she's still alive at 70 and I survived my
| first bout with cancer at 36 already so she was wrong on two
| counts. Still didn't put any elderly family in any home
| though...
| 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.
| throwaway41597 wrote:
| Very sorry to hear that, end of life is hard for many. Thank
| you for your post and the discussion it brought.
| 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.
| asn1parse wrote:
| so cool!
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| I just love how non-bullshit, concise and precise this is! Love
| it!
| 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 .
| opportune wrote:
| SQL will always exist as a lingua Franca for data because
| its declarative nature lets anybody immediately start using
| a new database/data tool just knowing basic SQL. At the
| same time, it's far from perfect for all use cases - it can
| be much easier to write certain queries imperatively than
| declaratively.
|
| I can envision a future in which databases are primarily
| used imperatively while still supporting SQL for those who
| want to use it.
| 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!
| high_5 wrote:
| It won't because it's too close to human interaction.
| still_grokking wrote:
| I don't get this argument.
|
| UIs changed in the past, and still change the whole time.
|
| Why would shell be any different?
| 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.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Prototyping in Python, then rewriting the performance
| critical parts in a speedier more difficult language is
| one of the most efficient paths a project could take.
| 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).
| dspillett wrote:
| Does a lot of that extra pool of features get used in
| production (relative to more "legacy" code) as seen with
| many reengineering JS projects regularly, it is the
| Fortran user base more conservative? I might expect the
| latter, but this is just a gut guess.
| kjs3 wrote:
| I'm not doing much work with Fortran-using communities
| these days, so this is an opinion only, and probably out
| of date in various ways.
|
| Yes, developers are using the new features. Most code I
| touched was regularly using up to 2003 features, with
| later stuff dependent on other factors (solid compiler
| support across different compilers being a big one).
| However, most Fortran programs are going to be fleshed
| out with components taken from the vast collections of
| well debugged and tested libraries available, many of
| which are still F77, and probably will stay that way.
| Fortran is more 'conservative' in the sense that there's
| not much compulsion to rewrite working code in the name
| of 'refactoring' or whatever. Adoption of new features is
| more 'I'm going to use a select set of things that will
| make my life appreciably easier' rather than 'everyone on
| board with all the latest shiny things'.
| 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.
| gcanyon wrote:
| I knew Richard Siegel.
|
| My stepfather Marty Einhorn was part of a developers' association
| in San Diego back in the '70s/'80s. I don't remember the name of
| it, but I used to go occasionally as a kid. I met Richard Siegel
| there several times -- seemed like a nice guy.
| 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.
| aasasd wrote:
| I didn't even think about this at first, but--perhaps the
| parents' occupation is there because of the caste system?
| I heard that it's still around not just in India, but
| also in diasporas like the Silicon Valley.
| daveslash wrote:
| Could be. I work with a lot of Indians, both here and
| abroad. I won't/can't profess to be an expert on them of
| their culture. But I can say that I've learned a lot over
| the years. I can only speculate (but won't do so here) on
| the reason for giving parent's occupation. From what I
| understand, the caste system is not what it once was and
| is beginning to disappear into the past, but it's legacy
| can still be felt in some profound ways both in India and
| here in the U.S.
| 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...)
| StevePerkins wrote:
| Photographs are back. Either your resume contains a link
| to your LinkedIn profile, or else your LinkedIn IS your
| resume to begin with.
| 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.
| StudyAnimal wrote:
| A German would point out, the very purpose of a job
| application is discrimination.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Discrimination based on relevant skills surely - not
| irrelevant things like family situation? In other
| countries things like that are actually illegal.
| 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.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| afaik the line of thinking were : religious people were more
| honest, happily married more stable (ie, your relationship
| wasn't a source of stress/instability), and being a parent
| made you seem more responsible.
|
| Nowadays cynicism has inverted those thoughts:
|
| Religious -- hypocrites. Married -- soon will be divorced,
| may get pregnant. Parent -- how irresponsible for the
| environment.
| 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.
| robocat wrote:
| From my memory of Engineering School in the "colonies" in
| 1990, CS were very geek, EE were normal geek, mechanical
| engineers were normal engineers, and civil engineers were
| social deviants (to use stereotypes). There was a certain
| geek pride abnormality that was almost expected of the better
| EE engineers . . . or perhaps I thought that because I
| identified as a geek? I don't recall noticing any strong
| demand for EE engineers. I think I noticed the uptick in
| demand for computer skills in the mid-90s, although I admit I
| surely was unaware of the world around me.
| 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.
| beezle wrote:
| My father started at Univac just after the Korean War. He never
| did a lot of coding, instead he was a "systems man". He went
| from the room size mainframe systems with huge dedicated tape
| and disk machines to time sharing to buying me an Apple II
| around 1980.
|
| Unfortunately, systems and procedures is no longer sexy and is
| mostly an after thought today. But back in the hey day of the
| 1960/70s that was where the money was.
| coss wrote:
| Sorry must be at least 5'10.
| reader_x wrote:
| I love the resume itself: the non-fussy font, wording, and layout
| is refreshingly straightforward. It makes me want to take your
| dad to lunch and hear all his stories. My grandfather piloted a
| B-29 in 1945, and his brother was an early computer scientist;
| maybe their paths overlapped. Warm regards to your dad!
| 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.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| That's a good point, but I think people have a lot more
| connections than they realize
|
| Chances are good you're acquainted with 50+ people, and
| if each of them is acquainted with 20 unique people,
| that's 1000 people you can contact through a few weeks of
| hanging out and chatting
|
| Professors often know relevant industry people in town,
| too
|
| Worst case, you can hop on here or blind and ask for
| referrals. Some random dude cold-mailed me before and
| asked for a referral to my company. I chatted with him a
| little to make sure he wasn't completely insane, then
| passed his resume on to a relevant hiring manager. I
| forgot all about it until I noticed that a $3000 referral
| bonus showed up in my paycheck a few months later
| 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.
| Bakary wrote:
| It's not that they are displeased with the Word doc or
| examining every detail. Just that aesthetically pleasing
| things attract our good graces on a subconscious level,
| and CVs are in competition with other CVs. Really we are
| overcomplicating this. The OP could have fixed the CV in
| the time it took us to discuss it.
|
| I'd say too often what happens is that engineer minded
| types rebel against unwritten norms like these and derive
| a sense of moral superiority from being immune to them,
| when ironically from an engineering POV it would make
| more sense to just do these little things, iron the
| shirts, use a template, and call it a day.
| antonknee wrote:
| I agree a standardised database would be ideal.
|
| I think it's telling that you have received very valid
| and constructive criticism on this resume from multiple
| people, yet you still can't see why this is a bad resume.
| You know from data and observation that in the real world
| this is in fact a bad resume, because it doesn't get you
| interviews and offers - which is the point of a resume.
| 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.
| Cogito wrote:
| The advice I give for resumes is that they fill two
| roles.
|
| The first is like what you say - make sure you check the
| right boxes. OFten the first person who sees your resume
| is non-technical, so make it easy for them to progress
| you on to the next step.
|
| The second purpose of the resume is far more important:
| get people interested in YOU.
|
| Almost everyone has done interesting things, but many
| people are bad at communicating those things. Often
| people are bad at even identifying the interesting
| things!
|
| For each skill/technology you want to highlight think of
| a situation where you solved a problem using that skill.
| You're aiming for a problem your interviewer will find
| interesting, and will want to ask you questions about.
| Very briefly highlight the problem and that you fixed it
| with SKILL, and you're done. The more specific you can be
| the more interesting you will appear.
|
| Two or three of those, your employment/education history,
| and contact details, and you're done.
|
| I think your resume does do this, but it should be both
| more prominent and more intentional.
|
| If I was helping someone today and they showed me this
| resume, I'd recommend re-ordering the sections and
| putting a brief intro at the top serving the same purpose
| as a cover letter. I'd also make sure they create
| tailored versions for each job they apply for.
| blandflakes wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd even interview this person; I'd at least
| have to find reasons to. It definitely doesn't give me
| anything to ask about. Quotes like "Save a lot of time by
| automating an email process" are so vague and ambiguous
| that the bullet point may as well be omitted.
|
| Education on the top is a waste of most anybody's time,
| let it be on the top only if you have no work experience
| (and if that's the case, yikes).
|
| I don't care about language/skillset checklists, because
| that's not what I hire for. Especially with no indication
| of relative strength or accomplishments with them - if I
| need a specific skill I'll happily scroll to see if it's
| there or not, but I want to see an actual story about
| this person's career and interests, not a set of "fill in
| the blank" stuff that every graduate has:
|
| * woo high school and a college degree great, that's not
| something we're going to talk about
|
| * version control, editors, etc are table stakes
|
| Why is all of the experience effectively unscanable (by
| eye)? Prose-first, no easy way to separate by date, by
| project, or position held?
|
| A resume doesn't have to be a thesis in print design, but
| I think you'd do well to consider the feedback you're
| receiving in this thread and that you alluded to
| receiving before - this resume isn't advertising anything
| to me and it's work for me to construct a coherent story
| about why this candidate is a strong fit for hiring.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > It definitely doesn't give me anything to ask about.
| Quotes like "Save a lot of time by automating an email
| process" are so vague
|
| ... are you kidding with these two sentences side by
| side? you just answered your own question, ask about the
| email process! and how is that outline of what I did even
| that vague? and everyone says to list accomplishments
| that benefitted the company instead of responsibilities,
| which this is a perfect example of.
|
| I'll hopefully never have to write a resume again but if
| I have to I'll just pay an expert. The way I
| instinctively read and understand a document by actually
| reading it and caring about the content first is just too
| mismatched from the average neurotypical's way of looking
| at the world for me to empathize.
| blandflakes wrote:
| Don't beg the question in your resume. I don't want coy
| points to ask about, I want details so I can make sure
| that I can actually have an engaging conversation about
| something, especially so that I can figure out how it
| might relate to work I'm doing here. It's astonishing to
| me that you can't grasp that a resume is a form of
| communication, and that therefore you might want to, I
| dunno, communicate in it.
|
| > and everyone says to list accomplishments that
| benefitted the company instead of responsibilities, which
| this is a perfect example of.
|
| It's not perfect, it's nearly worthless. A perfect
| example would have at the very least some hint of the
| business value and the nature of the problem at hand.
|
| > The way I instinctively read and understand a document
| by actually reading it and caring about the content first
| is just too mismatched from the average neurotypical's
| way of looking at the world for me to empathize.
|
| This is pretty patronizing. I'm actually suggesting that
| the content of the resume you provided is itself lacking.
| The issue is not that "oh no the neurotypicals don't want
| to read my resume", the issue is that this resume's
| content has room to improve, but you think that can't
| possibly be the case. Yeah, you're lacking empathy (or at
| the very least pretty defensive), but it's because we
| WANT content, not because we're looking for surface-level
| stuff. In fact most of the feedback has actually been
| that this resume is TOO surface-level (list of skills?
| don't care, vague bullet points? don't care), and you're
| defending the superficiality of content, which is
| incoherent alongside the claim that people don't care
| about the substance.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That is what _you_ do. The very first thing I check is
| where they worked before and how they describe what they
| did there.
|
| In the case of juniors, that's replaced with looking at
| basically anything they did and how they describe it.
|
| By the time the CV gets to my desk the keyword matching
| is already done.
|
| While the resume isn't necessarily bad, it screams to me
| that the candidate didn't even bother to look at, or
| didn't care how a CV is normally structured/laid out
| before handing theirs in.
|
| It's not necessarily bad, but when looking through a
| bunch of them you don't really want to adjust your mental
| parsing model for every resume, so barring anything else
| about it that stands out, you just mentally dismiss it.
|
| To be fair, this is something I've seen more from people
| just leaving school.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| Thanks for taking trouble to actually link to the resume in
| question. I'd only wish critics of it were similarly
| verbatim.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| It's not 1980 any longer, and even the resume from that era
| has a nice table layout for ease of reference. Yours on the
| other hand looks like a first draft with arguably seome good
| stuff in it.
|
| I don't care for a fancy resume, but it should at least look
| like you spent more than 15 minutes on it, and with the
| _reader_ in mind.
| 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.
| system2 wrote:
| LaTeX seems very difficult. Why are you using it for such a
| basic job you could do with MS Word?
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > Doesn't it come out during the interview process if
| there's BS on the resume?
|
| Oh yes. As the candidate this is also great when the
| interviewer says something like "It says here you've
| worked with x" and you go "I'm fairly certain that that
| wasn't on there when I submitted the resume (to the
| recruiter), let me see that" and it turns out like the OP
| said, extra skill added in a different font.
| 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.
| Jolter wrote:
| My experience has been that great workplaces sometimes
| have Whitt luck with recruiters, so you'll end up judging
| a book by its cover. But one only has time to make so
| many applications, and you gotta filter them somehow, so
| why not by recruiter skill?
| 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.
| chaorace wrote:
| Unforunately, being able to read the document is already
| sufficient access to make your own copy and alter it
| however you please.
|
| The best you can do is a digital signature[1], which
| proves that the document has not been tampered with. Of
| course, it's up to the recipient to _ask_ for a signed
| document and to _actually check_ if the signature is
| still present and accurate upon receipt. Otherwise, it 's
| very trivial for a third-party to remove the signature
| and add their own edits.
|
| [1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/add-or-
| remove-a-di...
| 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!
| akamaozu wrote:
| I just updated my resume for a new round of job hunting, and I
| think its similar to what you're describing
|
| http://designbymobius.ca/resume
| 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
| kubanczyk wrote:
| Broken link inside (404): https://vazor.com/media/tech.png
| mattbillenstein wrote:
| thanks!
| 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 (???).
| princeharry86 wrote:
| Loved the part in resume which says Health: Excellent
| 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.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| >...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<
|
| Why is that? You don't build your own computers anymore? Or
| write a small for fun application on ESP32 that you slap on a
| board made by yourself? That's the fun, to have a helicopter
| toy flying your own board + software.
| a4isms wrote:
| No, even when I put together a PC, I was putting chips and
| boards together.
|
| But as a boy holding that memory board, I was looking at the
| cores that held individual bits of memory. Instead of
| connecting things with ribbon cables or whatever, I was
| looking at tiny wire that would transmit individual bits of
| information.
|
| Completely different level of abstraction.
| beezle wrote:
| I have some core memory - one batch in a small container, the
| other is wired and mounted inside a picture frame and hangs
| on the wall. Neat stuff
| 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
| btilly wrote:
| Computers are older than you think.
|
| Computers based on integrated circuits were more recent. But
| the foundations were much older.
|
| For example take the punchcard. Punchcards as a way to work
| with automatic computing devices go back to Hollerith machines
| and the 1890 census. That was how IBM got started. The phrase
| "Super Computing machine" dates back to 1931, and referred to a
| tabulating machine built for Columbia University. Raytheon was
| producing and selling analog computers starting in the late
| 1920s. Much of the calculations for the Manhattan project were
| done by machines - Feynman talks about this in _Surely You Must
| Be Joking, Mr. Feynman_.
|
| And to give a sense of how much history there is, one of my
| favorite essays in the 1945 essay, _As We May Think_ , which
| you can find at
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-
| we-m.... It provided the inspiration for both hypertext and the
| science citation index. The recombining of those ideas in the
| PageRank patent was the foundation of Google. But how could
| someone in 1945 understand computing that well? It is simple!
| Its author was the man who designed those computers Raytheon
| sold in the 1920s, and among other things was in charge of the
| development of mechanical computers for the Manhattan Project.
| (OK, he did a lot more than that...)
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| > Computers are older than you think.
|
| I doubt it. If by computer you want to mean any machine
| capable of mechanically doing some kind of calculation, then
| of course there are examples going back hundreds of years, or
| even millenia - the Antikythera device was without doubt a
| mechanical, astronomical computer, for example. But I wrote
| "the first commercial computer," and the first stored
| program, Turing complete computing machine that you could
| actually write a purchase order and be invoiced for, the
| UNIVAC I, was only produced in 1951. So, I cheated a bit with
| "less than 20 years old in 1973." It was 22 years old. The
| point being in terms of my post, that when I started,
| computers, and programmers, were still very unusual in the
| employment landscape, and for people like Ray, of the
| original post, the concept of being a programmer appeared
| AFTER their formal education in electronics was finished.
| btilly wrote:
| There is a distinction between computer and stored program
| computers, and you're right that the first commercially
| available stored program computer appeared in 1951.
| (Though, interestingly, there was a 1936 patent application
| on the idea in Germany. And a barely functioning one was
| actually built in 1941.)
|
| But Turing complete computers predated that. In fact
| Turing's own design for a Turing machine was NOT a stored
| program computer. And you're right that the modern idea of
| programming postdated stored program computers.
|
| But computers are older. As you pointed out, arguably
| thousands of years older.
|
| However I maintain that automatic tabulating machines were
| on the path to modern computers. Early accounting
| applications were based on them, as were key parts of the
| technology used. Like punch cards.
| 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.
| tomcam wrote:
| Never really wrote about it!
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Where can we read it?
| tomcam wrote:
| I didn't take notes or anything and many of my questions
| were very specific. For example, how did Turbo Pascal do
| error handling (easily, because it was a handwritten
| recursive descent compiler), or did Tim Paterson, who
| sold DOS to Bill Gates for $50,000, ever regret it (no).
| 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.
| jboy55 wrote:
| My guess is that the earliest Code Versioning systems
| were completely manual, "Duplicate your tape, mark it
| 1.2, store it in drawer". And these manual processes were
| brought to and duplicated on computers when code began to
| be stored on the computers themselves, instead of through
| cards and paper tape.
|
| Certainly if you were a business, you had an extreme
| business interest in keeping your "known good" stack of
| cards in a place, and every revision in code required a
| new stack of cards.
|
| "Hey, the machine just ate 10 cards from the payroll
| software, can we get duplicates made?"
|
| "No, those were the originals, guess we're SOL no one
| gets paid" never happened.
|
| Most likely "Ok, version 1.34 of the payroll software
| that was updated last week? Cards 1032 to 1042? Duplicate
| cards will be up to you within the hour"
|
| or "We have to revert to the old payroll processing
| software, can you create a new fresh copy of 1.33, 1.34
| has some bugs and we need to get tonights run in?"
| 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.
| dusted wrote:
| I'm pretty sure a card dealing game is rarely considered
| mundane enterprise software..
| dleslie wrote:
| > Your software is going to need to change over time!
|
| Not so for anything shipped on ROM.
| nske wrote:
| The software running on a specific ROM might not be able
| to change (assuming we're talking for devices using mask
| ROM and not EEPROM) but it doesn't mean the code itself
| is supposed to be disposable. Different devices or
| revisions of the same device can benefit from code
| changes. Even on the same device unit, they might want to
| replace the ROM chip to include some fix if it's
| important enough and makes financial sense. The software
| itself transcends the constraints of any particular
| delivery medium.
| dleslie wrote:
| Ha, perhaps. I work in game dev, and previously had a
| stint in integrated display controllers for feature
| phones. Anecdotally, most of my code is effectively
| thrown away once shipped.
| 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."
| jmfldn wrote:
| Ditto more or less. Dad was a mechanical engineering
| academic. Learned fortran programming in the late 1960s on
| punch cards.
| 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!
| pastage wrote:
| One have to understand the social factors as well. It was
| womens job in the beginning, the stigma of being seen as a
| female computers was most probably what made it unattractive
| and tediuos to many men at the time. Many highly placed
| engineering bosses in programming were women for a long time
| because those where the people who had experience. See
| Margret Hamilton of Apollo, and also some of the pioneers in
| cellphone "software".
| suzzer99 wrote:
| My uncle worked for Folgers coffee in the 60s as a general
| office clerk. They gave everyone some kind of test designed
| to see if you had aptitude for programming. He scored high,
| so they asked him if he wanted to learn COBOL, and his career
| was born.
| 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).
| brailsafe wrote:
| It's still tedious grunt work
| 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.
| switchbak wrote:
| If you really find the agile processes you're using are
| adding tedium, why don't you do the agile thing and
| tailor them to your specific context?
|
| But I imagine we're probably using the same word to
| describe very different things.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| The current implementation of Agile in most cases is
| pretty much the opposite of agile as described in the
| agile manifesto.
|
| In my team we have reduced the process to having a simple
| backlog which we work through. But I have seen other
| teams where you spend enormous amounts of time on
| planning but it's frowned upon if you think any further
| than the next sprint. Just check off tasks without any
| thoughts about long term architecture or strategy.
| Basically just a sweatshop with replaceable "resources"
| (the company doesn't hire "people" anymore but
| "resources")
| lmaollamalmao wrote:
| viridian wrote:
| You should seriously look in to changing companies.
|
| I'm not trying to denigrate you in any way, I myself
| switched from working at $BIG_BANK to a more lithe type
| of company and 90% of that bullshit went away.
|
| Agile + Scrum stuff are minimal and now consume ~4.5% of
| my week instead of ~12.5%, I'm not spending half my "dev"
| time babysitting and maintaining giant applications no
| one really understands in full, and instead work on a
| bunch of little serverless applications, maybe half of
| which I do actually understand and can explain end to
| end.
| 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
| worthless-trash wrote:
| _swoon_
| 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]
| listenallyall wrote:
| > You used to legit need that CS degree in order to code
| in your day-to-day
|
| And when people today look back with disdain at ugly VB
| applications and wonder what simpleton, non-programmer,
| drag-and-dropper built this piece of excrement (that has
| somehow been running for 17 years without an update and
| the replacement project that we hired those consultants
| for ended up 3x over costs and nobody uses it) as opposed
| to a Real Software Program, there's the reason.
| _glass wrote:
| When I started uni in 2004 it was still like this. I kind
| of was ashamed at parties to tell what I study, not to
| come off as too nerdy. I did a double major, so business
| was hipper. Just imagine! The status of developers
| changed so much in two decades. Nowadays people are
| impressed. And even in my career I see the difference.
| Not so many VPNs anymore, the move to the cloud made
| everything much easier.
| telcal wrote:
| I majored in Computer Science in the late 90s and
| honestly don't remember any of what you're saying
| regarding negative/hostile media.
|
| To me it felt like a golden age. The .com bust hadn't
| happened yet. If you could turn a computer on there were
| jobs everywhere. The world was starting to get online.
| Linux was really gaining traction and Slashdot was all
| time.
| wilsynet wrote:
| I majored in CS in the late 90s and this wasn't my
| experience at all. The Netscape IPO happened in 1995,
| followed by 5 years of the dot.com gold rush. Computers
| flew off the shelves, and everyone wanted to get online.
|
| The dotcom crash happens later in 2001, but if we are
| talking about the late 90s, then I'd say it was a period
| of huge energy in the CS field and tech companies were
| hiring as fast as they could and jobs were plentiful all
| around.
| nb1987 wrote:
| I was in high school in the early 00s and heard the
| _exact_ same thing, and that was a major reason why I
| chose not to major in CS! (The other is that my HS
| programming curriculum and teacher were inadequate, but
| at the time I was convinced that I just wasn 't wired for
| programming.) In the end I took the long way around and
| ended up in the field as a self-taught programmer.
| 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.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| There was also bad programmer job market crash in the 80s
| that changed the market up a lot by the 90s. In fact,
| this was about when the gender ratio became very skewed
| (men and women dropped out of programming at equal rates,
| but the recovery was lopsided).
|
| Our computer science department chair (Ed Lazowska) at
| the time brought this up as a reason to be wary about
| department expansion in the mid 90s.
| omginternets wrote:
| What caused the crash?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I'm not really clear. A general recession at the end of
| the 70s along with an end in a booming rise of programmer
| jobs. If you look at
| https://www.geekwire.com/2014/analysis-examining-
| computer-sc...
|
| You'll see a huge drop off in computer science graduates
| after a local peak in 1985 (they wouldn't get back to
| that level until 2000, note this article also quotes data
| from Ed Lazowska).
| 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...
| gedy wrote:
| Yes, this is one reason I am personally really sensitive
| when various people say how privileged I was to get into
| computers and that we somehow got all this encouragement
| unlike young women, etc.
|
| In the 80s we were mocked and called nerds for being
| interested in computers, and before and after dot com
| people thought this was dead end career.
| lmaollamalmao wrote:
| vintermann wrote:
| Yes. Even as the internet started to become a thing in
| 1994-1995 when I was in middle school, I'd reckon less
| than half of my class had a computer at home - and fewer
| still of them would ever want to mention it.
| 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.
| heurisko wrote:
| > 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
|
| My career advice as a teenager was that there wasn't any
| point doing software, as Microsoft had made it all
| already with Microsoft Office.
| majormajor wrote:
| Yeah, that's why I don't take re-kindling of the "it'll
| get offshored any day now" panic post-Covid that
| seriously. Time zones haven't gone away. The
| communication-based hard parts of software development
| haven't gone away. The way that delivering what someone
| asks for usually leads to them asking for _more things_ ,
| not fewer, hasn't gone away.
| lmaollamalmao wrote:
| 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.
| adwn wrote:
| > _In the early days computer programming was considered
| a clerical job one learned in trade schools._
|
| That's because in those days, the term "programming"
| didn't mean "software development", it referred to data
| entry. It actually was clerical work, comparable to
| typing a dictation on a typewriter. Only later, when user
| interface devices (keyboards, displays) considerably
| improved and it became more efficient to unify those
| tasks in one person, did "programming" and "software
| development" start to become synonymous.
|
| It has nothing to do with "dignity of a male profession",
| or oppression of women, just a misunderstanding of a
| shift in the meaning of words.
| 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.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| I think that the tv series "Halt and Catch Fire"
| illustrates the rapid recombination of tech and "new
| ideas" quite well.
| 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
| Maursault wrote:
| > I almost didn't major in Computer Science because in
| the late 90s
|
| You missed, by a few years at least, the opportunity to
| study and earn a degree that is no longer available from
| CMU, the B.S. in Cognitive Linguistics. I got an early
| acceptance from CMU in late 1988, my first choice of
| education because I wanted that degree in particular, but
| I could not afford CMU tuition let alone housing, and I
| was ineligible for financial aid. I studied CS at
| Virginia Tech at about a tenth the cost and never
| regretted it. Though I never met him, Allen Briggs[1] was
| an underclassman there while I was an upperclassman. He
| ported NetBSD to 68k Macs while still an undergraduate at
| Virginia Tech, which always impressed me. A/UX licenses
| were not cheap, and MacBSD was free.
|
| [1] https://www.netbsd.org/ports/mac68k/history.html
| User23 wrote:
| The backdoor into CMU back then was and maybe still is
| Pitt. Pitt students had the privilege of signing up for
| any CMU course and it just meant a slightly longer walk
| to class.
| Maursault wrote:
| The Cognitive Linguistics degree at CMU in the 90's was
| an interdisciplinary combination of cognitive science,
| neurology, computer science and linguistics, and
| disappeared when the faculty member that created and
| sponsored it passed away in the mid-1990s. While Pitt is
| a quality university, I don't think they offer degrees
| from CMU. Pitt was on my radar and one of the few places
| I was accepted to, but out of state tuition at the time
| iirc was $7K/semester, more reasonable than CMU's
| ~$12K/semester, but I had moved to Virginia the year
| before, and Virginia Tech's in-state tuition was about
| $2K/semester with housing (though I was required to
| purchase $4500 worth of Mac and A/UX license). Today,
| Virginia Tech's instate tuition is as much as Pitt's out
| of state tuition was then, which is now about the same as
| CMU's private tuition was in 1989, and CMU's annual
| private tuition today costs a little more than an Audi Q5
| Prestige.
| User23 wrote:
| Perhaps I wasn't clear. CMU allowed Pitt students to
| register for CMU classes. Your degree would say Pitt on
| it, but you would have attended the exact same classes as
| the CMU students. As in sat in the same classroom with
| the same professors at the same time, doing the same
| assignments and taking the same tests.
| Maursault wrote:
| Thank you, that is what I understood you to mean, but if
| Pitt doesn't offer the same degree, how could one
| graduate accumulating credits for a degree that doesn't
| exist? While many universities allow non-students to
| audit courses, and one could take every required course
| of a subject this way, without actually being awarded the
| degree one can not claim the degree. Also, as I
| explained, I was out of state, making Pitt tuition
| expensive. CMU does grant its FT employees and their
| children free tuition after a token number of years of
| employment, but, of course, even a qualified and
| experienced HS graduate without an undergraduate degree
| would not make it past HR for an interview. And
| unfortunately, the Cognitive Linguistics degree only
| existed for a very short window, about 5-6 years.
| Personally, my only option to attend CMU was to get about
| $90K worth of college loans, or conversely, $60K worth of
| loans to attend Pitt, but I would gave sooner accepted
| the appointment offered me to Annapolis, an even more
| selective university than CMU that costs nothing but a
| commitment of 5 extra years of military service. What I
| did instead was study CS at Virginia Tech and graduate
| only $10K in debt, which was not difficult to get out
| from under. And though I did not study any linguistics
| there, I did exhaust my curiosity in cognitive science
| and neurology via an elective in philosophy of mind. CS
| was itself 60 credits of CS and Math with a built-in Math
| minor, and was tricky enough completing without idk how
| many other credits in proper neurology and linguistics
| that I missed out on at CMU or Pitt, though fascinating,
| each considerably complicated subjects in their own
| right.
| smcameron wrote:
| > 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.
|
| They used to do objdumps. They still do, but they used to
| too.
| 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)
| tomcam wrote:
| Yeah, depending on deadlines that sounds fun to me
| 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| It definitively is true of local universities. I've met
| people from the local university who have a master in
| machine learning, yet have never heard of docker.
| mywittyname wrote:
| This is a good thing. Opportunity costs are incredibly
| important with university educations because students
| have a limited time to learn.
|
| Why spend the time futzing with a tool like docker? It's
| not foundational to machine learning, so learning that
| tool takes away from time that could be spent learning
| something more relevant. And the student may or may not
| use it when they get a job.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Docker I can forgive, but I've worked with a lot of grads
| who haven't even been taught the basics of using the
| command line.
| 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
| njacobs5074 wrote:
| I remember taking a graduate level networking course at
| NYU in the early 1990s. The instructor was an IBM
| consultant. We studied token ring, FDDI, SNA, HDLC/SDLC
| and several other commercial products.
|
| One evening, I raised my hand and asked when we were
| going to study TCP/IP.
|
| He simply quipped, "TCP/IP is not a real networking
| protocol."
|
| So I wouldn't say that universities are always behind the
| curve :)
| 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... :)
| kjellsbells wrote:
| I had to deal with token ring way up until 2001 when even
| the most die hard nuts had to admit that you could buy a
| dozen ethernet cards for the cost of a single TR. IIRC
| the TR people tried to convince us that ATM was the
| future.
| diseasedyak wrote:
| Hah, not quite nowadays but I, too, was dealing with one
| from around '97-2000'ish. What a pain in the ass. That
| was just one network in the building, I also had to deal
| with 10base-t, which was also a nightmare. _shudder_
| HourglassFR wrote:
| Not quite 2022, but yeah I was maintaining a token ring
| based network for some subway at my last gig in 2019. As
| far as I know, no work is done on it now but the subway-
| car using the system are schedule to run for at least
| another decade so another bugfix release of the
| networking firmware is not entirely out of the question.
| 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.
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| The bit on "DevOps" is pretty egregious. There's two key
| things at stake here.
|
| 1. "DevOps" is an absolutely critical part of automation.
| It's _the_ reason why we can start tech companies with
| such small engineering staff compared to 20 years ago. It
| 's as important as all the high-level languages we use.
| This stuff is the logistics of how software gets
| deployed. It's the same in business as it is in war.
| Coding chops is like tactical strategy, and being able to
| ambush a tank column. It matters, and you won't have an
| engineering org without it, but the whole chain of how
| stuff gets deployed and iterated is what keeps the ammo
| flowing and the fuel pumping.
|
| 2. Universities want to teach stuff that'll still be
| relevant in 50 years. Given their proclivities, that
| means stuff like algorithms.
|
| On one hand, I think that universities and academics can
| be somewhat forgiven for their ignorance on this matter.
| In fact I think we ourselves don't know what's going to
| be needed in our field in ten, twenty, thirty years. If
| the folks in industry didn't predict infrastructure-as-
| code 20 years ago, then the universities couldn't have
| taught it.
|
| But what I know now is that:
|
| - After all these years, no one is getting rid of shell
| scripting.
|
| - Old school (i.e. 2nd generation) config management
| still has its place in many companies. Ansible is great
| for provisioning an AMI, if you need one, but if you need
| static infrastructure, puppet and chef are actually
| better because they track state, which allows you to
| better manage config drift.
|
| - k8s may be hot and all, but a lot of the underlying
| "ops" stuff still translates. You average resource usage
| over pods instead of hosts, for example.
|
| - Put together, there is an "instinct" for ops that is
| not unlike the "instinct" people learn for math,
| algorithms, and code. They are completely separate and an
| engineering org needs both. I think that universities
| don't "get" ops because computer science is more like
| math, whereas ops is more like history.
|
| - On one hand, being stuck in an older ops paradigm is
| pretty awful - if you missed the transition to
| infrastructure-as-code, then it may be really, _really_
| hard to get out of that rut. But the field itself can be
| pretty bad with being stuck - it took us forever to give
| up our own datacenter racks.
|
| - But otherwise, the old knowledge about old tools didn't
| necessarily just go away, in fact it's oftentimes still
| quite relevant. Linux internals (e.g. iptables) are still
| useful.
|
| - When I was at CMU, a lot of folks learned some of that
| ops instinct in the dorm room, and in the computer
| clusters. But the universities pretty much made it
| optional. Looking back, I think this was a mistake. Ops
| is pretty much entirely transmitted through osmosis,
| whereas we at least _try_ to teach people to code in
| official uni classes.
| maire wrote:
| I agree with your father that batch processing (cards) is a
| drag.
|
| I was in school and working in the computer lab when we
| switched from batch processing (cards) to a time shared
| system with terminal labs. I was part of the team that
| wired up the campus and connected the campus to the ARPANET
| (precursor to the internet).
|
| As we rolled out the terminal labs, each CS class was
| either assigned to batch processing or time sharing. Since
| I was part of the lab, I could schedule my classes to be
| time share only. I was only stuck with 4 classes not in the
| time share lab. 2 were batch processing. For some reason my
| LISP and AI classes used a teletype interface. It was not
| as bad as the cards, but still weird. Some classes allowed
| me to use my personal computer (TRS80) and work at home.
|
| At the time my uncle was a programmer. He said that there
| was no future in CS and I should switch majors. I could
| already see the wave coming and ignored the advice.
| 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.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| UNIX packaged a lot of ideas that had been invented
| elsewhere. (Often badly.)
|
| CTSS -> Multics -> UNIX. All had interactive development
| and scripting to varying degrees.
| smcameron wrote:
| I remember going off to college in 1986, and thinking I
| might major in computer science, and my dad told me,
| "anyone can learn to program computers, you might be better
| off with EE." To be fair, at the time, anyone _could_ learn
| to program computers (and it 's probably still true) -- my
| dad was doing it, and his major was chemistry -- and
| really, anyone that's really good at programming computers
| is necessarily self-taught to a great extent. You just
| don't become a great programmer by dint of tutoring.
| Anyway, I stayed in EE for a year, then switched my major
| to computer science with a minor in EE, and no regrets.
| 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.
| [deleted]
| 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".
| keithnz wrote:
| my father who was a research physicist from the 70s+ lamented
| at his colleagues who got too distracted with programming
| their computers! For me it was great, I got to grow up with
| computers and electronics and a bunch of adults who loved
| these things!
| jimt1234 wrote:
| My grandpa told me the same thing; he didn't think computers
| were gonna last.
|
| Not sure of exact time, but I think it was late-60s-to-
| early-70s; Gramps was a business professor at a major
| university in the Midwest. A team of math nerds started
| working on this new thing called a "computer". He said it was
| almost the size of a basketball gymnasium, it took weeks to
| get the thing set up, and was always breaking. In the end, it
| could only do simple calculations. He said the university
| viewed the project as pretty much a failure. So, Gramps, the
| futurist, told all his business students not to get involved
| with computers, there was no future in them. Good job,
| Gramps.
|
| He later told me his big hope was that none of his students
| listened to a word he said. LOL
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" 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?"..."_
|
| I'd suggest there is likely another reason, and if your
| father didn't actively think about it he probably understood
| it subliminally. Back then, programming was part of
| mathematics at many universities and, like it or not,
| everyone doing science and engineering had to study the
| subject--and for many universities that was Fortran. Fortran
| was essential part of the background culture: if one was
| doing mathematics or any of the physical sciences, Fortran
| was just there--thus, one didn't see it as special or
| exceptional.
|
| I had no option but to study it but I didn't see that as an
| imposition--diehards like me were regularly chucked out of
| the punch card room by the university security guards last
| thing at night when the joint closed.
|
| Moreover, at my university the Fortran lecturer also wrote
| the Fortran textbook (well, the ones we used at least), so
| there was no leniency or excuse: _Introduction to FORTRAN IV
| programming using the watfor compiler_ - 1968 & 1971 and
| _Basic FORTRAN IV programming (version IBM 360),_ 1969--by
| John M Blatt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Blatt.
|
| As I found out later there were better textbooks on the
| subject and Blatt was a didactic forceful character without
| much charisma, so his lectures were somewhat painful.
| However, comic relief was not that infrequent. We had Fortran
| lectures in a large hall which had an upper circle like a
| picture theater, a certain fraternity would frequent the
| circle and aim paper airplanes at him when he was facing the
| blackboard much to his chagrin. No, I wasn't one of the
| guilty but I fully enjoyed the spectacle.
| 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.
| pensievelogsfir wrote:
| 11/10! Gracias for sharing !
| 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.
| vjust wrote:
| I worked at a startup, in India's silicon valley, before the word
| startup ever existed. 1 PC, with 640Kb of Ram, 20Mb hard-disk,
| the owner took a loan to buy that thing. We were 4 programmers
| sharing that 1 PC. We each had 2 hour timeslots to code in C or
| whatever other language. Away from the keyboard, I'd write code
| on paper, so that I could make the most of my slot. Sometimes I
| would have to print my code, and my boss (the owner) would go
| over it with a red-ink pen. I was an apprentice. The boss (owner)
| would warn me, "beware of the day computers will be writing
| programs, it will be soon here (and maybe put me out of a job)"
|
| Bangalore was where it was all happening then (as far as India
| was concerned). It was a heady place and time. As a rookie
| customer support engineer I also got to see Data General's
| computers at various customer installations, spooled tape, and
| drum hard-drives, etc. This was early 90s in India. India's IT
| Export industry was in its infancy.
| 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.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > What did people do for interviews back then? Reverse-a-
| linked-list?
|
| The last time I was hired for a purely software-related
| position was 1993. They were looking for an IC (they didn't
| call it that, then) who would quickly transition to tech lead /
| system architect. The technical part of the interview involved
| role-playing myself presenting an initial proposal to a
| potential customer who had provided a brief written
| requirement. One of the interviewers role played the customer.
| IIRC the interview schedule was something like 30 mins to read
| the requirement and think, 15 mins to ask initial questions, an
| hour (perhaps longer?) to develop the proposal, an hour (?) to
| present it and face customer questions.
|
| In essence I was being asked to spot ambiguities in the
| requirement and develop an initial estimate. I passed. I would
| have failed had I applied for the same job straight out of uni.
| [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.
| thewebcount wrote:
| Yeah, I did one of those interviews with them circa `93 and
| got that exact question!
| 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.
| djmips wrote:
| That's very beautiful in a melancholy way.
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Being a bunch of engineers on HN, I get it, but that's
| needlessly pedantic. My first real job was a systems and
| tools programmer working on scaled database systems.
|
| Literally every aspect of that job is fully automated.
|
| Where I work today 20+ years later, we have 1/3 of the
| people doing like 100x the amount of work by several
| measures. Little teams of developers can just crank out
| work.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| You call it pedantry, I call it "field of work". I've
| managed to avoid working on apps built around databases
| for my entire career, instead focusing initially on
| operating systems, device drivers and OS-level tools;
| then later on software for pro-audio/music creation
| workflows. Literally no aspect of this work is "fully
| automated".
|
| Yes, the productivity of modern day "stored-in-the-
| DB/presented-in-the-browser" project teams can be
| astounding. But that's only one type of software.
| dboreham wrote:
| Debug heap libraries existed in 1895.
| paintballboi07 wrote:
| I worked at a place a long time ago upgrading legacy
| software from the 80s. I helped them update their build
| process from file shares, copy/pasting and manual
| building to Git, Jenkins and automated
| builds/tests/packaging. I know it's not automated code,
| but it certainly saved us a lot of time with about 50
| assemblies. I'm sure some companies were ahead of the
| curve when it comes to stuff like that, but this was a
| really small company. Modern CI/CD software is great and
| saved us lots of time.
| [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
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| oh so typical
|
| literal fraud by banks and security rating agencies was
| directly responsible for the crisis. They defrauded their
| customers and each other.
|
| Thats why they were called subprime loans.
| 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.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Amen to that. We hired a guy that just completely polluted
| the office morale. We were small and wanted to do the
| "right thing" so we tried to figure out how to make it work
| for way too long. Finally ended the relationship and the
| whole place felt better. He wasn't a bad guy, just didn't
| fit somehow. He was really big on "lanes," didn't handle
| code review well, and on and on... Important lesson
| learned. It would have been better for him and us if we had
| ended it much sooner.
| 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.
| SCUSKU wrote:
| I'm seeing this comment as a result of this Reddit post:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/comments/y
| diu...
|
| But overall I agree with you. While I don't have the
| results to back it up, I do believe that ultimately
| Leetcode isn't that useful outside of recruiting people
| straight out of college. Otherwise, I think there are
| more domain specific methods to assess candidate fitness
| to a role.
|
| Also, my giving my unsolicited opinion, I do agree with
| one of the Reddit posters saying that you are currently
| on your way to burnout. While I can sympathize with you
| being super interested in learning programming all the
| time (because it is very interesting!) be sure to not
| ignore your other needs, and also to take a mandatory
| break at least one day a week. Speaking from experience,
| if you don't do this you will burn out and you will have
| to pick up the pieces.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Well, I have been doing this for over 30 years, and going
| at my current pace for probably ten years (I noticed the
| comment about me being an enthusiastic youngster. That
| was cute).
|
| But I also take breaks (and naps) whenever I want. No one
| wants to hire old folks, so I don't work for anyone. I do
| this, because I want to.
|
| What's that saying? "It's not work, if you love what you
| do?" For me, coding (designing solutions, in particular)
| is relaxing. I have some fairly serious family and
| extracurricular obligations that bring their own
| stressors. Coding is how I get away.
|
| I'll tell you when I was actually in danger of burning
| out; it was when I was a manager (which I did for 25
| years). I spent a hell of a lot of time, sitting on my
| ass. I coded on the side, so I _wouldn't_ burn out. This
| is like Disneyland, compared to that horrible grind.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| I share this position fully, but we need to consider the
| benefit of a standardized test despite its flaws. Other
| paths to success need to exist (e.g., university
| admissions take people on other merits besides SAT and
| similar) but it can be more difficult to assess the
| validity of any claims regarding level of experience
| without a well-known certificate.
|
| When a job doesn't focus on what LC asserts, and I think
| we'd agree about how huge that segment is, then naturally
| it should be a small or non-existent consideration.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have no problem with licensing, depending on the job.
|
| Some stuff should _definitely_ have a steady hand on the
| tiller, other jobs, not so much.
|
| But the thought of licensing software engineers is
| daunting. The industry is so incredibly varied.
|
| For example, almost none of the programming I do,
| involves higher math. I've pretty much forgotten all my
| calculus, while other jobs are almost nothing but math.
|
| I could be writing crucial, lifesaving device control
| stuff, and the math person could be working on a game
| physics engine.
|
| I am in awe of game programmers, but they also work on
| "nice to have" stuff. I know someone that writes software
| for medical devices. He is _not_ a "math person," but
| he's also _very_ dependable, and can be relied upon to
| Get The Job Done. He has many years of working on things
| like USB drivers, firmware, Bluetooth, and networking
| layers.
|
| So, if the "licensing test" insisted on a good command of
| advanced math (because "everyone should know it" -the
| same argument given for LC), neither he, nor I, would
| make it, so the company would be deprived of some _very_
| good, dependable, disciplined, and talented engineers,
| fully capable of writing highly effective asynchronous
| device control code, and would, instead, prefer an
| inexperienced math programmer that would try to rewrite
| the project in haskell.
| 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:
| vgel wrote:
| The first thing you mention is a common problem in
| marketplaces: used cars, online dating, etc. Term is "market
| for lemons"
| 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.
| Kamq wrote:
| Of course there is. You can generate studies that show
| roughly anything.
|
| It may not be the majority, but if the research is all done
| in-house by various firms, there's no way for anyone to
| know that.
| LtWorf wrote:
| By research I mean of course properly done research.
| 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.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| I know a contractor who started a gig and it was over a
| month before he was given a logon, let alone a computer.
|
| That started the contractor looking elsewhere...
| 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
| indymike wrote:
| > Have you built a successful growing software firm?
|
| Yes, three times.
|
| > Does your software systems scale to Millions?
|
| Is 8m active users per day enough?
|
| > What about counterfactuals?
|
| A broken clock is correct twice a day. Not sure what you
| are wanting here.
|
| > 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
|
| I don't work for them.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I've done that.
|
| I have a human conversation, make sure the expectations
| are clear and ask them if they think they can do it. Then
| I look at some of their work to verify and that's
| literally all.
|
| No whiteboard, no takehome, no brainteaser, nothing like
| that.
|
| Go google "how gates hires" or "how jobs hired" ... it's
| more or less the same. None of this I watch you implement
| a sliding window in a shared coding environment bullshit.
|
| Let me put it this way. Say your candidates were all
| award winning scholars with phds and prestigious
| organizations to their name, then how would you go about
| it?
|
| With respect but also, you'd still check to make sure
| it's the right fit, obviously.
|
| Now here's the crazy go-nuts bananas idea - treat
| everyone with that level of respect. Totally wacky, I
| know. But hear me out - you can apparently build better
| teams with trust allocated to trustworthy people as your
| building block. That starts the day you interview and
| extends forever, well beyond your time working together.
| 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.
| jaza wrote:
| The closest equivalent to that today, in most white-collar
| roles at least, is contracting. Usually not a physical walk-on
| hire anymore, but it is often quite a quick process (sometimes
| as little as a few hours), from "I need a worker", to "I can do
| it", to "get cracking sonny". And it's then, days / weeks /
| months (usually not years) later, a similarly quick process,
| from "we don't need you anymore" / "I'm outta here", to "don't
| let the door hit you".
|
| But the contractor usually needs to be "employed by" some
| agency company, that guarantees his/her suitability, and that
| handles the (not insignificant) paperwork / legalities, and
| that takes a handsome cut.
| 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.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| I guess as long as abending of interviews is still legit,
| it's as viable to take walk-ins as to take electronic
| applications. Just be sure to act on any GTFO needs
| before the start date. The interview process is longer to
| accommodate those legal protections, but those don't
| start until hiring (or something that isn't the first
| conversations), right?
|
| Long story short: I think we can lengthen the interview
| period to accommodate those legal time sinks without
| killing off the (now a bit of a novelty) meatspace first
| impression. Unless you're talking about blind selection,
| where the candidate's likeness (name, etc.) is redacted
| for DEI. In that case, I can see how witnessing the
| candidate's skin, gender, etc. could be problematic. TFA
| even explicitly included the types of things we try to
| leave unspoken these days: excellent health, 5'4"?!
| 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
| hunter2_ wrote:
| I wouldn't call entertainment work (even the craziest
| corners of that world) nearly as off-brand as suggesting
| that women dominate it. I have no idea how far from 49/49
| the makeup might be, but I do know that I'm a guy who's
| done plenty of entertainment industry gigs (music
| production, fwiw) where the pay is quite reliably
| received before going home, and that's the important
| distinction here.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| yeah, we agree
|
| I was referring to women dominated crazy corners and I
| don't have lived experience with man's equivalent job
| pursuit to say so I didn't speak about them
| poorbutdebtfree wrote:
| "Workers' rights" makes hiring and particularly firing very
| expensive. The same thing with "tenants' rights." I would rent
| to anyone with bad credit and a sob story if I could simply
| evict them within days for non-payment. But because of these
| rights now everybody has to have an 800 credit score and six
| figure W2.
| rablackburn wrote:
| While I'm not doubting you would personally do as you say, I
| would point out that as someone living somewhere with quite
| lax tenants rights and a nationally recognised housing
| emergency (Australia), landlords not renting to people
| because tenants rights are too onerous doesn't seem to have a
| particularly large impact on housing availability.
|
| Whereas some tenants rights seems to have a pretty large
| positive impact - ie all the positive effects of secure
| housing.
|
| Of course ymmv in your local housing market.
| bestcoder69 wrote:
| You would gladly take in someone with a history of non-
| payment, on the sole condition that you can evict them for
| non-payment?
|
| In that case, one benefit of public housing is that it slims
| the pool of "sob story"-havers that you can evict for sport!
| 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.
| golergka wrote:
| Well, then may be it's important to note that we are
| talking about two different industry niches and practices
| from one of them are not a good match for the other. And
| may be we even should come up with some kind of names for
| these kinds of "tech" to avoid mixing one up with the
| other.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| We do have a variety of words that have certain
| connotations -- there are even essays / blog posts about
| the supposed hierarchy (or soup) of script kiddies,
| hackers, coders, programmers, developers, architects,
| etc. etc. etc. but the analogies to their metaphorical
| ancestors (very often from real construction) are neither
| perfect nor stable. A housing developer can more easily
| search for laborers than a software hiring manager can
| search for a code monkey who doesn't try to steer the
| ship!
| 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
| skrbjc wrote:
| was wondering what that meant
| 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...
| sswaner wrote:
| True. Imagine where we would be if that hadn't happen. The
| lost opportunity is immense.
| keepquestioning wrote:
| If slavery is the original sin, this is the second sin.
| 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
| StudyAnimal wrote:
| And a drink.
| boh wrote:
| Not to get off topic, but ending a formal letter to a business
| with "very truly yours" is weird and people still do it.
| 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?
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