My dad’s resume and skills from 1980
github.com
github.com
I just started a new position, I have to learn at least 2 new languages (on my own time) which I need to be proficient in basically immediately. My very first project was, fix something in this new project which uses a new language, you have 3 days. And I felt lucky to have been given 3 days instead of 1 so I could learn the language. And then dozens of new frameworks and complex tools, complex and evolving architecture. In 2 months I will have my first week as being the point person to fix anything that goes wrong in production. And I feel like this is ok, this is normal.
I wonder if most engineers now are just permanent amateurs hopping around between tools and projects, learning just enough to make it work without breaking, but not knowing how to build things properly. How many years would it take to really become expert in that language? Even if you focused all your time on that, by the time you have mastered it another language will have come along to replace it, or the language itself will have been transformed into something new.
If you stay still and become an expert in something you run the risk of losing your relevance and not being able to get another job in just a few short years. 25 years? Will the company you work for even be around in 25 years? Doubtful.
Then again, back then they didn't have Stackoverflow and all the resources we have now that make it possible to learn so much so quickly.
They were still teaching this shit at my school in the 90s. Encouraged you to take COBOL II because "there's so much old code around you'll always have a job" (left out the part about a job you'd rather kill yourself at).
Peter Gibbons was updating code for the Year 2000 switch over.
The CS school within the state school in this city is sponsored by one of those companies, and they still teach (2018!) COBOL as a course req--obviously as a way to train up talent--but the fact that it's still taught today boggles the mind for me as a web developer learning something-newJS every week.
Then I got good at Java + Spring
Then I got good at React + Redux
Now I gotta get good at Python + Django and the damn magic it does.
Next I gotta get good at Scala.
It is frustrating. And I feel that had I spent 10 years in any of those I could really make amazing things in each one. But instead I feel like a generalist. Jack of all trades.
And that's just the last 5 years. Before that was dozens of java frameworks, knowing differences between 4 different databases and wielding sql like a master, and more.
The worst parts are:
- Front-end engineers are looked down upon while I LOVE coding in React + Redux + ES6js. Wish it was TypeScript.
- React changes damn near daily.
- I really want to deeeeeeep dive in a tech but I feel lots of FOMO that if I don't study a hot new tech I'm screwed. (Except Vue. Vue is the same paradigm as Backbone / Ember)
- I have a kid, time is limited to learn new languages.
It's better to be a good programmer that's deeply experienced in a domain, then a great scala developer that doesn't understand the domains he's working in.
I'm more in the distributed space so I know elixir and scala very well with actor model and distributed coordination tools in my toolbelt. I'm not the best scala engineer but I can get shit done and it will be correct and work through all of the pathological conditions because I've seen a lot in this area. If you asked me to build a webpage I'd fall apart but I'm good at that specialization and have all of the tools I need to work with the technology I know today, and to build on to learn whatever technology is needed tomorrow (eg I've been working with elixir for a year but I'm extremely proficient at it because of my 6 years of akka experience)
If you know js and web standards then anything on the frontend is just a new application of the same ideas. If you know a bit of networking and a bit of operating systems then web development in python/django/Scala are all just interesting new ways to say basically the same thing.
If you know the specs then you don't need to find out about technology by following 100 different blogs.
Occasionally there will be new fundamentals to learn but you'll be ready because you won't have a backlog of relearning framework X's new way of saying "hello, world".
I work for a competitor to General Dynamics in practically the same field (as close as you can get in 2018) as Mr. Ray Livesay.
Counting the acquisition, I've been with the same company for 11 years, having worked my way up from being a technical writer to programmer to systems engineer.
When I wanted to transition from programmer to systems engineer, I went to school to get my Master's and the company paid for most of it.
Sometimes I feel like an alien, reading about other working programmers and engineers, because everyone here has their own office, has worked here for years, is happy, enjoys great benefits, the company promotes from within, and encourages professional development.
But then I go to our "competipartners" and their offices are set up the same way, their benefits are within a marginal twist of a dial up or down here or there, and when I go to trade shows I see the same people with the same employer polo shirts year after year after year.
The only reason I'll leave my employer is if, in a couple of years after I transition to "senior" systems engineer there isn't a position on a contract or program that will support my labor category.
Maybe aerospace is the field you want to look at getting into? There are no "rock star" programmers, just people who work 9-5.
It is not really appealing to most younger folks because we aren't a bunch of "hip young urban professionals" with MacBooks clustered around a communal workspace in a downtown startup incubator in a converted loft/warehouse lit by faux edison light bulbs in iron-pipe light fixtures with a pinball machine and some scooters in the corner.
We're a bunch of old dudes in a generic office park. And we're paid in "lots of money" instead of "a little bit of money with tons of stock and a promise".
I recently went to a startup but I don't know if they will make it, and I would love a company with private offices and a bit of stability. But I'm afraid I'll be left looking at the other companies left i haven't de-FAANG-ed yet. What is the name of your company?
Stock is not pay. As the old saying goes, "A bird in the hand is worth N in the bush, where N is a value that people whose profession is to guess the value of N cannot guess the value of."
It's not, but it'd also be foolish to ignore that RSU's can be fairly easily exercised and translate into real money. It's probably more accurate to say that the stock isn't worth the face value, but RSU's certainly does have value at public companies.
However, it also sounds extremely expensive to run a business with everything you described. It might only be possible because you appear to work in the group of large corporations that exist off of a government contracting system that has been criticized as being fundamentally broken. Projects cost way too much, take too long, and are frequently late and over budget anyway. I've heard a lot of that has to do with the government constantly asking for changes and asking for too much, but whatever way you slice it the only reason it works is because it is basically non-competitive. Does your company create successful consumer products?
Spacex is aerospace too, but they are disrupting their industry. I wonder if all the engineers there get their own offices and stay in the same roles for years, with the same technology.
I don't have enough experience to know which works best, letting engineers become professionals in their niche, making the business not very adaptable but having some deep strengths, or moving fast and breaking things, being adaptable and fast moving, but have some crappy code gluing things together that will need replacing in a few years.
"I have an offer from OtherCo. But I'd like to stay here. Could you match it?"
"We don't negotiate salaries."
This is basically why I continually fail to make it as a web developer, at the times I'm forced to try. Even though I enjoy the work just fine, I don't have anywhere near the passion to keep up with every new framework on my own time.
1980s programmer: sits down at the typewriter and bangs out a fixed width table, finishes with a signature.
But the smell of typewriter ink. Man, I miss it.
The mess is still there but only now one keeps the detritus of all of one's creative efforts, all the previous discarded attempts, silently gunked up in the recesses of the forgetful mind.
One would argue that version control might be sufficient to trace the evolution of ideas. But no. One would still miss the violence of the mind changes, of reckless scribbles or of reattempts that often take place in between the commits. Things are forever lost in the virtual trashcan and it's blunt implement, the backspace.
https://www.drexplain.com/press/articles/agile_technical_wri...
And I suspect that this went on longer in traditional big iron shops.
Knuth still does use a pencil and paper, as far as I know. He only types the manuscript in Emacs once he has composed it.
For bonus points, find a generic document preview library (a la macOS Preview), render images of everything in the Recycle Bin, and use these as the textures for all the crumpled bits of paper. And use a procedural physically-based renderer to make all the crumples move as you walk around the room!
Potentially also make all the videos in the Recycle Bin play on the crumples.
I'm completely serious; this will exist eventually. You might as well make it, you have the romantic motivation for it.
--signed, real 1980s programmer current resume http://linkedin.com/in/maggieleberit generally doesn't matter, because most HR employees probably have one where you're from.
My resume read RESUME(8) across the top. One person got the joke. One. I went back to using TeX until everyone refused anything but a word doc. Mostly so they could take your information off and replace it the agency info.
(okok, it's Saturday so can we have this as a top level reply?)
It definitely is, not just to see what technologies were in use, but what an exemplary career in that field looked like, so thanks for sharing. It's just that the first thing that went through my head was this joke, since it's really something that isn't too far fetched situation wise (see that one longer reply).
Fun story: About 6 years ago, my uncle was still working at a big car manufacturer. They have bounties for when employees come up with ideas to optimize some workflow or cut costs somewhere. He handed in a suggestion to stop computing big reports on one of their mainframes that were meant for being printed out but weren't actually for quite some time, so basically just went to /dev/null, while the generation process took quite some time. There was quite some confusion first since the IT people in charge insisted no such thing was going on, so they had him show them where this job was actually wired in and where the output went. In the end they decided to remove it and paid him some reward. How did he know? He coded that job in the 80s.
I guess your dad would have quite some interesting stories too.
* My uncle was actually a maths teacher, but right when he finished college there was absolutely no demand, so a friend already working there got him on board. He learned cobol while trying to figure things out there, reading books day and night...
Sorry about that. I have this theory on dementia that part of the cause (stress among other things) is a change from an intellectually demanding career or a life involving thinking and a change to either retirement or not having to do much thinking. The delta in other words.
So my question is does any of this relate to your father? Did he remain active in thinking past his retirement?
The one common reason why all replacement attempts falter if not fail. No one knows all the touch points. No one knows exactly what they really do. Oh its easy to say "that machine is the warehouse inventory and related" but on a grand scale that is a fine description. it is when you get into all the custom interfaces, all the different systems relying on it, then it becomes a whole different ball game.
I full expect the z, i, and p, machines to all be there in the next ten to fifteen years for the same reason they are here now. it gets really expensive to replace something when you don't even know what you truly have. when you do find out it can be far more economical to keep what you got but be more diligent where new apps reside.
Not typical of the 80s
AFAIR at least
> “The old air force designs were all based on finding pilots who were similar to the average pilot,” Daniels explained to me. “But once we showed them the average pilot was a useless concept, they were able to focus on fitting the cockpit to the individual pilot. That’s when things started getting better.”
https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
All this to say: the idea that resumes and interviews would stay out of your personal life is a rather modern concept.
https://i.imgur.com/btFE99N.jpg
And Paul Allen's -
Also looked up the cost of Harvard tuition in those days: $5,350 (about $27.5K in 2018 dollars)[https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1974/3/5/faculty-announce...]
I guess even programmer salaries haven't kept up with the cost increase in higher education...
Further, not more than 20 years ago, when I went to many interviews in person in Salt Lake (a very conservative town) I was asked about religion, at a car dealership where I was trying to get a job as a car salesman. I had a second interview at a bank, and when the interviewer saw a tiny diamond chip in my ear, told me to turn around, that he wasn't interested, and I was on my way. I was told that at a high-class tourist restaurant downtown that they didn't hire waiters, as they only had waitress uniforms, I was told at a grocery store in Ogden, that I couldn't be a cashier, as they only had women's uniforms for the cashiers, men/boys would only work as box boys.
As little as 8 years ago, I was told I was a bit old to keep up with walking around a college campus to perform the work on desktop PC's in a timely manner. (I was 48 at the time). I have been kept out of many positions due to my current age at this point, regardless of my mental abilities, and the fact that I had most definitely kept up with the current levels of technology as verified by my current Microsoft, and other certifications.
So yeah, discrimination is alive and well in the greater U.S. and we are screened via a multitude of forms using technology, or personal interviews, or whatever is at hand.
I don't look at someone's LinkedIn profile before interviewing them...
Or else he hasn't written a resume in 25 years because he's worked for the same company and just wrote it like the last time he did coming out of the military :D
1951 - Graduated SD State.
1964-1965 UC Extension Cobol
1968 UC Extension Fortran
1968-1969 UC Extension Systems and Procedures/Data Processing
1968-1969 IBM 370 Assembler Language
The message is always be learning, never just get a degree and then never go back to learning something new. It helps with neural plasticity and it keeps you engaged and employable.
This applies only to countries like US, where higher education is actually good.
In rest of the world the university tutor lacks skills.
Tomorrow I guide some teenage punk through the wasteland of mobile development. Undoubtedly he's gonna throw some new shit at me. Hah!
That said when young people blithely get their smart faces on and start talking about REST I cannot avoid the old fogey suspicion that they don't know a damn thing they're talking about.
It's also understandable that once people find a tool which they like enough to sink some time into learning properly, that they then cling to it a bit.
But I'm inclined to think that anyone who chose Spring for that position either has pretty bad taste, or simply hasn't bothered to look at a second tool.
http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-apl-programming-lan...
An SSN was not designed to be a unique secret identifier held by every individual. But we have used it that way, and built a house of cards on it.
"In 1938, a leather factory in Lockport, New York attempted to capitalize on the excitement around the country’s newly-formed social insurance program by tucking duplicate Social Security cards into its wallets. Company vice president and treasurer Douglas Patterson thought it would be cute to use the actual Social Security number of his secretary, Hilda Schrader Whitcher.
Real Social Security cards had just begun circulating the year before, so many Americans were confused. Even though the display card was marked "specimen" and sold at Woolworth’s, more than 40,000 people adopted Hilda’s number as their own. According to the Social Security Administration, no fewer than 12 people were still using their Woolworth’s-issued SSN in 1977."
https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/26/3384416/social-security-n...
Suppose your number is 123-45-6789. If an attacker can uncover that you were born in Springfield in December 1989, they can deduce that the first 5 digits are likely 123-45. Now, there are only 9999 possibilities for what your full SSN might be.
Moreover, the only random bits are routinely used by utility companies, hospitals, etc. as an oral password and written identifier. If someone reads or overhears that your last 4 are 6789 and knows when/where you were born, they have a frighteningly good chance of discovering your SSN.
This is a loss. The competition was good. Success brought respect, and failure brought shame. Everybody had an extra incentive to put in more effort.
I've gotten almost every job I've applied for based on that + the interview. The few I haven't gotten, weren't because of the resume (I've always asked why, so I could improve).
I wrote my comment to inspire people to look at jobs they normally wouldn't, because I believe applying for a wide range of jobs is a good strategy for learning about the labor market.
It doesn’t matter as long as the company you got into was good lol (it wasn’t like that for me)
The company is getting a steal and I’m learning. I have one more aggressive jump I can do in the next 3 years before I top out in my market without going into management.
How do you get a response?
You had to seek out jobs in newspaper listings in local or national newspapers (international too). I would get people applying for jobs back in early 90s who thought that having a modem at home and having read one programming book qualified them for the job.
No coding interview in those days, but you were let go in a day or week if you could not perform what you said you could do during your first two tasks.
I think so and I wish it was the case. It was always frustrating, when I worked at large companies where poor performance wasn't an easily fireable offense, that it led to quality performance not being an easily laudable trait. I've also found in states and companies that are willing to fire bad developers (as opposed to, say, stringing them and the sub par side of the industry along), the cream has an easier time reaching the top. Sadly, due to sympathy for the employee and hate for the employer, many places make it harder for your signal flourish simply because of the protection of the noise.
If ten people apply for a position and their resumes all look good the company needs some way to determine who to hire.
If you wanna work in hip startups then I guess it's different but if youre like me and working in boring industry like IBM and defense contractors, it's still like this. I'm old and boring, my job is a means to gain money, nothing more.
I don't spend a weekend tweaking css either, just a simple text resume simply formatted that I created in Google Docs and FWIW since I started working in industry my resume has had 90%ish success rate in getting job interviews. Of course, I also have only applied to jobs I'm interested in and I don't job hop like crazy.
Many companies these days install tracking software on workstations, as well as for programming challenges during the interview process.
IBM and defense contractors are known for the good old boy game, so your mindset is not surprising. I used to work at Ball and was pushed out for complaining about every single face in every single meeting being white, so I'm something of an authority on this subject.
>I used to work at Ball and was pushed out for complaining about every single face in every single meeting being white
I doubt that's why you were "pushed out..." Or maybe "complaining" was not done in a constructive manner.
(My uncle thinks he gets "pushed out" of all the jobs he's ever had because of some silly reason like this[1] but it's actually because he has poor work ethic and doesn't get along with others. I used to listen to him talk to dispatch when he was a truck driver living with us...uhhh it was embarrassing to listen to...)
Also, I'm a woman myself, FWIW.
[1] stuff like "my boss promoted my coworker over me because she's pretty." That was the last "reason" he had.
While simpler times are attractive, I'm glad we have so much choice.
Almost 40 years later, phone numbers are on the way out, DOBs are "illegal" and github and email are more important information on a CV.
In the USA discrimination is 100% legal if 1) the group being discriminated against is not specifically defined as a protected group under law OR 2) it's a legitimate job requirement.
Requiring programmers to know how to program also discriminates against non-programmers but non-programmers aren't a protected group.
Requiring a stocker to be able to lift 30 pounds discriminates against the disabled. The disabled are a protected group, but it's a legitimate job requirement for a stocker to be able to move the stock around.
If you're hiring for a senior engineer it's not illegal discrimination because 1) it's a legitimate job requirement and 2) young people are not a protected group under law (only people over 40 are)
Nevertheless, once you go there in person for your interview, people will notice anyway.
I always go completely clean shaven with a bald head when I interview.
Or use a “functional” style resume.
> Cyber- is derived from "cybernetic," which comes from the Greek word κυβερνητικός meaning skilled in steering or governing
You might notice it's the same word from which 'Kubernetes' comes from, though Kubernetes is a more legitimate sounding word without the (modern) palatalization of C.
Weird, I feel the opposite way. To me "kubernetes" feels like someone couldn't come up with a name, so they obscured an existing word and hoped no one would notice. It's like calling "tumblr" "a more legitimate-sounding word than 'tumbler'". Why transliterate Greek the normal way when you can do it your own, less accurate way?
> without the (modern) palatalization of C
Huh? You could describe the change in Italian as palatalization; [s] is not a palatal sound at all, and the change in question took place many hundreds of years ago. Modern?
https://www.worldcat.org/title/cybernetics-or-control-and-co...
Incidentally, pronounced "cyber-NEET-iks", originally.
And explicitly intended to apply to biological and social systems. Also: The human use of human beings : cybernetics and society (1954).
https://www.worldcat.org/title/human-use-of-human-beings-cyb...
And yet recruiters frequently request them up top on resumes.
I remember that.
"Still in all, every night we does the tell, so that we 'member who we was and where we came from..."
I'd like to know the brand. Almost 40 years old and not yellowed - that's amazing.
Exposing it to sunlight and/or excessive heat will cause it to age. If it's high cellulose paper, like a newspaper, it will generally yellow quickly regardless of the storage because newspaper is cheap and acidic and not intended to last.
aren't you expecting a little bit too much? Don't get me wrong, its great if you do... but knowing about upcoming encryption standards is imo something a security engineer should be fluent in, not a web developer.
Yes: it helps the developer to learn to code much more defensively - which is a very good thing. But then, that developer has no time to code. Defensively, or otherwise.
(depending on the environment, and management's willingness to invest in infrastructure - yeah, you can really get bogged down in this stuff).
Tuning performance and setting up logging is another matter.
We're talking about the changelog of TLS 1.2 to 1.3, not the general attack vectors for web applications.
I wish people would stop including the information as then it takes away the risk that they can't later claim that they didn't get the job because of their age, sex, martial status, etc.
They have some guidance on how to encourage equal opportunities in the job application process [0], the monitoring questions here [1] should be seen as things that should not be asked in a standard application process, nor included in a CV.
There's many attributes that we can't legally discriminate against when someone applies for a position [2]. We might be a little more aware of trying to ensure the process is fair and balanced, and it's certainly quite different from other parts of the UK and Europe.
[0] https://www.equalityni.org/ECNI/media/ECNI/Publications/Empl...
[1] https://www.equalityni.org/Employers-Service-Providers/Small...
[2] https://www.nibusinessinfo.co.uk/content/equality-law-and-ty...
*edit - fixed formatting of references
In the UK it seems it's perfectly alright to have a farm owner appear on a TV news station and be completely unchallenged as she is almost boastful about how she discards applications from one EU country's workers because another EU's countries workers are better and don't complain as much.
This is prima facie the very thing that equality legislation is there to prevent -- generalizations being applied to individuals based upon something beyond their control, such as nationality of birth.
If you found a way to survey small employers in a way they felt comfortable about answering truthfully, they will have notions about many nationalities. Some will be generalizations that on average apply poorly to the individual, some will apply better. Almost all will be based on a ridiculously unrepresentative sample size that is likely heavily biased towards a particular segment of the population. This is in spite of some of the most advanced equality legislation in the world.
The tech industry has some pretty poor generalizations about the work produced by certain nationalities.
For many employers equality starts and ends with an equal opportunities monitoring form stapled to the back of an application form that the applicant is to complete for a job that they already have no chance of getting. Even getting rid of names, education, past jobs and on CVs and application forms is not going to change that.
This is HN I suspect that no one on here is "casual labour"
It was implied that you had to fill out the template properly, including adding a photo, and as a result we were sending unnecessary personal information to all companies we applied to.
[0] https://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/editors/en/cv/compose
Here's an indeed.com search for "cm" that pulls them up: https://cn.indeed.com/jobs?q=cm
You don't need to be able to read Chinese to know that a 160cm bust size requirement is implausible...
I guess she doesn’t think that when reviewing 100 applications a screener might not want to constantly scroll.
So then, I exhaustively detailed every past project on my resume. At every interview: it's excruciatingly clear, nobody read the fucking thing.
Junior engineers who I interview, know this: Even if my boss hands me your resume the day before, I will read every single word, and I will pay attention, and understand what it means in context of your background. 3 pages is my upper-limit for patience. Your competence is usually demonstrated by about halfway down the second page.
https://www.cengage.com/school/corpview/Mission-CriticalFunc...
My understanding is that there was a big cultural change in theory of management during the corporate raider era of the 1980s. Before, lifetime employment was common; employee loyalty was matched by defined-benefit pensions and the implicit commitment that you'd be kept on until retirement unless you did something terrible.
Corporate raiders, though, found that they could make a lot of money by buying a company and, among other things, ignoring all the implicit commitments. So they'd just lay off a lot of people, forcing out the older, more expensive workers. Getting rid of all that knowledge and loyalty might have long-term costs, but that didn't matter to corporate raiders, because they'd quickly sell off the company. Managers everywhere eventually adopted these tactics, both because it helped fend off corporate raiders and because narrow-focus financial evaluation of everything became the dominant management paradigm.
Now it's up to each worker to ensure that they stay marketable, and there's no particular incentive to stay around. Indeed, the incentives are often negative. At most places it's easier to get a raise if you move. And too many companies are stuck in legacy technology stacks; if you stay, you'll eventually become unemployable.
So I'd rather ask how many tech companies have programmers confident that their employer will stick with them until 67? Damned few, I'd guess.
It’s really sad to see 1000s of years of people’s work and toil washed away this way. Really drives home that nothing we do in this field has any meaning certainly not permanence.
This is still taught today in business schools.
When you take over a company, the first thing you do is fire a bunch of people. The market sees it as cutting costs, so the stock goes up.
It doesn’t matter who the people were or how essential to the company they were. This is simply a fundamental part of the theory of “business” as taught in top management courses.
The tiny (usually temporary) stock boost secures your employment for the the next six months. This buys you time to figure out how to run/fix the company.
So now our sales targets are higher than both combined (AFAICT), and we don't meet them at all. Since we're a "team" now they distribute the layoffs equally across the "team".
Not sure where these sales targets come from since we aren't publicly traded. I just feel we're being setup to fail.
Anyway, people are leaving in droves (2 best salesmen left, engineering is a revolving door) since our formerly generous performance based bonus is going away.
I am the only full-time left on my project, the rest are contractors (since we have a hiring freeze, but a large budget left over for contractors for some reason). They literally cannot do releases without me. And after asking for a raise to reflect that I'm managing 3 contractors instead of coding (the former lead left), I got scoffed at and told that there was a hiring freeze (that's not a promotion freeze, but ok, except you have 100k/year freed up from the last guy that left...), and that my project isn't under as much pressure as the other projects so no. Come back to me in a year and we'll talk.
Yeah ok. Wait a year for maybe 5%. Or jump ship for an easy 20%. And no managing/lead responsibilities. Go pound sand.
The company is clueless about keeping talent. No one mentions the massive churn at company update meetings. They just go "wow, didn't meet the sales targets... gotta work harder guys! Look at all these cool initiatives we're gonna do next year!"
I keep hearing the word death spiral among coworkers. Yep.
/rant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Christensen (inventor of the BBS and author of xmodem) is one, at 44 years for IBM. I knew a very small numbers of career Allstate folks at over 40 years.
The departments looking after things like websites think 5 years with the company is a long time.
The department I'm in tends to be lifers - I personally know two people who have made 50 years, a few more at 40. Certainly if you're under 10 years you're new.
Though EE (RF, Microwave, Antennas to be exact) still has the respect for the gray beard.
The record for my employer is 60+ years; a machinist who started at 18 and still working into his late 70’s as he enjoys it.
Now the age distribution is log-normal with 5 years average experience. Was just given a 25% retention bonus yesterday, which is unheard of. They are scared of the old people leaving, and rightly so.
The millennia’s job hop like crazy, and in my field there is a lot of institutional knowledge built up.
http://munk.org/typecast/2013/11/03/gp-ibm-selectric-typebal...
Bitstream has a $$ font called Pica 10 Pitch if you're interested.
https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bitstream/pica-10-pitch/
n.b - the typist used lower-case L instead of the number 1.
I've seen font files based on that before, a Google for IBM selectric font looks not totally dissimilar.
Maybe that helps?
As to the discussion about 1 page v. multi-page c.v.'s: a c.v. is ADVERTISING. If you get the interview, you bring along a more comprehensive document in which you can go into detail about subject areas which may be relevant but don't merit inclusion on a one-pager.
As to his height: he worked on B-29's in the 1940's. Conceivably the ability to access cramped spaces was an issue then and he merely continued including this out of habit. Same as to his security clearance--most people are proud of holding one (look at all the brouhaha about Trump terminating a clearance) and like to include it on their c.v.'s.
BTW a "walt" is short for "walter mitty"
After the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company and IBM packed up and left, the town collapsed on itself and hasn't been able to recover since. It's crazy to think years ago, people migrated from California to upstate NY to work. OP if he ever told you about his time there, I'd love to hear about it.
That's enough bling for most.
My boss specifically commented how my resume wasn't full of bullshit.
Mind you, that’s in Japan, so possibly not entirely representative.
;; This buffer is for notes you don't want to save, and for Lisp evaluation.
;; If you want to create a file, visit that file with C-x C-f,
;; then enter the text in that file's own buffer.
Needless to say, I felt really embarrassed to find this out during the interview, and was baffled that the internal recruiter had even considered me.
I got the job.
— Jason Cohen
Your dad seems like quite a guy :-)
He built telemetry systems before the Internet was we know it.
In fact, you could double underline a word by moving half a line down (that was a thing) and then create the underline with equal signs.
What a different world we live in.
There's flaws in the ways a lot of companies hire, but the process has to be complicated when you get down to the numbers of how many people are for hire and how many are worth hiring.
i.e. we're trying to hire imaginary unicorns because we don't respect actual programmers.
We certainly weren't looking for imaginary unicorns, but we also couldn't afford to train someone who sent in a code sample in a MS word doc that was full of syntax errors...
Any software development job requires training. Every project is different and it takes time to come up to speed. For a good developer catching up on some particular buzzword is much faster than your undocumented spaghetti of a project ;) If you can't afford new people ramp up then you have a bigger problem.
This is a bit of a fun story to tell in person; this was the same person who claimed to be the second coming of Christ, and tried suing us for religious discrimination when we didn't hire him.
Fortunately for us, the people in the interview didn't respond to his claims at all, didn't mention it in the feedback we gave him when we declined to hire him, and (edit: the company) lost only lawyer fees fighting the lawsuit.
That said, hiring is damned expensive, and I have a hard time faulting companies who make the process difficult for potential candidates.
Presumably this is partly why hiring is expensive. Not that I'm sure it's really that expensive in the big scheme of things. The problem isn't the process being difficult per se, it's the process having poor predictive power.
I agree with your overall points- especially with regard to respecting your candidates time. You do need to verify that the relevant information they provide is correct however. You wouldn't make a significant investment in finances, buying a car, marrying someone, or go into business with someone if you didn't trust that you have a decent understanding of what you're getting into.
Then again, if you do, it's a lesson you'll learn rather quickly. Respect yes, blind trust no.
More often than not, those job requirements are not written by the person who is doing the hiring, or the people you will be working with. Just be honest about what you know, what areas you are willing to grow in, and what excites you about the job position.
Some companies "hire only the best". A good company for a junior developer will look for a person's "trajectory"- i.e. is a person willing and worth investing in to help them grow.
When I was involved in hiring I was astonished at how difficult it was to even find a person who was both worth interviewing and willing to interview, and resumes were basically worthless at helping you make that determination.
Resume did not matter at all. The hiring pool is flooded with a thousand bootcampers, 1 in 40 can actually program and its impossible to tell who they are without conducting a remote. A thousand people with Masters degrees in comp sci, 1 in 50 can actually program and most of them don’t even seem to have any interest in programming.
Then there are unfortunate language barriers, where a large percentage of the pool are international but your company doesn’t have anyone who can interview them adequately.
There’s a reason finding tech hires has become its own industry and we all get spammed 10x daily. It’s because it’s really, really difficult and time-consuming and exhausting and expensive to make a good tech hire, and the cost of making one of your first 5 or 10 engineering hires a bad one can literally be that your company just fails.
It’s just so hard to hire software developers. I’ve been on both sides so I know how frustrating the situation is for devs, but I don’t think it’s half as frustrating as being on the hiring side of it. It’s just so fucking hard and exhausting. Even beyond the logistics of it, you’re spending all your time judging people’s economic worth and sending emails that you know will ruin their day. It’s just not a fun job at all.
I hope your pay and total comp is actually competitive, in which case you're grousing over something you could fix in a jiffy.
This discounts people that transition to CS from another field like mathematics, chemistry, physics, etc. Just because you didn't major in CS as an undergraduate doesn't mean you can't program. That is a bit of gatekeeping. Plus, I'd argue someone from a field like mathematics and physics might be more suited to do certain types of programming jobs due to their background skillsets.
Sure, there's fields where the domain knowledge is prerequisite to do anything at all, but that doesn't make you a better programmer for it.
Then by that metric you don't even need a degree and your initial point of a BS > Masters > Bootcamp is nullified by the self-taught programmer that has programmed longer than anyone else in that group that happens to apply for your position. But that doesn't necessarily mean they will be a better programmer in the long term.
Or don't, and run my resume through a buzzword search program, instead. Yeah. That will work. Good luck with that.
I think the reality is more nuanced. There is some fraction of good people who are not happy where they are for whatever reason. They are bored. They want to make more money. They want to move to a different country/location. If you are a great place to work with the right kind of challenges and you do the right PR some of these good people will find you. Obviously they'll also go through their contacts who know they are good and will be happy to hire or help them. Some companies looking for great people are unable to recognize them, especially startups founded by inexperienced people, as they tend to have little clue of what makes good software. Others may accept a very large false negative rate due to some religious beliefs :) You may need to take some risks to find "your" good developers.
If you are a sucky workplace working on boring stuff you're not gonna find any good people whatever you do unless you're incredibly lucky, e.g. some guy that lives next door and likes the commute. The sucky workplace is under people's control (if they realize it) and the boring can also to some extent be made more interesting.
If everyone applying can't program then no amount of resume analysis or interviewing will yield a good candidate. So if that's your problem you need to address it.
It's also quite likely you are rejecting good people. Possibly even great people. Some hiring processes have people jump through ridiculous hoops that have nothing to do with their potential to do great work in the actual role they're hired for.
I've never worked for a company that doesn't say it hires the "best" people. Guess what, most people are average. That's true in Google, in Amazon, in Apple, in Microsoft etc. etc. The 100's of thousands of developers working there all lie on a nice Gaussian with some minor offsets. In all these companies there's like 20% of the people at the most who do the really hard bits and the others are worker bees/supportive roles.
His resume/cover letter still listed off a lot of buzzwords for specific technologies/platforms/languages to get the manager's attention -- they just were different ones from a different era.
Currently new frameworks are created in dozens and few are required for everyday work and they change each year.
The amount of information newer programmers have to keep pace with is HUGE...
Thats why some companies stop hiring ppl after 30s because they are simply not able (statistically) to keep with all of it. Its also more about not having other responsibilities - family, kids, friends, home, groceries, hobbies, health etc
I really hate that part of IT because its not what we have seen in our hearts when our first "Hello World" did run..
This is a huge generalization. Some people's careers start in their 30s. Would you think some 30s something ML researcher that just got a PhD is over the hill? Not everyone is married and has kids in their 30s either.
From my experience the young guys aren't keeping up either. They have a very short period where the framework they have learned is the one that's en vogue. 3 years later they are also "behind" because if you do actual long term work you are behind almost by definition. You can't abandon your previous work and rewrite everything every two years because your tech isn't cool anymore.
[1]: http://www.phrasemix.com/phrases/put-someone-in-a-home-insti...
A: A home is where they put you when they want the house.
That resume is from shortly after he turned 54.
It must have been hard looking for a job at that age and I don't think the economy was brilliant in 1980 either.
That was when Reagan got elected after Carter had only one term.
There was a recession, actually
Personally, after having seen quite a few for family reasons, there are a few I wouldn't mind living in.
I don't understand Western opinion on this matter.
But on topic, that is one concise application letter. Cheers for your dad efforts back then!
Repayment for what exactly? I never asked for any of this.
It's a separate matter as to whether families make adequate effort to visit and spend quality time with their ageing parents/grandparents when they've been put into a home.
In the case of my family, my mother visited her parents daily for the last few years of their lives, and my partner's mother and aunt now visit their mother daily too - both before and since she was put into an aged care home.
Other families may not be as attentive and that's sad, but it's a separate issue as to whether aged care homes are good places for elderly people to live.
Not as much difference from what your family was and is doing with people with hospitalization, I think.
Because my parents are huge assholes, are intolerable as people, and abused me during my entire childhood. So I'd rather avoid them at all costs.
>Repayment of when you yourself was born into this one?
I didn't ask to be born, I don't owe my parents anything.
Even if you love your parents more than anything else in the world, it can be downright impossible to care for someone who needs 24 hour medical care if you aren't medically qualified. On top of that most people can't afford to quit their job and their entire lives to become permanent caregivers. It's often impossible.
I have an uncle-in-law who is extremely disabled and lives in a home. It's not possible for my (now dead) grandparents-in-laws (or anyone else) to give him the care he needs.
Please don't post like this to HN.
I don't mean to pick on this guy - I've seen an several repositories like this recently.
I personally have almost everything I write or do backed up in various git repo, why not? Literally my resume folder, with one file, has its own repo. Can I not push this to GitHub and share it?
Its not a source control system. I'm sure you know this but you are interacting with a website, not git itself.
Furthermore GitHub offers their pages feature which turns any repo into a website. If this was in gh-pages would that make it okay?
Or maybe it’s just easier to be overly-critical than to appreciate a cool way of sharing/saving information.
I mean, it’s a also a platform with an embeddable “gists” feature ostensibly for code snippets, but frequently used to access notes of all types. Clearly anyone who has ever typed a plaintext gist is also misusing GitHub.
/s
Dude, why do you care? It’s not a “project” in a traditional sense but it’s not hurting anything and if someone wants to store a cool readme in their account, why does it matter?
>For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
It's the simplicity. That's all. Making things easier and more accessible. I don't know how can I explain it more because that's the whole point of Github Pages, like on their site "Websites for you and your projects". And that's it.
As far as hosting dad's CV from 1980 goes, striving for "me too" good-enough web is exactly appropriate. Rational choice.
You know, facebook started off a social media and now it has become effectively a news outlet and entire Internet in some places. Google started as a search engine but now become many people's part of life.
When people start using services for everything, it's the service provider that is happily harvesting the data. Users end up being tied to a system that they find hard to replace. Github offers free hosting, free domain, free https certs, no need ssh, no need CMS, pretty neat and convenient, except now you depends on github's black box for hosting. Same for github APIs, which are not part of git, but github's proprietary technology. Wait until Github uses that as a leverage against you and you are forced to migrate off it.
Edit: I'm not saying don't use github. However, I would suggest not abusing it or become too dependent on it for things other than what it was designed to do.
:/
If Github Pages wouldn't be a thing, I'd have been inclined to agree. Ever since, though, such usage of Github strikes me as fair game.
Upvoting because as others have pointed out this is a valid question.
Also JavaScript in a few years.
"May I ask that you read the enclosed, resume. Thank you very much."