Wow, I wish I was an engineer in that era. 25 years at the same company, 3 languages over 13 years. And when he needed to learn a new language he actually went to school for it.
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.
I got fairly proficient in RoR some years ago. In that I understood most of the magic and was thinking on what is the best ways to design the program for readability / maintainability.
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.
I promise you. If you ignore the churn and learn the fundamentals, your skills will have an order of magnitude longer shelf life.
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".
IMO You don't need to specialize on a language or famework, but a problem domain, either technical (eg distributed systems, machine learning) or not (manufacturing, video, etc).
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)
A fair point. At this point picking up front-end technologies is a thing I can fairly easily to. React was definitely hard because it was a different paradigm, but once I got over the hump, I'm solving the same problems as before.
I'm a games engine programmer. I pretty much only know VS and C++, plus some bits of C# for an occasional tool. I feel like what you described is only applicable to Web programmers - my coworker has been at the same company for the last 26 years and he only knows assembly, C and C++, and uses windows batch for scripting. No need to learn anything else - that's enough to build the latest AAA games.
Ha, you're right about web engineering. But how available are jobs like yours? Because the guys that were doing them 20 years ago are still doing them today.
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.
I have a former classmate that was still doing mainframe development as a military contractor using I believe COBOL but I know she was doing something with JCL up to two years ago.
spoiler alert, COBOL and Assembly are used for major financial systems that you use every day (no snark intended). I live in a city that headquarters one of the largest credit card processing companies around (they use Assembler), a large insurance company (they use COBOL), and a too-big-to-fail bank (they use COBOL).
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.
>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.
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.
>Wow, I wish I was an engineer in that era. 25 years at the same company, 3 languages over 13 years.
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".
Google/Microsoft/amazon/facebook/other big top companies seem to only have people work in group settings, but the problem is they pay a metric shitload of money. I've worked for several of them on this list. Work at one of those for 10 years and you might be fixed for life. I also used to work at Microsoft back when we all had private offices but I was lucky enough to be there when the stock was steadily appreciating.
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?
> i thought including the stock amazon pays well these days
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.
Amazon stock is pay. It has a monetary value that it is easily convertible into. If your point is that RSUs have vesting schedules, annual salary does too, in the form of paychecks.
What is the salary growth like? My experience is that the only way to get more than a 3% raise per year is to job hop. Salary compression and inversion are real.
I worked at a competitor to GD for about 7 years. Had a great career trajectory until a managerial fuckup cost the company one third of the revenue and they had to ax 50 percent of the staff. Be careful, those big, stable companies can tend to lull you into thinking things can't go left quickly. They most assuredly can, and do.
I applaud that your company promotes from within and encourages professional development. I think that is more likely to happen when a company can rely on most employees sticking around for a while, which they probably will because of the opportunities provided inside the company. A virtuous cycle.
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.
Contemporary programmer: spends a whole weekend tweaking CSS parameters, asking web forums for LaTeX templates, finding a cool fresh font pairing on Google Fonts.
1980s programmer: sits down at the typewriter and bangs out a fixed width table, finishes with a signature.
Real 1980s programmer: sits down at IBM 3278 mainframe terminal, edits resume into text file containing DCF/Script markup. Prints mailing copies on IBM 3800 laser printer using typewriter font, hoping operations staff running printer doesn't notice (unlikely considering speed printer runs at).
After getting into the guts of unix's typesetting system I decided to use it for my resume. I customized the macros used for online help called man pages. Man pages have a reference across the top which cite the command and section so man itself reads man(1).
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.
I can see why a real programmer might have favored the typewriter: computer time and printer ink (esp. laser) were expensive and normally reserved for business-related jobs.
This is not weird. The fact you both have worked for the same place makes it more likely that you end up in the same online community as well, not less likely.
But it's more than the romance of the ink that is missed. One has lost the visual impact of all discards with the use of the virtual trashcan. The psychology of seeing or the stark visual impact of a trashcan filled to the brim with all the imperfect and therefore discarded attempts of one's creative effort is lost - almost forever. These were the metrics of effort now untenable in the virtual trashcan. Gone. Who knows how one's next attempt would have shaped out or re-imagined had one seen even a few of the uncountable crumpled up balls of paper strewn across the room? Maybe a signal to give up? Maybe a sign to believe that one hasn't reached even half way to acceptable quality?
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.
I really have no idea what you're talking about. I absolutely hated paper. The inconvenience of wanting to add some content higher up the page and having to redo the whole page to achieve that was infuriating to me. I for one am quite pleased that I no longer have as many violent urges when I'm composing text.
True. However the inflexibility of the physical media (pen/typewriter+paper) forced people to think and plan before they acted. These days, not so much, and I can see the difference in approach when my kids are writing essays - back in the day we were taught to come up with a little plan, toc, etc before getting down to the details. Now my kids just spit it out without structure, then add bits an pieces here and there and call it done. Maybe they are taught the structural approach in scool, but the tools aren't helping.
This is like complaining about interactive terminals because programmers no longer have to think so hard about their code before writing it out to punch cards....
I'm old enough to have typed papers in my youth. It sucked because you had to write it twice, one draft by hand, then type it up. When you were drafting you had to physically cut and paste, with scissors and tape. It was annoying and didn't improve workflow at all.
Typewriters weren't the right tool for composing text, although there were some successful people that made it work, especially at offices or newspapers.
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.
Hopefully you get to enjoy VR/AR at some point. You could build a widget that connects your git repos to visualizations of filing cabinets, and your Recycle Bin to a visualization of your room being full to the ceiling with crumpled documents.
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.
I enjoyed learning how they added a rotating ball to that typewriter and hooked it up to some kind of mainframe for the first APL implementation I think.
My first job out of college (1991), my mom asked me if I got a secretary. Errr, no. But OP's father probably had a secretary assigned to the programming group.
Is your dad for hire? We have this legacy toolchain in cobol and IBM assembler running on a bunch of mainframes and are just not ready to migrate to our brand new Itanium servers we have ordered a while ago. Our engineers are busy porting all the logic but need help understanding the inner workings of the old setup. While they're at it, we have this small list of features we'd like to have added to the old version...
(okok, it's Saturday so can we have this as a top level reply?)
He has severe dementia unfortunately. I just thought it might be interesting to people to see what technologies were in use at those times. My dad loves to play catch with his stuffed doggie (or whatever you will throw to him) but activities more complicated than that are not feasible.
> I just thought it might be interesting to people to see what technologies were in use at those times.
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.
Good question. I can only guess from what else he told about his work that it was simply one of these cases where the younger staff was just not that well versed with the old systems and mostly just managed to maintain them. Most of the stuff that was done in the early days of computing there wasn't formally documented as it was just a bunch of nerds who knew each other very well.* Apparently, when the company got rid of the big printers directly attached to the mainframes they just forgot about that one job, or maybe just removed the print job but not the one that generated it. By the time that happened almost everyone from the old team was already busy with other stuff, much higher up the command chain.
* 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...
If people didn't realize, your dad is 92! I wish my dad lives that long, I love to take care of him when he's vulnerable. Just to return the favor a little bit.
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?
Oh my. Where I am now we just upgraded the mainframe to a Z14, this machine and software running is not even the current OS for the platform. For my twenty plus years there have been projects afoot to replace it but nothing ever pans out. This machine works in concert with a very large iSeries that for the last ten years has been rumored to be on the table to replace. Then throw in all the AIX/Oracle machines and you get the picture.
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.
if not a joke, I know a retired cobol expert (not sure about ibm asm) that would be interested. reply here with some means of contact and I will connect you.
I doubt it. The post explicitly states that s/he had to put him in a nursing home which means chances are that he cannot live comfortably independently.
It will be very cool if he could though, as I do believe he will much rather work on something he loves doing and is good at rather than being committed to a nursing home, besides it will definitely be a sight to see, a 92 year old man hacking away on a system, debugging, writing code, and joining up in meetings, He was literally alive when computing was not a thing or worth much and he got to not just see it grow but he helped make it grow, I will definitely like to work with someone like that.
If I lived through 3 wars and had a strong career alignment with major defense contractors, I suppose I'd be inclined to disclose health and height out of habit...but was this generally expected on a resume back in the 80s?
I've never seen health and height before, so that might be specific to military folks, but I know that in that era and earlier it was very common to include personal details such as your marital status, number of children, even your religion and what church you attended. I saw something recently about how in the 1950s/1960s, if a man were interviewing for an executive position with a company, part of the hiring process would be to interview his wife, often over a dinner that she hosted. There were classes available for women to teach them how to speak and act in those situations, so that their husbands had a better chance at the job.
All this to say: the idea that resumes and interviews would stay out of your personal life is a rather modern concept.
Great find! Imagine getting that kind of talent for a mere $15K a year! $15K in 1974 roughly translates to ~$77K today. Not too shabby. Balling since Freshman year.
They used to say never put a picture on a US resume (common in some countries). But a picture is considered essential on LinkedIn to increase the search status. Go figure.
As little as 5 years ago I was being asked to do many skype interviews. For one such interview, I was out of town visiting my mother (who was fading away from Alzheimers). I wanted to present a professional appearance, and my step-father always wore white collared shirts to work. I borrowed one of his shirts, and ties, and while I was speaking to the interviewer, he made a comment about how he appreciated that I "dressed professionally" for the interview, even noted that he hadn't (he was in a t-shirt). He said that most people didn't dress up. I am quite certain that the skype style interview was used for the same reason as expecting a photograph attached to the resume back in the day. I.e. to screen for age, and other factors like ethnicity.
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.
To see if you'll fit in the cockpit and/or tank driver's seat. In the 1940's the military had just discovered that not all pilots were the same size.
> “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.”
He worked on planes, it may have been an important factor for fitting into some space, and working in remote desolate places with a small crew of other people. Basically, you could probably send this guy to a dry lake bed in the desert for testing for a couple weeks if you needed to, and he could hop in and out of a cockpit to do some work, or sit for hours in a truck with equipment inside it because he wasn't 6'8".
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
Thanks for posting, there is a huge life lesson in there for this audience. It is these lines:
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.
What’s really remarkable to me is that senior Livesay, the same age as my mother, took a Fortran course in 1968, two years AFTER I did, as a teenager, at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. So the same phenomenon of coding teenagers [possibly] outdoing experienced workers was going on 50 years ago.
I was 16 in 1986 when I started programming C. Replacing all the old fogeys with their Fortrans and Cobols and .. shudder .. A/PL .. This is not a new thing, this teenage thing.
Tomorrow I guide some teenage punk through the wasteland of mobile development. Undoubtedly he's gonna throw some new shit at me. Hah!
I'm baby-sitting Java devs as "senior" atm. They don't know much, but what little they know they're defending with fervor, like "REST", Spring crap, and rubbish pseudo-modularization using "microservices". Worst, taking random architecture astronaut blog posts as dogma, incapable of reflecting whether something makes sense for a given task ("SQL is too old-school and low-level (!)"). Makes you really think about what kind of graduates our universities churn out.
Young programmers are a pretty good market to market to. They have lots of money, they're smart, they want new shiny things to show off to the other programmers at all costs, and they're extremely vulnerable to perceived peer pressure and social proof.
I'm sorry, do you have a specific issue with REST or microservices? Like all things, they have their place and purpose. Simply throwing quotes around them and using the fact that a junior dev recommended them as evidence against them is pretty weak, especially here on HN.
I was a very early proponent of REST in the Danish Government, for about two years before Gartner announced SOAP was dead and made a co-worker nearly cry to me at lunch and I had to make him feel better instead of doing my well-deserved victory dance.
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 more the unscientific knowledge acquisition I'm having trouble with, and which I hoped academic education had eliminated. Like "best practice dictates every record must be exposed as REST resource" and the stupid "hermeneutical" discussion about REST semantics as if it were a revealed religion.
I think the root issue is that there is just simply too much to know and too little time to know it. Everything is completely reinvented every 3 years now it seems, so many of the successful young engineers I know tend to develop a herd mentality, just do what everyone else is doing. You don't need to understand it, just pick your favorite thought leaders, emulate them, and things will usually work out well enough.
I think it's OK not to know the best tools. There's a lot of things out there, a lot of the best ones take some time to learn, and bad ones can ride a marketting wave to stay popular for a good few years.
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.
Then better don't take a look at "Spring data" + crud apps build on top of it - as pointless a framework as it gets. Allows you to churn out a CRUD app within the time bounds of an "agile" sub task of a day or less, to then degenerate into a typical inefficient Spring magic trial-and-error project to fix for months to come.
Do you mean APL? I know there was PL/I. I was 14 in 1978 when I bought a used Commodore PET with tape drive built in. I had purchased a book on DEC assembly and read it before purchasing the PET, and of course it wasn't applicable, however, books back then were written to be able to learn by reading rather than copy/paste. BYTE magazine would list the programs for you to type in. Ah, nostalgia in the morning!
Course work tends to focus on the latest fads in languages. While the language chosen for a project definitely matters, in terms of engineers, I've found the languages known doesn't matter nearly so much as the ability to learn and evaluate languages. I'm far less interested in whether someone knows Scala than I am in if they know why Scala can be a good starting point for microservices.
Looks like his SSN is crossed out. I was cleaning out some junk in my house and found an old telephone directory from when I worked at a military contractor in the 80's. It had everyones SSN on it. Times have changed.
I don't think this should be voted down, the SSN was originally designed as a sort of username for tracking earnings, before anyone realized how important it would be to have a password.
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."
For a long time, the last 4 digits of a SSN were the only ones with any entropy. The first 5 were determined by when and where you were issued an SSN (usually at the hospital when you were born).
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.
That's true, also at this point a pretty substantial percentage of social security numbers have been leaked (perhaps all of them, not every hacking victim goes public).
I'm a third generation programmer and talking to my grandpa is more foreign than French. He talks punch cards and I tease him about Atwood's law and my ineptitude in all things mathematic
Looks like a simpler time. You just say what you did. No need to BS it up to sound like you are gods gift to programming. And once you get the job probably no logging every second of your time.
Umm, that time still exists. My resume is exactly like this, just says what I did and doesn't contain BS. IDK what you mean about "logging every second your time" but all government contractors require a daily timecard and did so in the 80s as well (according to my coworkers - I was a kid in the 80s). The reason being was so they know how much time to bill for!!
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.
You must be quite fortunate to have such excellent connections amongst the privileged elite, most people will never get past "the algorithm" if they don't stuff their resumes full of buzzwords to even get past some python script.
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.
Maybe in silicon valley startups, but not in most places. Honestly.
>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.
Silicone is the stuff of shower sealant and plastic surgery. Silicon is the thing embeded circuits are made of. FWIW. The idea of a silicone valley did make me smile though, thanks for that.
It'd be nice if there were tailored dictionaries you could use in your spell checkers. Like injecting the Doctor/Lawyer/Engineer dictionary so that you don't sit there fighting with your phone to get some acronym to properly post.
For what it's worth, my resume to this day is still this style. I'm around 40, been in various forms of IT since end of high school. My resume has never been more than a bullet point list of my skills, and my experience.
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).
My success rate is also quite high. After being at one company way too long, I started aiming for jobs over the past 10 years where I wasn’t completely qualified, focusing on learning over money - even though the salary bumps were nice.
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.
That's an interesting argument. I am just starting out as a fresh grad. I applied to three places and got into all three. I did pretty much the same things when trying to land up internships. Maybe, I should try being more ambitious.
Maybe, it really would require a lot of research to determine if one of the two purposed situations are correct.
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.
The thing that stuck out the most to me in the resume is that he went to university to learn programming languages. That wouldn't happen today. Today you'd either get a book and definitely work through some online materials. How do you proof competency this way? You'll have to point at projects you did and talk a little more about what you did. I'm pretty sure that the set of potentially required skills has exploded. Knowing the right language seems to have been mostly it back then, the rest was likely proprietary to the company. I don't that they had yet another Fortran framework be popular every year. You didn't also need to know the correct test framework, scripting language, several markup languages etc.
While simpler times are attractive, I'm glad we have so much choice.
I know that some of my friends from college went and did a 1-year CS masters program after their science degree. The curriculum was programming and basic CS fundamentals. I think this is pretty close to "going to university to learn programming languages" so I do think it still happens today. That said, I think the way of proving competency would still fall to projects because there are so many ways to take classes on programming these days that simply doing it doesn't mean you've learned anything.
Yes but higher signal to noise ratio back then and programming and computer science were not as much a commodity degree. Now there are so many people on the internet and playing chameleon ;)
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 do wonder if they higher fast and fire even faster approach isn't ultimately better for everyone than the silly whiteboard interviews many companies do nowadays. At least there was an exact match between the skills because of which you have the job and the skills you need on the job.
> I do wonder if they higher fast and fire even faster approach isn't ultimately better for everyone
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.
That's right. A whiteboard interview can be done without getting the interviewee up to date with the company's policies and tools, which might take longer than a couple hours.
My personal custom LaTeX template isn’t that different, but I defined all the sections and items as macros in a separate style so I can keep content and format apart.
Usually ShareLaTeX and a healthy amount of Googling! I also try to find a similar document I can work off of. In this case, I had already done similar column-business for my actual resume, which definitely helped.
> 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.
> though Kubernetes is a more legitimate sounding word
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?
Date of birth, either by request from employer or voluntarily given by employee, is not illegal. However, anyone with half a brain won't use it since that's just asking for a discrimination lawsuit since there is no more plausible deniability.
Yep this and I’ve been told by my Caucasian friends that they can’t tell the age of Black men if we are clean shaven and shave our hair off to cut the gray and re ending hairline. Most guess that I am at most in my early 30s - not my mid 40s.
I always go completely clean shaven with a bald head when I interview.
Yes. But you usually don't do that to trigger an aegism detector. Also, if you include previous work experiences (with dates obviously) one can still determine how old you are.
Nevertheless, once you go there in person for your interview, people will notice anyway.
I only include my last 10 years of experience and don’t include the year I graduated. Not only to reduce the chance of ageism, but my experience with Perl, VB6, MFC, DCOM, etc. is not relevant.
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)
Yellowing in paper is a combination of factors, primarily cellulose content, acidity, and exposure to light, heat, and air. Decent bond paper from the 1980s will generally look just fine if it's stored in a dry box. It has a low acidity and will normally have a higher dag content do will age more slowly.
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.
Looks like your Dad got exposure to IBM equipment and realised that being a programmer could be a good job. I did my undergrad in the early 80s and the Uni had a CDC which was old then. First assignment in Pascal was writing it on a punchcard machine and handing the card batch over. But it was more an exercise in showing new students what had come before. I was fortunate to get a job working in COBOL on HP, which led to Unix exposure. Working on an IBM 370 would mean you were unlikely to move out of COBOL/Fortan for a while.
Web dev is an awesome beast compared to what existed in the 80s but the complexity has gone up incredibly. Resultantly, there are a lot of people who struggle to understand the fundamentals. I met a supposed web dev the other day who didn’t know what TLS was, let alone the difference between 1.2 and 1.3
you expect a webdev to know the difference between the current standard and its next version thats hardly used at the moment?
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.
Is it reasonable to expect a web developer to be able to configure nginx? To be honest, I guess maybe not. But the person in question was maintaining how https slowed all sites down and so should be avoided. When I questioned him about the new handshaking in TLS1.3, it became evident he didn’t know what I was referring to.
Surely you just means "ops"? I thought the point of someone being "DevOps" is that the developer also does operations, so it would be their own problem. I wonder if that word has become so diluted that its lost the reason that it came into existence in the first place.
Devops is more about dev working with ops and vice versa instead of siloing. That necessarily ends with some crossover of skills but it isn’t strictly necessary
During my brief time in Devops, I have learned that; if you're getting paged at 3am from your server being DDoS-ed, you're not going to be very effective as a 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).
I expect web devs to know about a lot of security concepts, including SSL/TLS, subresource integrity, CORS, a variety of cross-site stuff, etc. It's simply dangerous if they don't.
knowing about security concepts is quite a bit different to knowing the details about the currently established standard of encryption and its next iteration.
We're talking about the changelog of TLS 1.2 to 1.3, not the general attack vectors for web applications.
Look at current secretary job postings in China. Even if you can't read Chinese, you can see the measurement requirements in centimeters. Yes, those measurements (bust, waist, hip).
CVs here in France not only typically include date of birth but also a photo and marital status, too. None of this is relevant to the job search but it's how things are done.
You're right, yet almost every CV I see has a photo and DOB, and a good majority have marital status. Adding the number of children is less common, though, but all of it is irrelevant to any job I would be hiring for.
I did some training with the Equality Commission in Northern Ireland some time ago, and since then I've been actively ignoring anything that people put on their CVs that is not relevant to the position they have applied for. Aside from experience and education background, additional information should be limited to facts that are relevant to the position (e.g. do you need a work permit, can you speak the same language as the rest of the team)
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.
Names are also a way to discriminate on ethnicity, although they're less reliable: names can be changed. Discrimination occurs in all manner of ways. In many countries, more casual labour the screening is done by a face-to-face interview. Clamping down on photos on a CV is not going to do much in those cases.
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.
The Europass CV lists various personal information for inclusion, including address, date of birth and sex. The online editor[0] mentions that all fields are optional, and some of them are listed under extra fields, but before the online editor, these templates circulated only as Word documents for about a decade, with less nuanced instructions.
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.
I'm recruiting for an outsourced team in Portugal at the moment. They include photos on their CVs. Date of birth and marital status is pretty much standard in Norway as well.
I think that's mainly because of past conventions, and the lack of sharing current expectations. A company could refer to Europass in their job description, and also offer a filled out CV template that only lists personal information that is expected to be shared. Or are CVs which do not include photos still considered incomplete or less desirable by the recruiters you know?
You should only put a picture if you have a very good looking photo specifically for this purpose and if you are in a customer facing role. Otherwise it's likely to do more harm than good.
In his position at Convair, he lists "Flight Test Engineer" as one of his roles. If he performed these duties onboard an aircraft (as many FTEs do), these could be relevant parameters. If he listed them for that reason, he probably just left them there in 1980 out of tradition (see docdeek's comment).
At one time it wasn't illegal to discriminate based on health/disability, so it made sense to advertise yourself as healthy, as you'd take less sick days, etc.
I am still trying to stick to that. No one has time to read multipages resumes (and I think most interviewers read the resume on the way to the interview room anyway).
I tried cutting my resume down to one page.
I received virtually no callbacks, because I'm perceived as inexperienced. (OR: the shotgun approach to getting past resume filters is a real thing).
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.
I think the better question is: how many employers can claim that these days?
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.
So they'd just lay off a lot of people, forcing out the older, more expensive workers.
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.
Similarly, my private company promoted some person horizontally, then they decided to merged two dpts together. My excellent performing one, and a larger poor performing one. We always exceeded our sales targets, they hadn't met theirs in 8+ years.
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.
This still happens today, living through it now. This company was raided/bought recently with an immediate 7% layoff. More to come as they push all acquired business units to jump from 18% margin to 40% margin in a year. Legacy black boxes no one understands now, let alone when they RIF another 2000 people.
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.
I think it's common in smaller cities, there just aren't many jobs to jump to. My city is population 360,000. I had my first job in 2001 and I know several devs that are still there. My wife, electrical engineer, not dev, has also only had one job.
I’m an EE with 22 years at the same employer; first job out of grad school. Working until 67, I could be there 42 years, and I probably will be. This is an old school defense contractor.
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.
My employer had a sharp bimodal age distribution. I was hired during the defense layoffs of the mid 90’s, and was smack in the middle of that distribution, until the wave of retirements.
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.
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.
My company employs modern website jockeys, but also traditional broadcast engineers.
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.
At my previous employer we had people on our team who were up there in age who were still programmers. One of them said he tried management but he's definitely not a people person and doesn't like playing politics. He said it went horribly for everyone involved, him, his team, his superiors. He went back to just coding and said he'll never do management again. Technically, he's very proficient, and as a new grad myself, he was always my go to for design questions.
That font looks lovely, what would be closest alternative I could find today to make my editor look that way? Not even sure what I should be googling for.
Poor guy was trying to find a new job at 54. He had been out of work for a month. Wasn't easy then, isn't easy now.
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.
Sometimes you enter that information on your CV to demonstrate responsibility and/or trust rather than because you're specifically after another equivalent position
I went to school at SUNY Binghamton which is right next door to Endicott, NY, founding place of IBM. Super interesting that your father was around there during the town's heyday.
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.
Funny story, I maintain a resume in html format. One time I applied for a job, and their online application rejected my upload, telling me it had to be PDF, Word, or plain text format. In frustration I copy/pasted the text content into an emacs buffer (not the html itself, just the text shown in the browser). I tried to pretty it up a bit, but forgot to save my final draft, so the interviewers got a resume that started like this:
;; 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.
What followed was extremely poorly formatted plain text.
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.
To me, it might be. But literally all the jobs I’ve applied to in the past half year have given me some variation of a comment along the lines of “but can you list ALL of the projects you’ve ever worked on and the languages/libraries you used for them?”
Mind you, that’s in Japan, so possibly not entirely representative.
Your dad was an American hero, please thank him for all his hard work on my behalf. Men like him built this country by living their lives and raising their children. I'm sure he wasn't perfect, but he's still your dad and I'm sorry you've moved him to a home. Please take good care of him.
Yes, that sounds strange to me - the family of two generations programmers can't afford in-house nursing? I can't imagine putting my parents or grannies in "home" unless I am really poor.
I realize there's no mechanism in the text box that prevents people from posting to HN like this, but can you please restrain yourself? What a horrible position you put the other person in, to have to defend their most intimate family situation in public or else leave a gossipy slur like this unanswered.
I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but that's the form it congeals into once you post it. Users need to do better than this here.
I am pretty sure my siblings may not appreciate my discussing our business in public, but just to be clear. My sister and I have been living in his house for the past six months in order to care for him. It had become increasingly difficult to feed or move him because of his dementia and things like compression fractures in his back. After I was unable to get him out of bed last week we decided we were no longer qualified or able to do it. The place he is in now has a lot of experience and it seems like they do not have difficulties. Also there is a bit of a community there which is good.
There is not enough money left over of my dad's to pay for two experienced people or actual nurses to be here for the amount of time needed and pay the mortgage at the same time. A few of his children have dedicated quite a lot of time or money, but for those helping and for others, money is usually already allocated to their own families.
I'm really sorry that part of this thread turned into a thoughtless public prodding of your family situation. It pains me to see HN being used that way, especially when your intention was obviously to honor your father. It was a fine submission, and I hope the nastier end of the responses won't spoil how you feel about HN.
We don't know the whole story... We're gonna assume he is a great person based on his resume in the 80s? My parents are huge assholes and abused me my whole childhood. I'd lock them up if I could.
For some reasons it looks so catchy to me. I really like the synergy of minimalism and old retro things like this one. I may used it a template for mine!
Typewriters let you backspace _over_ what was already there, so we just typed the word, used backspace to get the beginning of the word, and then typed underscores until the word was effectively underlined.
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.
Wow, a resume from an era when programming was a respectable job, instead of the circus of group interviews, take home tests, whiteboard tests, and non-stop emails from this new class of people whose sole job it is to find programmers jobs. Before hiring managers asked you if you’re familiar with agile, SOA, TDD, microservices, BDD, Domain Driven Design and that JavaScript framework that came out last year.
> Before hiring managers asked you if you’re familiar with agile, SOA, TDD, microservices, BDD, Domain Driven Design and that JavaScript framework that came out last year.
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..
>Thats why some companies stop hiring ppl after 30s
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.
"Thats why some companies stop hiring ppl after 30s because they are simply not able (statistically) to keep with all of it. "
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.
If tech was just look at a resume and decide to hire or not people would hate that even more than modern complicated forms of interviewing.
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 hate the state of tech interviews with a passion but I have to reluctantly agree.
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.
Good people are all hired. So you are looking through a pool of people that couldn’t get hired in the hottest market ever. I would pause. Find someone whose work you really appreciate and hyper focus on their network and poach. Stop using recruiters or spam networks and put in the actual time.
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.
There are three parts to this problem. First is that you need to be able to attract/find good people. The second is that you need to be able to find the right cues in the resume (or otherwise make a determination who to interview, e.g. screens, references/recommendations). The third is you need to actually be able to tell good people apart from the others (and have a realistic definition of good).
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.
Yeah; well, you can distinguish me from the poseurs, by asking for my professional references. Call them. They will convey the authenticity of my 25 year work history.
Or don't, and run my resume through a buzzword search program, instead. Yeah. That will work. Good luck with that.
In my experience, bachelor's in CS counts more than master's in CS, which in turn of course counts more than bootcamp. It's just time spent in front of a computer.
I hope your pay and total comp is actually competitive, in which case you're grousing over something you could fix in a jiffy.
>In my experience, bachelor's in CS counts more than master's in CS
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.
>But they don't have as much experience programming?
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.
Time in front of a computer. Many master's programs are actually less rigorous, too. The filtering done for the better colleges is worse: Stanford and CMU, in particular, are incredibly easier to get into for a master's than a bachelor's.
As an engineer involved in the hiring process at two different companies, it's rather depressing how many people outright lie on their resume about what they know or what experience they have.
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...
There are companies that will check a resume for employment and education details. You also can and should do reference checks. In my experience outright lying is rare, there's definitely some embellishment. The person who sent in the MS word doc was a CS/Engineering graduate with significant experience in respectable companies? Hard to believe.
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.
> The person who sent in the MS word doc was a CS/Engineering graduate with significant experience in respectable companies? Hard to believe.
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.
Companies who treat potential candidates unfairly eventually tarnish their reputation. You don't design your process for the single outlier crazy person and then treat everyone like they are potentially crazy or liars. You treat everyone with respect, that's how you build a reputation. Respect includes respect for their time amongst other aspects.
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.
Firing a bad hire can be just as or more expensive than hiring them in the first place.
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.
To be honest, I would treat them as a wishlist. If you've got a solid handle on at least some of the requirements, it literally won't hurt to apply.
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.
Also, in this case "just" probably refers to time only (as in very recently; in the immediate past), and not the more colloquial usage in the sense of "just put it over there". (English is hard.)
I don't think you should have been downvoted for this comment. People are taking this as criticism of the son when that's not necessarily the case. No one wants to end up in an old folks home.
The stereotype of a retirement home as necessarily "confinement" is wrong; e.g. my aunt lives in one, and she goes out most days to meet her friends at the plaza or coffeeshop. And for people without mobility, they are confined in any case.
Personally, after having seen quite a few for family reasons, there are a few I wouldn't mind living in.
Put in a home? Why wouldn't you want to spend all the last time on this mortal earth with your parents, and holding their hands as they leave this lifetime? Repayment of when you yourself was born into this one?
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!
It's a breach of HN's civility rules to disparage other people's intimate personal situations. There's always a great deal we don't know, and what lies underneath is often pretty tragic.
Elderly care homes have professional medical and nursing staff on site, so far better care can be provided than most families can offer in their homes.
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.
Yes, you don't. Lifes and circumstances vary as much as the oceans and asking assuming questions on emotional topics without at least first trying to get near the person having to make the decision seems really pointless.
>Why wouldn't you want to spend all the last time on this mortal earth with your parents, and holding their hands as they leave this lifetime?
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.
Why would I? I would hope that any decent and truly moral person would not bring another human into existence as long as there is the slightest chance of suffering, no matter how small it is.
Yes, clearly this is a misuse of a platform that offers GitHub pages with custom domain support so that users can host their own static sites or blogs.
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?
Still begs the question how come it's more attractive to put something onto GH pages rather than creating a simple web site from scratch. Yes I know - buying a domain, hosting, SSL, HTML/CSS etc is considerably more effort even for a static site. But should we be satisfied with the de-facto monopolization of the Web and its attention economy and tracking business model? Part of the problem seems also that folks merely strive for "me too" good-enough web presences and experiences on platforms.
Your comment reminds me to the classic when Dropbox was first shown here
>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
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.
I have sympathy for you for being downvoted. I have raised this issue a couple of times before for using github for things other than hosting source code (hosting online courses, using github issues as calendar or comment system for blogs). No downvotes but people laughed it off like I was suggesting something crazy.
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.
I am also sympathetic to the person you are replying to. All that happened was someone asking a question, then people being sarcastic and unkind, and using the downvote button to express their dislike for such horrible questions.
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?
I'm guessing GP is uncomfortable with very few web sites having all the content. Does your CV or any content on GH other than source code matter? Does a project that doesn't even have a real web site matter? Like really?
Plus, GitHub is a Microsoft property now, and I believe that on some fundamental level, Microsoft is happy to be in command of social web properties that still see avid use, and aren’t being stifled by Microsoft’s otherwise domineering reputation.
I wanted to come back and apologize for the tone of my earlier comment. I had read more sarcasm / contempt in your original post that I don't see upon subsequent reads.
Upvoting because as others have pointed out this is a valid question.
So if that's the resume then why does that letter have a line at the end asking that the reader of the letter read the enclosed resume? Looks more like a cover letter to me given the way it's addressed and signed. Very neat indeed, but op may yet come across another document.
"May I ask that you read the enclosed, resume. Thank you very much."
Wow, I wish I was an engineer in that era. 25 years at the same company, 3 languages over 13 years. And when he needed to learn a new language he actually went to school for it.
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.
I got fairly proficient in RoR some years ago. In that I understood most of the magic and was thinking on what is the best ways to design the program for readability / maintainability.
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.
I promise you. If you ignore the churn and learn the fundamentals, your skills will have an order of magnitude longer shelf life.
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".
IMO You don't need to specialize on a language or famework, but a problem domain, either technical (eg distributed systems, machine learning) or not (manufacturing, video, etc).
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)
A fair point. At this point picking up front-end technologies is a thing I can fairly easily to. React was definitely hard because it was a different paradigm, but once I got over the hump, I'm solving the same problems as before.
I'm a games engine programmer. I pretty much only know VS and C++, plus some bits of C# for an occasional tool. I feel like what you described is only applicable to Web programmers - my coworker has been at the same company for the last 26 years and he only knows assembly, C and C++, and uses windows batch for scripting. No need to learn anything else - that's enough to build the latest AAA games.
Ha, you're right about web engineering. But how available are jobs like yours? Because the guys that were doing them 20 years ago are still doing them today.
That sounds great.
JCL, 360/370 ASM, COBOL.
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.
I have a former classmate that was still doing mainframe development as a military contractor using I believe COBOL but I know she was doing something with JCL up to two years ago.
spoiler alert, COBOL and Assembly are used for major financial systems that you use every day (no snark intended). I live in a city that headquarters one of the largest credit card processing companies around (they use Assembler), a large insurance company (they use COBOL), and a too-big-to-fail bank (they use COBOL).
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.
>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.
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.
What kinds of companies do you work for and what kind of teams?
Basically full stack web developer, probably a lot of these issues are particularly bad in this field
>Wow, I wish I was an engineer in that era. 25 years at the same company, 3 languages over 13 years.
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".
Google/Microsoft/amazon/facebook/other big top companies seem to only have people work in group settings, but the problem is they pay a metric shitload of money. I've worked for several of them on this list. Work at one of those for 10 years and you might be fixed for life. I also used to work at Microsoft back when we all had private offices but I was lucky enough to be there when the stock was steadily appreciating.
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?
I wish I knew. Looking at this user's post history (only two pages) it appears to be defence-aviation related.
Amazon doesn’t pay much.
i thought including the stock amazon pays well these days, better than microsoft. that's what my friend working there says.
> i thought including the stock amazon pays well these days
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."
>Stock is not pay
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.
Amazon stock is pay. It has a monetary value that it is easily convertible into. If your point is that RSUs have vesting schedules, annual salary does too, in the form of paychecks.
What is the salary growth like? My experience is that the only way to get more than a 3% raise per year is to job hop. Salary compression and inversion are real.
3%! Luxury! Best I've pulled off for sitting around is 0.9%pa.
"I have an offer from OtherCo. But I'd like to stay here. Could you match it?"
"We don't negotiate salaries."
I worked at a competitor to GD for about 7 years. Had a great career trajectory until a managerial fuckup cost the company one third of the revenue and they had to ax 50 percent of the staff. Be careful, those big, stable companies can tend to lull you into thinking things can't go left quickly. They most assuredly can, and do.
I applaud that your company promotes from within and encourages professional development. I think that is more likely to happen when a company can rely on most employees sticking around for a while, which they probably will because of the opportunities provided inside the company. A virtuous cycle.
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.
Contemporary programmer: spends a whole weekend tweaking CSS parameters, asking web forums for LaTeX templates, finding a cool fresh font pairing on Google Fonts.
1980s programmer: sits down at the typewriter and bangs out a fixed width table, finishes with a signature.
Real 1980s programmer: sits down at IBM 3278 mainframe terminal, edits resume into text file containing DCF/Script markup. Prints mailing copies on IBM 3800 laser printer using typewriter font, hoping operations staff running printer doesn't notice (unlikely considering speed printer runs at).
(also 1970s programmer, 1990s programmer, 2000s programmer, 2010s programmer)After getting into the guts of unix's typesetting system I decided to use it for my resume. I customized the macros used for online help called man pages. Man pages have a reference across the top which cite the command and section so man itself reads man(1).
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.
I can see why a real programmer might have favored the typewriter: computer time and printer ink (esp. laser) were expensive and normally reserved for business-related jobs.
just in case you don't know, that resumee can't be accessed without a linkedin account.
it generally doesn't matter, because most HR employees probably have one where you're from.
Around that time I think I did mine as a text file using ed on a PDP 11.
You worked at Andesa, weird .. I work there now
This is not weird. The fact you both have worked for the same place makes it more likely that you end up in the same online community as well, not less likely.
Ha! The trashcan is usually full of crumpled-up failed attempts.
But the smell of typewriter ink. Man, I miss it.
But it's more than the romance of the ink that is missed. One has lost the visual impact of all discards with the use of the virtual trashcan. The psychology of seeing or the stark visual impact of a trashcan filled to the brim with all the imperfect and therefore discarded attempts of one's creative effort is lost - almost forever. These were the metrics of effort now untenable in the virtual trashcan. Gone. Who knows how one's next attempt would have shaped out or re-imagined had one seen even a few of the uncountable crumpled up balls of paper strewn across the room? Maybe a signal to give up? Maybe a sign to believe that one hasn't reached even half way to acceptable quality?
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.
I really have no idea what you're talking about. I absolutely hated paper. The inconvenience of wanting to add some content higher up the page and having to redo the whole page to achieve that was infuriating to me. I for one am quite pleased that I no longer have as many violent urges when I'm composing text.
True. However the inflexibility of the physical media (pen/typewriter+paper) forced people to think and plan before they acted. These days, not so much, and I can see the difference in approach when my kids are writing essays - back in the day we were taught to come up with a little plan, toc, etc before getting down to the details. Now my kids just spit it out without structure, then add bits an pieces here and there and call it done. Maybe they are taught the structural approach in scool, but the tools aren't helping.
This is like complaining about interactive terminals because programmers no longer have to think so hard about their code before writing it out to punch cards....
I think you mean writing it out on coding sheets before sending it to the "girls" to be punched onto card's
That was so early 1960s. In the mid 60s to the mid 70s, you had to mostly do it yourself unless you were really senior and still programming.
Well in the early 80's I entered fortran code that an Engineer had written onto coding sheets for our two phase flow simulator
And I suspect that this went on longer in traditional big iron shops.
I'm old enough to have typed papers in my youth. It sucked because you had to write it twice, one draft by hand, then type it up. When you were drafting you had to physically cut and paste, with scissors and tape. It was annoying and didn't improve workflow at all.
It's called agile essay writing.
There is Agile Technical Writing.
https://www.drexplain.com/press/articles/agile_technical_wri...
Typewriters weren't the right tool for composing text, although there were some successful people that made it work, especially at offices or newspapers.
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.
And more than just for academic papers: TeX was hand written in full on yellow legal pad, and then typed into the full-screen editor.
I have this again today with 3D printing. It’s such a flawed process, and my real trash bin fills up quickly with failed prints.
Hopefully you get to enjoy VR/AR at some point. You could build a widget that connects your git repos to visualizations of filing cabinets, and your Recycle Bin to a visualization of your room being full to the ceiling with crumpled documents.
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.
You should write. This was amazing to read. Do you have a blog?
Hipster wankfest
I still miss the IBM selectric typewriter :-)
I enjoyed learning how they added a rotating ball to that typewriter and hooked it up to some kind of mainframe for the first APL implementation I think.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_DTpQ4Kk2wA
I miss the lined green dot matrix printouts. Best way to read code. But maybe I'm just romanticising.
And the 1980s one is more pleasurable to read. No cruft. Just the facts.
1980s programmer bangs it out on a legal pad and hands it off to a friendly face in the typing pool!
My first job out of college (1991), my mom asked me if I got a secretary. Errr, no. But OP's father probably had a secretary assigned to the programming group.
Looks like he had ‘sd’ sit down at the typewriter
Is your dad for hire? We have this legacy toolchain in cobol and IBM assembler running on a bunch of mainframes and are just not ready to migrate to our brand new Itanium servers we have ordered a while ago. Our engineers are busy porting all the logic but need help understanding the inner workings of the old setup. While they're at it, we have this small list of features we'd like to have added to the old version...
(okok, it's Saturday so can we have this as a top level reply?)
He has severe dementia unfortunately. I just thought it might be interesting to people to see what technologies were in use at those times. My dad loves to play catch with his stuffed doggie (or whatever you will throw to him) but activities more complicated than that are not feasible.
> I just thought it might be interesting to people to see what technologies were in use at those times.
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.
Why were the IT people unaware of it? Was it "wired in" in an unusual way?
Good question. I can only guess from what else he told about his work that it was simply one of these cases where the younger staff was just not that well versed with the old systems and mostly just managed to maintain them. Most of the stuff that was done in the early days of computing there wasn't formally documented as it was just a bunch of nerds who knew each other very well.* Apparently, when the company got rid of the big printers directly attached to the mainframes they just forgot about that one job, or maybe just removed the print job but not the one that generated it. By the time that happened almost everyone from the old team was already busy with other stuff, much higher up the command chain.
* 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...
Lol. I guess this qualifies as "unethical life hack" ?
"Introduce some bugs in the mainframe code so you can earn a reward 30 years later fixing them"
If people didn't realize, your dad is 92! I wish my dad lives that long, I love to take care of him when he's vulnerable. Just to return the favor a little bit.
Better take care of him now, both of you will appreciate it much better. Dementia is not fun at all, for any of the involved parties.
That's sad.
> He has severe dementia unfortunately.
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?
His memory was going down hill for many years, even before he retired.
Wonder how much of his COBOL is still running today?
Oh my. Where I am now we just upgraded the mainframe to a Z14, this machine and software running is not even the current OS for the platform. For my twenty plus years there have been projects afoot to replace it but nothing ever pans out. This machine works in concert with a very large iSeries that for the last ten years has been rumored to be on the table to replace. Then throw in all the AIX/Oracle machines and you get the picture.
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.
if not a joke, I know a retired cobol expert (not sure about ibm asm) that would be interested. reply here with some means of contact and I will connect you.
I doubt it. The post explicitly states that s/he had to put him in a nursing home which means chances are that he cannot live comfortably independently.
The person you're replying to was joking.
hah, that went right over my head.
It will be very cool if he could though, as I do believe he will much rather work on something he loves doing and is good at rather than being committed to a nursing home, besides it will definitely be a sight to see, a 92 year old man hacking away on a system, debugging, writing code, and joining up in meetings, He was literally alive when computing was not a thing or worth much and he got to not just see it grow but he helped make it grow, I will definitely like to work with someone like that.
Is this a troll?
I don't think this is a troll. A lot of young people honestly don't understand many of the realities of aging.
No I'm not a troll and yeah true to the other posters words I'm 24 and apologize for my ignorance to the reality of ageing.
Is having the ability to live independently really a prerequisite? You wouldn't know it based on the standard bigcorp benefits package.
That would be super impressive if he was still programming at the age of 92. The resume does say "Health: Excellent", but still.
you must be kidding because of the itanium. uh, right?
If I lived through 3 wars and had a strong career alignment with major defense contractors, I suppose I'd be inclined to disclose health and height out of habit...but was this generally expected on a resume back in the 80s?
I've never seen health and height before, so that might be specific to military folks, but I know that in that era and earlier it was very common to include personal details such as your marital status, number of children, even your religion and what church you attended. I saw something recently about how in the 1950s/1960s, if a man were interviewing for an executive position with a company, part of the hiring process would be to interview his wife, often over a dinner that she hosted. There were classes available for women to teach them how to speak and act in those situations, so that their husbands had a better chance at the job.
All this to say: the idea that resumes and interviews would stay out of your personal life is a rather modern concept.
And I can imagine that must have put some kind of unnatural pressure on which women the men decided to pursue.
Here's the resume of Bill Gates from 1973 (lists height and weight) -
https://i.imgur.com/btFE99N.jpg
And Paul Allen's -
https://i.imgur.com/0pDSVBS.jpg
Bill Gates, first year at harvard, course taken: operating systems structure, database management, compiler construction and computer graphics.
I only took 1 of those in my entire undergrad career...
Great find! Imagine getting that kind of talent for a mere $15K a year! $15K in 1974 roughly translates to ~$77K today. Not too shabby. Balling since Freshman year.
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...
Goddamn, that phone number's old enough to have letters in the exchange.
Height, weight, age and current salary. Yikes.
They used to say never put a picture on a US resume (common in some countries). But a picture is considered essential on LinkedIn to increase the search status. Go figure.
Used to? It's still completely unacceptable to put a photo on a resume in the US.
As little as 5 years ago I was being asked to do many skype interviews. For one such interview, I was out of town visiting my mother (who was fading away from Alzheimers). I wanted to present a professional appearance, and my step-father always wore white collared shirts to work. I borrowed one of his shirts, and ties, and while I was speaking to the interviewer, he made a comment about how he appreciated that I "dressed professionally" for the interview, even noted that he hadn't (he was in a t-shirt). He said that most people didn't dress up. I am quite certain that the skype style interview was used for the same reason as expecting a photograph attached to the resume back in the day. I.e. to screen for age, and other factors like ethnicity.
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.
The LinkedIn profile is that photo now.
A LinkedIn profile is not the same thing as a resume.
I don't look at someone's LinkedIn profile before interviewing them...
I do. It's a good way to set expectations, see if they've gotten any interesting recommendations from coworkers, and see if we know anyone in common.
Many people treat it that way, though. Personally I don't care for LinkedIn, but apparently that's strange behavior.
Recruiters do.
This is/was distinct to military contractors & personnel.
Not typical of the 80s
AFAIR at least
Why military contractors?
To see if you'll fit in the cockpit and/or tank driver's seat. In the 1940's the military had just discovered that not all pilots were the same size.
> “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-...
Maybe to verify clearances based on the name and dob?
He worked on planes, it may have been an important factor for fitting into some space, and working in remote desolate places with a small crew of other people. Basically, you could probably send this guy to a dry lake bed in the desert for testing for a couple weeks if you needed to, and he could hop in and out of a cockpit to do some work, or sit for hours in a truck with equipment inside it because he wasn't 6'8".
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
If you have an active security clearance you're long since accustomed to giving out personal/private information to government bureaucracy (OPM, etc).
Thanks for posting, there is a huge life lesson in there for this audience. It is these lines:
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.
> huge life lesson in there for this audience...is always be learning
This applies only to countries like US, where higher education is actually good.
In rest of the world the university tutor lacks skills.
What’s really remarkable to me is that senior Livesay, the same age as my mother, took a Fortran course in 1968, two years AFTER I did, as a teenager, at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. So the same phenomenon of coding teenagers [possibly] outdoing experienced workers was going on 50 years ago.
I think more reasonably the same phenomenon of experienced workers needing to update their skills in order to stay relevant was going on 50 years ago.
I was 16 in 1986 when I started programming C. Replacing all the old fogeys with their Fortrans and Cobols and .. shudder .. A/PL .. This is not a new thing, this teenage thing.
Tomorrow I guide some teenage punk through the wasteland of mobile development. Undoubtedly he's gonna throw some new shit at me. Hah!
I'm baby-sitting Java devs as "senior" atm. They don't know much, but what little they know they're defending with fervor, like "REST", Spring crap, and rubbish pseudo-modularization using "microservices". Worst, taking random architecture astronaut blog posts as dogma, incapable of reflecting whether something makes sense for a given task ("SQL is too old-school and low-level (!)"). Makes you really think about what kind of graduates our universities churn out.
Young programmers are a pretty good market to market to. They have lots of money, they're smart, they want new shiny things to show off to the other programmers at all costs, and they're extremely vulnerable to perceived peer pressure and social proof.
I'm sorry, do you have a specific issue with REST or microservices? Like all things, they have their place and purpose. Simply throwing quotes around them and using the fact that a junior dev recommended them as evidence against them is pretty weak, especially here on HN.
I was a very early proponent of REST in the Danish Government, for about two years before Gartner announced SOAP was dead and made a co-worker nearly cry to me at lunch and I had to make him feel better instead of doing my well-deserved victory dance.
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 more the unscientific knowledge acquisition I'm having trouble with, and which I hoped academic education had eliminated. Like "best practice dictates every record must be exposed as REST resource" and the stupid "hermeneutical" discussion about REST semantics as if it were a revealed religion.
I think the root issue is that there is just simply too much to know and too little time to know it. Everything is completely reinvented every 3 years now it seems, so many of the successful young engineers I know tend to develop a herd mentality, just do what everyone else is doing. You don't need to understand it, just pick your favorite thought leaders, emulate them, and things will usually work out well enough.
I think it's OK not to know the best tools. There's a lot of things out there, a lot of the best ones take some time to learn, and bad ones can ride a marketting wave to stay popular for a good few years.
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.
No phrase terrifies me so much as 'Entity Framework'.
Then better don't take a look at "Spring data" + crud apps build on top of it - as pointless a framework as it gets. Allows you to churn out a CRUD app within the time bounds of an "agile" sub task of a day or less, to then degenerate into a typical inefficient Spring magic trial-and-error project to fix for months to come.
Do you mean APL? I know there was PL/I. I was 14 in 1978 when I bought a used Commodore PET with tape drive built in. I had purchased a book on DEC assembly and read it before purchasing the PET, and of course it wasn't applicable, however, books back then were written to be able to learn by reading rather than copy/paste. BYTE magazine would list the programs for you to type in. Ah, nostalgia in the morning!
I did indeed mean APL ..
http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-apl-programming-lan...
Course work tends to focus on the latest fads in languages. While the language chosen for a project definitely matters, in terms of engineers, I've found the languages known doesn't matter nearly so much as the ability to learn and evaluate languages. I'm far less interested in whether someone knows Scala than I am in if they know why Scala can be a good starting point for microservices.
Looks like his SSN is crossed out. I was cleaning out some junk in my house and found an old telephone directory from when I worked at a military contractor in the 80's. It had everyones SSN on it. Times have changed.
In the meantime a whole bunch of organizations started accepting 'usernames' as passwords
I don't think this should be voted down, the SSN was originally designed as a sort of username for tracking earnings, before anyone realized how important it would be to have a password.
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...
For a long time, the last 4 digits of a SSN were the only ones with any entropy. The first 5 were determined by when and where you were issued an SSN (usually at the hospital when you were born).
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.
That's true, also at this point a pretty substantial percentage of social security numbers have been leaked (perhaps all of them, not every hacking victim goes public).
My college posted test grades by ssn!
These days, they don't even post grades.
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.
My college ID was also SSN. IIRC My husband's first military ID had his SSN on it too.
My first driver’s license had my SSN on it as my DL#.
Mine too (Oklahoma, 1998)
My college ID card was the SSN. They did not have instant online credit like today.
I'm a third generation programmer and talking to my grandpa is more foreign than French. He talks punch cards and I tease him about Atwood's law and my ineptitude in all things mathematic
Looks like a simpler time. You just say what you did. No need to BS it up to sound like you are gods gift to programming. And once you get the job probably no logging every second of your time.
Umm, that time still exists. My resume is exactly like this, just says what I did and doesn't contain BS. IDK what you mean about "logging every second your time" but all government contractors require a daily timecard and did so in the 80s as well (according to my coworkers - I was a kid in the 80s). The reason being was so they know how much time to bill for!!
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.
You must be quite fortunate to have such excellent connections amongst the privileged elite, most people will never get past "the algorithm" if they don't stuff their resumes full of buzzwords to even get past some python script.
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.
Maybe in silicon valley startups, but not in most places. Honestly.
>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.
Silicone is the stuff of shower sealant and plastic surgery. Silicon is the thing embeded circuits are made of. FWIW. The idea of a silicone valley did make me smile though, thanks for that.
I rely on auto correct/auto fill too much... On a related note... I hate that every time I put ID it gets "corrected" to "I'd."
It'd be nice if there were tailored dictionaries you could use in your spell checkers. Like injecting the Doctor/Lawyer/Engineer dictionary so that you don't sit there fighting with your phone to get some acronym to properly post.
You might not know but that term is used (slightly jokingly) by the porn industry
For what it's worth, my resume to this day is still this style. I'm around 40, been in various forms of IT since end of high school. My resume has never been more than a bullet point list of my skills, and my experience.
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).
If you get every job you ask for maybe you are aiming too low.
My success rate is also quite high. After being at one company way too long, I started aiming for jobs over the past 10 years where I wasn’t completely qualified, focusing on learning over money - even though the salary bumps were nice.
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.
That's an interesting argument. I am just starting out as a fresh grad. I applied to three places and got into all three. I did pretty much the same things when trying to land up internships. Maybe, I should try being more ambitious.
Meanwhile I applied to 40-50, did interviews for 20 odd companies, 8 onsites and got only 2 offers.
It doesn’t matter as long as the company you got into was good lol (it wasn’t like that for me)
Or maybe he or she just chooses well and is that good.
Maybe, it really would require a lot of research to determine if one of the two purposed situations are correct.
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.
> asked why
How do you get a response?
The thing that stuck out the most to me in the resume is that he went to university to learn programming languages. That wouldn't happen today. Today you'd either get a book and definitely work through some online materials. How do you proof competency this way? You'll have to point at projects you did and talk a little more about what you did. I'm pretty sure that the set of potentially required skills has exploded. Knowing the right language seems to have been mostly it back then, the rest was likely proprietary to the company. I don't that they had yet another Fortran framework be popular every year. You didn't also need to know the correct test framework, scripting language, several markup languages etc.
While simpler times are attractive, I'm glad we have so much choice.
It does happen today:
https://extension.ucsd.edu/courses-and-programs/java-program...
https://www.pce.uw.edu/certificates/c-plus-plus-programming
https://www.uclaextension.edu/digital-technology/programming...
https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academics/professional-gra...
I know that some of my friends from college went and did a 1-year CS masters program after their science degree. The curriculum was programming and basic CS fundamentals. I think this is pretty close to "going to university to learn programming languages" so I do think it still happens today. That said, I think the way of proving competency would still fall to projects because there are so many ways to take classes on programming these days that simply doing it doesn't mean you've learned anything.
There was way less competition, though
Yes but higher signal to noise ratio back then and programming and computer science were not as much a commodity degree. Now there are so many people on the internet and playing chameleon ;)
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 do wonder if they higher fast and fire even faster approach isn't ultimately better for everyone than the silly whiteboard interviews many companies do nowadays. At least there was an exact match between the skills because of which you have the job and the skills you need on the job.
> I do wonder if they higher fast and fire even faster approach isn't ultimately better for everyone
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.
Hiring and firing come at a nonzero cost, just like whiteboard interviews.
If ten people apply for a position and their resumes all look good the company needs some way to determine who to hire.
That's right. A whiteboard interview can be done without getting the interviewee up to date with the company's policies and tools, which might take longer than a couple hours.
If anyone's interested, I made this resume in LaTeX. I might have to try this out as my next resume template!
https://www.sharelatex.com/read/cqscsqsqmskm
My personal custom LaTeX template isn’t that different, but I defined all the sections and items as macros in a separate style so I can keep content and format apart.
Beautifully done! What do you use for writing in LaTeX, if I may ask?
Usually ShareLaTeX and a healthy amount of Googling! I also try to find a similar document I can work off of. In this case, I had already done similar column-business for my actual resume, which definitely helped.
hilariously: the site won't load with javascript disabled.
"CDC Cyber" made me laugh. Marketing seemed to be on point
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.
COMPASS. Odd things like 60 bit words and 6 bit characters.
I remember that.
"Still in all, every night we does the tell, so that we 'member who we was and where we came from..."
DOB on your resume isn't illegal, it's just illegal for the company to discriminate based on it.
> DOBs are illegal
And yet recruiters frequently request them up top on resumes.
Not in the USA.
recruiters where?
Germany. Photos and birthdays are often on resumes. They're not required (or really even legal to require) but they're so common that it's expected.
In Europe, anyway.
Ah, yeah, this is an American resume though (it's illegal in Canada too fwiw).
Really?
It's quite common in Europe and Asia
Ya, along with a picture and your gender in Asia.
Same in Europe.
pls send n00dz
DOB was required on my international CV for Southeast Asia and Europe up until I last needed one in 2009.
I didn't realise the word "cyber" had been around that long... As much as I (have to) use the word, I didn't know it's background.
Its etymology, as per wikipedia
> 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.
> though Kubernetes is a more legitimate sounding word
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?
And cognate to "govern".
1948, Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and communication in the animal and the machine.
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...
date of birth is illegal? Probably one of the more irrelevant things, as it is easily deductible from the rest of the entries.
Date of birth, either by request from employer or voluntarily given by employee, is not illegal. However, anyone with half a brain won't use it since that's just asking for a discrimination lawsuit since there is no more plausible deniability.
Alas, it is trivial for employers to guess a candidate's age with resonable accuracy, as most people have their education timeline in their resume.
I'd think most people who are worried about age discrimination would drop their matriculation year from their resume.
Yep this and I’ve been told by my Caucasian friends that they can’t tell the age of Black men if we are clean shaven and shave our hair off to cut the gray and re ending hairline. Most guess that I am at most in my early 30s - not my mid 40s.
I always go completely clean shaven with a bald head when I interview.
Not always. Folks can obtain a degree later in life to throw off the ageism detector.
Yes. But you usually don't do that to trigger an aegism detector. Also, if you include previous work experiences (with dates obviously) one can still determine how old you are.
Nevertheless, once you go there in person for your interview, people will notice anyway.
I only include my last 10 years of experience and don’t include the year I graduated. Not only to reduce the chance of ageism, but my experience with Perl, VB6, MFC, DCOM, etc. is not relevant.
If applying in a market with rampant ageism why not just leave specific dates off altogether. Just list degrees received and durations of employment.
oh yeah and how do you make up for the years of experience then? fake jobs entries?
I'm 36. If I get a degree in a new field and work 15 years, I'll be 55, but my resume will say I have a Bachelor's degree with 15 years of experience.
I picked up my BCE at 36. Of course now that I am 58, even 44 is getting to the outer edge for those who would discriminate.
Or just don’t include more than a year or two of job history prior to the degree.
Imagine his career lasts just as long, he just starts at his 40s
Requesting Years of experience can also be considered discrimination
FFS, It's not illegal discrimination.
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)
Out of my own personal curiosity. How does the protection for people over 40 work?
in which world? because every job posting I have ever seen requires years of doing x or y.
Leave the date off your degree. Leave out experience prior to date X, or leave dates off ancient history experience entries.
Or use a “functional” style resume.
It is a fig leaf intended to discourage age discrimination.
Does the paper have any watermark?
I'd like to know the brand. Almost 40 years old and not yellowed - that's amazing.
Yellowing in paper is a combination of factors, primarily cellulose content, acidity, and exposure to light, heat, and air. Decent bond paper from the 1980s will generally look just fine if it's stored in a dry box. It has a low acidity and will normally have a higher dag content do will age more slowly.
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.
"higher rag (cotton) content", in case anyone is wondering what "dag" is.
Thanks -- didn't spot that typo.
Looks like your Dad got exposure to IBM equipment and realised that being a programmer could be a good job. I did my undergrad in the early 80s and the Uni had a CDC which was old then. First assignment in Pascal was writing it on a punchcard machine and handing the card batch over. But it was more an exercise in showing new students what had come before. I was fortunate to get a job working in COBOL on HP, which led to Unix exposure. Working on an IBM 370 would mean you were unlikely to move out of COBOL/Fortan for a while. Web dev is an awesome beast compared to what existed in the 80s but the complexity has gone up incredibly. Resultantly, there are a lot of people who struggle to understand the fundamentals. I met a supposed web dev the other day who didn’t know what TLS was, let alone the difference between 1.2 and 1.3
you expect a webdev to know the difference between the current standard and its next version thats hardly used at the moment?
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.
Is it reasonable to expect a web developer to be able to configure nginx? To be honest, I guess maybe not. But the person in question was maintaining how https slowed all sites down and so should be avoided. When I questioned him about the new handshaking in TLS1.3, it became evident he didn’t know what I was referring to.
If you can't apt-get install nginx and copy a basic configuration from the internet, I have bad news for you.
Tuning performance and setting up logging is another matter.
Compared to the habit of including huge gobs of javascript and unoptimised images on "modern" web sites the impact of https is nugatory.
DevOps engineer will configure docker\tls\nginx and all that stuff
Surely you just means "ops"? I thought the point of someone being "DevOps" is that the developer also does operations, so it would be their own problem. I wonder if that word has become so diluted that its lost the reason that it came into existence in the first place.
Devops is more about dev working with ops and vice versa instead of siloing. That necessarily ends with some crossover of skills but it isn’t strictly necessary
During my brief time in Devops, I have learned that; if you're getting paged at 3am from your server being DDoS-ed, you're not going to be very effective as a 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).
I expect web devs to know about a lot of security concepts, including SSL/TLS, subresource integrity, CORS, a variety of cross-site stuff, etc. It's simply dangerous if they don't.
knowing about security concepts is quite a bit different to knowing the details about the currently established standard of encryption and its next iteration.
We're talking about the changelog of TLS 1.2 to 1.3, not the general attack vectors for web applications.
"web dev" is a big tent with room for many specializations underneath. Not everyone needs to know everything.
Very striking for me is listing of height, health and birth date. I would never put these on a CV. All irrelevant.
Look at current secretary job postings in China. Even if you can't read Chinese, you can see the measurement requirements in centimeters. Yes, those measurements (bust, waist, hip).
Here's an indeed.com search for "cm" that pulls them up: https://cn.indeed.com/jobs?q=cm
All the results in that link are height requirements.
You don't need to be able to read Chinese to know that a 160cm bust size requirement is implausible...
CVs here in France not only typically include date of birth but also a photo and marital status, too. None of this is relevant to the job search but it's how things are done.
They don't need to. It's a bad habit from some old folks and some teachers poorly telling students how to do a resume.
You're right, yet almost every CV I see has a photo and DOB, and a good majority have marital status. Adding the number of children is less common, though, but all of it is irrelevant to any job I would be hiring for.
I did some training with the Equality Commission in Northern Ireland some time ago, and since then I've been actively ignoring anything that people put on their CVs that is not relevant to the position they have applied for. Aside from experience and education background, additional information should be limited to facts that are relevant to the position (e.g. do you need a work permit, can you speak the same language as the rest of the team)
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
I am surprised that the EU hasn't clamped down on photos etc on cv's as it's obvious way for employers to discriminate on race.
Names are also a way to discriminate on ethnicity, although they're less reliable: names can be changed. Discrimination occurs in all manner of ways. In many countries, more casual labour the screening is done by a face-to-face interview. Clamping down on photos on a CV is not going to do much in those cases.
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.
I was talking about "professional" well paid jobs in particular casual labourers don't have CV's
This is HN I suspect that no one on here is "casual labour"
The Europass CV lists various personal information for inclusion, including address, date of birth and sex. The online editor[0] mentions that all fields are optional, and some of them are listed under extra fields, but before the online editor, these templates circulated only as Word documents for about a decade, with less nuanced instructions.
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
No European has ever used an Europass CV to apply to a job.
I see that some grad schools in Europe want a Europass CV. Is this more or less what it is meant for, or are there other niche use-cases?
At least one did. Source: interviewed him.
I'm recruiting for an outsourced team in Portugal at the moment. They include photos on their CVs. Date of birth and marital status is pretty much standard in Norway as well.
I think that's mainly because of past conventions, and the lack of sharing current expectations. A company could refer to Europass in their job description, and also offer a filled out CV template that only lists personal information that is expected to be shared. Or are CVs which do not include photos still considered incomplete or less desirable by the recruiters you know?
You should only put a picture if you have a very good looking photo specifically for this purpose and if you are in a customer facing role. Otherwise it's likely to do more harm than good.
I've noticed the same trend as well. Different parts of Europe & South America its fairly common to include a photo of yourself on the topleft corner
In his position at Convair, he lists "Flight Test Engineer" as one of his roles. If he performed these duties onboard an aircraft (as many FTEs do), these could be relevant parameters. If he listed them for that reason, he probably just left them there in 1980 out of tradition (see docdeek's comment).
The 1980s weren't all that long after they stopped requiring you to include a picture with a job application.
At one time it wasn't illegal to discriminate based on health/disability, so it made sense to advertise yourself as healthy, as you'd take less sick days, etc.
It is not illegal to declare you are advantageous in particular skill.
One Page resume was still the style in 1980, that's cool. Really well written cover letter as well, hard to see that come by these days.
I am still trying to stick to that. No one has time to read multipages resumes (and I think most interviewers read the resume on the way to the interview room anyway).
Or sometimes during the actual interview itself. As I've unfortunately had to do on more than one occasion.
I am still doing that. One pagers are difficult to write but they save time for anyone reviewing them.
I tried cutting my resume down to one page. I received virtually no callbacks, because I'm perceived as inexperienced. (OR: the shotgun approach to getting past resume filters is a real thing).
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.
I have never done the shotgun approach. I always go through local recruiters.
The majority of resumes I read are one page and my own resume is one page.
A recruiter recently told me that one pagers don’t matter anymore because it’s all electronic now.
I guess she doesn’t think that when reviewing 100 applications a screener might not want to constantly scroll.
They still the norm in Denmark. Although more information is normally crammed in.
What does “sd” below his signature stand for?
That's the initials of the typist. Always lowercase, below the signature block.
Signed
That is definitely not the case. As ghewgill says, it's the initials of the typist. See this for more:
https://www.cengage.com/school/corpview/Mission-CriticalFunc...
Thanks. I'm unaware of that practice. Wonder what purpose it serves given the signature is pretty obvious.
Trail of accountability in the event that what was typed isn’t exactly what was dictated. (Typos usually)
Nearly 24 years with a single employer. How many programmers can claim that these days?
I think the better question is: how many employers can claim that these days?
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.
So they'd just lay off a lot of people, forcing out the older, more expensive workers.
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.
Similarly, my private company promoted some person horizontally, then they decided to merged two dpts together. My excellent performing one, and a larger poor performing one. We always exceeded our sales targets, they hadn't met theirs in 8+ years.
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.
This still happens today, living through it now. This company was raided/bought recently with an immediate 7% layoff. More to come as they push all acquired business units to jump from 18% margin to 40% margin in a year. Legacy black boxes no one understands now, let alone when they RIF another 2000 people.
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.
I think it's common in smaller cities, there just aren't many jobs to jump to. My city is population 360,000. I had my first job in 2001 and I know several devs that are still there. My wife, electrical engineer, not dev, has also only had one job.
I’m an EE with 22 years at the same employer; first job out of grad school. Working until 67, I could be there 42 years, and I probably will be. This is an old school defense contractor.
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.
I worked at an old school defense contractor where tenure was measured in decades. :)
My employer had a sharp bimodal age distribution. I was hired during the defense layoffs of the mid 90’s, and was smack in the middle of that distribution, until the wave of retirements.
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.
Not very many.
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.
My company employs modern website jockeys, but also traditional broadcast engineers.
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.
None since they all became managers after year 5 :)
At my previous employer we had people on our team who were up there in age who were still programmers. One of them said he tried management but he's definitely not a people person and doesn't like playing politics. He said it went horribly for everyone involved, him, his team, his superiors. He went back to just coding and said he'll never do management again. Technically, he's very proficient, and as a new grad myself, he was always my go to for design questions.
Well, excluding the ones who were kicked out and replaced by younger folks, cheaper and less caring about working conditions.
Coming up on 20 years at a FAANG.
That font looks lovely, what would be closest alternative I could find today to make my editor look that way? Not even sure what I should be googling for.
I'm neither a typewriter nor font expert but I think it's a monospaced font and since IBM is mentioned maybe it was from an IBM Selectric typewriter?
I've seen font files based on that before, a Google for IBM selectric font looks not totally dissimilar.
Maybe that helps?
Monospaced fonts, especially: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courier_(typeface)
It's not Courier, though. Similar, but the g and numerals are different.
I'm going to guess it was an IBM selectric using the pica72 font typeball.
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.
Yeah, looks very similar to the Courier font. Thanks!
https://imgur.com/a/5izg3YW Not bad with basic solarized light theme and slightly heavier font.
Poor guy was trying to find a new job at 54. He had been out of work for a month. Wasn't easy then, isn't easy now.
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.
I assume he was applying for security cleared jobs with this CV
Sometimes you enter that information on your CV to demonstrate responsibility and/or trust rather than because you're specifically after another equivalent position
Not no for jobs not requiring SC /DV clearance it would be to "waltish" to brag about your clearance.
BTW a "walt" is short for "walter mitty"
Sorry but even the walter mitty reference is lost on me.
It's more than just pride with security clearances - they're minimum requirements for a lot of federal government work.
I went to school at SUNY Binghamton which is right next door to Endicott, NY, founding place of IBM. Super interesting that your father was around there during the town's heyday.
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.
By Mark 4, is he referring to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_IV or https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARK_IV_(software) ?
I doubt a resume like this a would even be considered today. It's missing pretty much all the bling.
Funny story, I maintain a resume in html format. One time I applied for a job, and their online application rejected my upload, telling me it had to be PDF, Word, or plain text format. In frustration I copy/pasted the text content into an emacs buffer (not the html itself, just the text shown in the browser). I tried to pretty it up a bit, but forgot to save my final draft, so the interviewers got a resume that started like this:
What followed was extremely poorly formatted plain text.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.
Being memorable is more important than what they remember.
— Jason Cohen
Mine isn't that different and I worked for two of the Big 4.
> I worked for two of the Big 4.
That's enough bling for most.
What bling? It seems like a completely acceptable CV even today.
I got my current job from a resume like this.
My boss specifically commented how my resume wasn't full of bullshit.
To me, it might be. But literally all the jobs I’ve applied to in the past half year have given me some variation of a comment along the lines of “but can you list ALL of the projects you’ve ever worked on and the languages/libraries you used for them?”
Mind you, that’s in Japan, so possibly not entirely representative.
Inspiring. Thanks for sharing. Perhaps my resume can learn something from this.
Your dad seems like quite a guy :-)
Your dad is so cool.
Your dad was an American hero, please thank him for all his hard work on my behalf. Men like him built this country by living their lives and raising their children. I'm sure he wasn't perfect, but he's still your dad and I'm sorry you've moved him to a home. Please take good care of him.
Thanks, we are doing our best.
Yes, that sounds strange to me - the family of two generations programmers can't afford in-house nursing? I can't imagine putting my parents or grannies in "home" unless I am really poor.
I realize there's no mechanism in the text box that prevents people from posting to HN like this, but can you please restrain yourself? What a horrible position you put the other person in, to have to defend their most intimate family situation in public or else leave a gossipy slur like this unanswered.
I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but that's the form it congeals into once you post it. Users need to do better than this here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I agree. If possible, feel free to delete this subthread.
I am pretty sure my siblings may not appreciate my discussing our business in public, but just to be clear. My sister and I have been living in his house for the past six months in order to care for him. It had become increasingly difficult to feed or move him because of his dementia and things like compression fractures in his back. After I was unable to get him out of bed last week we decided we were no longer qualified or able to do it. The place he is in now has a lot of experience and it seems like they do not have difficulties. Also there is a bit of a community there which is good.
There is not enough money left over of my dad's to pay for two experienced people or actual nurses to be here for the amount of time needed and pay the mortgage at the same time. A few of his children have dedicated quite a lot of time or money, but for those helping and for others, money is usually already allocated to their own families.
I'm really sorry that part of this thread turned into a thoughtless public prodding of your family situation. It pains me to see HN being used that way, especially when your intention was obviously to honor your father. It was a fine submission, and I hope the nastier end of the responses won't spoil how you feel about HN.
I'm sorry. You shouldn't have needed to explain your situation.
We don't know the whole story... We're gonna assume he is a great person based on his resume in the 80s? My parents are huge assholes and abused me my whole childhood. I'd lock them up if I could.
He is a great person. Please see the comment reply I make.
Your dad is a legend.
He built telemetry systems before the Internet was we know it.
Now that's a life.
For some reasons it looks so catchy to me. I really like the synergy of minimalism and old retro things like this one. I may used it a template for mine!
Did he have to draw the underlines with a ruler and pen?
Typewriters let you backspace _over_ what was already there, so we just typed the word, used backspace to get the beginning of the word, and then typed underscores until the word was effectively underlined.
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.
Interesting, thanks for enlightening me. I have never actually used a typewriter. I wonder if they will ever make a comeback a la record players.
What's up with the date format in the table, for example 1964-67 and 1968-70? I don't recognize this format.
1964-1967, 1968-1970. Just omitting the redundant second "19". Save characters that way!
Doh - thanks! For some reason I was parsing "67" and "70" as a month.
are you under 25 (and thus learnt about dates in a time of 4 digit dates)?
My grandparents meet at convair (on the factory floor during WWII) and lived in Spring Valley too
lol, just a few days ago I was asked if I could do a Fortran project.
My first programming language was Fortran, writing GOTO lines everywhere and making spaghetti logic was fun
What version of Fortran were you using that you needed gotos?
Can't remember the version its been too long. Writing GOTO lines everywhere was a bad practice but I didn't know any better at the time
What is OSAS and GASS? Google doesn't come up with anything
How should a resume look like today ?
Great resume! We need him back!
Thanks for sharing :)
Just awesome. :-)
Wow, a resume from an era when programming was a respectable job, instead of the circus of group interviews, take home tests, whiteboard tests, and non-stop emails from this new class of people whose sole job it is to find programmers jobs. Before hiring managers asked you if you’re familiar with agile, SOA, TDD, microservices, BDD, Domain Driven Design and that JavaScript framework that came out last year.
What a different world we live in.
> Before hiring managers asked you if you’re familiar with agile, SOA, TDD, microservices, BDD, Domain Driven Design and that JavaScript framework that came out last year.
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.
Its not about buzzwords but time ranges.
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..
>Thats why some companies stop hiring ppl after 30s
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.
Yup. And who exactly lives through his 20s without dealing with groceries and other mundane stuff ? Am I missing on some life hack?
"Thats why some companies stop hiring ppl after 30s because they are simply not able (statistically) to keep with all of it. "
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.
If tech was just look at a resume and decide to hire or not people would hate that even more than modern complicated forms of interviewing.
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 hate the state of tech interviews with a passion but I have to reluctantly agree.
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.
Good people are all hired. So you are looking through a pool of people that couldn’t get hired in the hottest market ever. I would pause. Find someone whose work you really appreciate and hyper focus on their network and poach. Stop using recruiters or spam networks and put in the actual time.
This is what Joel Spolsky says: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve...
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.
There are three parts to this problem. First is that you need to be able to attract/find good people. The second is that you need to be able to find the right cues in the resume (or otherwise make a determination who to interview, e.g. screens, references/recommendations). The third is you need to actually be able to tell good people apart from the others (and have a realistic definition of good).
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.
Yeah; well, you can distinguish me from the poseurs, by asking for my professional references. Call them. They will convey the authenticity of my 25 year work history.
Or don't, and run my resume through a buzzword search program, instead. Yeah. That will work. Good luck with that.
In my experience, bachelor's in CS counts more than master's in CS, which in turn of course counts more than bootcamp. It's just time spent in front of a computer.
I hope your pay and total comp is actually competitive, in which case you're grousing over something you could fix in a jiffy.
>In my experience, bachelor's in CS counts more than master's in CS
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.
But they don't have as much experience programming?
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.
>But they don't have as much experience programming?
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.
Self-taught is better when they have more good experience, yes.
Why is a bachelors degree more worth than a masters?
Time in front of a computer. Many master's programs are actually less rigorous, too. The filtering done for the better colleges is worse: Stanford and CMU, in particular, are incredibly easier to get into for a master's than a bachelor's.
'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.
As an engineer involved in the hiring process at two different companies, it's rather depressing how many people outright lie on their resume about what they know or what experience they have.
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...
There are companies that will check a resume for employment and education details. You also can and should do reference checks. In my experience outright lying is rare, there's definitely some embellishment. The person who sent in the MS word doc was a CS/Engineering graduate with significant experience in respectable companies? Hard to believe.
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.
> The person who sent in the MS word doc was a CS/Engineering graduate with significant experience in respectable companies? Hard to believe.
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.
Companies who treat potential candidates unfairly eventually tarnish their reputation. You don't design your process for the single outlier crazy person and then treat everyone like they are potentially crazy or liars. You treat everyone with respect, that's how you build a reputation. Respect includes respect for their time amongst other aspects.
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.
Firing a bad hire can be just as or more expensive than hiring them in the first place.
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.
As an engineer looking, it's rather depressing how many places have job requirements that are just a wishlist, or a resume-whittling strategy.
To be honest, I would treat them as a wishlist. If you've got a solid handle on at least some of the requirements, it literally won't hurt to apply.
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.
Didn't it pay like, half or less of what programmers get paid nowadays? And technical leadership at companies was much less of a thing.
I started as a 'systems programmer' in 1980 at $18,500/year. I had accepted the job at $17,900 but an across the board raise happened right away.
Letter was dated in 1980, guy had like 16 years of experience on the belt already.
So he was 54 years at the time, and started coding at 38.
or maybe he started earlier and didn't mention it.
Would have been cool to work with him and makes you think about doing what you love for as long as you can
wow, the 714 area code extended all the way to SD back then. coolio
What do you mean "we just put him in a home"?
Typically means they put him in a retirement or nursing home. [1]
[1]: http://www.phrasemix.com/phrases/put-someone-in-a-home-insti...
Also, in this case "just" probably refers to time only (as in very recently; in the immediate past), and not the more colloquial usage in the sense of "just put it over there". (English is hard.)
"A home" refers to some sort of permanent assistant living facility. In this case it's probably a nursing home.
Q: What's the difference between a house and a home?
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.
It was not, and stayed not the next 5+ years
There was a recession, actually
In the bay area officially the recession was well over in 1983, but frankly it sucked till 1986-7. Commercial tech sucked worse than military.
It's regrettable that you have to put a man like this into confinement.
That's a personal attack. We ban users who post uncivilly to HN. Please don't do it again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't think you should have been downvoted for this comment. People are taking this as criticism of the son when that's not necessarily the case. No one wants to end up in an old folks home.
The stereotype of a retirement home as necessarily "confinement" is wrong; e.g. my aunt lives in one, and she goes out most days to meet her friends at the plaza or coffeeshop. And for people without mobility, they are confined in any case.
Personally, after having seen quite a few for family reasons, there are a few I wouldn't mind living in.
Put in a home? Why wouldn't you want to spend all the last time on this mortal earth with your parents, and holding their hands as they leave this lifetime? Repayment of when you yourself was born into this one?
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!
It's a breach of HN's civility rules to disparage other people's intimate personal situations. There's always a great deal we don't know, and what lies underneath is often pretty tragic.
Please don't post like this to HN.
Thank you for the gentle reminder, I'll make sure to not do this again. Not the forum for it.
Elderly care homes have professional medical and nursing staff on site, so far better care can be provided than most families can offer in their homes.
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.
Thank you for the perspective.
Not as much difference from what your family was and is doing with people with hospitalization, I think.
Yes, you don't. Lifes and circumstances vary as much as the oceans and asking assuming questions on emotional topics without at least first trying to get near the person having to make the decision seems really pointless.
Ah, isn't it easy to judge other people based on just one sentence?!
>Why wouldn't you want to spend all the last time on this mortal earth with your parents, and holding their hands as they leave this lifetime?
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.
Why? Nobody ever asked my consent about coming into existence filled mostly with misery and struggle. Why do I owe them anything?
Repayment for what exactly? I never asked for any of this.
You don't have kids, do you?
Why would I? I would hope that any decent and truly moral person would not bring another human into existence as long as there is the slightest chance of suffering, no matter how small it is.
I don't understand why this is on github. Are you going to accept pull requests?
Isn't this a misuse of Github? Surely there's a more suitable website for hosting a page with text and pictures than a source control system?
I don't mean to pick on this guy - I've seen an several repositories like this recently.
Yes, clearly this is a misuse of a platform that offers GitHub pages with custom domain support so that users can host their own static sites or blogs.
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?
Still begs the question how come it's more attractive to put something onto GH pages rather than creating a simple web site from scratch. Yes I know - buying a domain, hosting, SSL, HTML/CSS etc is considerably more effort even for a static site. But should we be satisfied with the de-facto monopolization of the Web and its attention economy and tracking business model? Part of the problem seems also that folks merely strive for "me too" good-enough web presences and experiences on platforms.
Your comment reminds me to the classic when Dropbox was first shown here
>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.
This is not monopolization. He could have hosted CV on WordPress or blogspot for free too and infinite amount of other such sites too.
As far as hosting dad's CV from 1980 goes, striving for "me too" good-enough web is exactly appropriate. Rational choice.
I have sympathy for you for being downvoted. I have raised this issue a couple of times before for using github for things other than hosting source code (hosting online courses, using github issues as calendar or comment system for blogs). No downvotes but people laughed it off like I was suggesting something crazy.
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.
I am also sympathetic to the person you are replying to. All that happened was someone asking a question, then people being sarcastic and unkind, and using the downvote button to express their dislike for such horrible questions.
Microsoft*
:/
Does it matter? Like really.
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?
I'm guessing GP is uncomfortable with very few web sites having all the content. Does your CV or any content on GH other than source code matter? Does a project that doesn't even have a real web site matter? Like really?
I think some people overlook the second half of the company/product name, “hub.”
Or maybe it’s just easier to be overly-critical than to appreciate a cool way of sharing/saving information.
No annoying ads, opens picture, allows comments, thematic. I'd say that this is good cause
Plus, GitHub is a Microsoft property now, and I believe that on some fundamental level, Microsoft is happy to be in command of social web properties that still see avid use, and aren’t being stifled by Microsoft’s otherwise domineering reputation.
I wanted to come back and apologize for the tone of my earlier comment. I had read more sarcasm / contempt in your original post that I don't see upon subsequent reads.
Upvoting because as others have pointed out this is a valid question.
If his dad is still updating his resumes, why not :)
forked.
> Isn't this a misuse of Github? Surely there's a more suitable website for hosting a page with text and pictures than a source control system?
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.
I set it up with my phone. GitHub was the easiest way to do it that I knew HN wouldn't ban. They don't allow image links I don't think.
Sorry, i am not going to read it as it is not in europass format.
Also JavaScript in a few years.
So if that's the resume then why does that letter have a line at the end asking that the reader of the letter read the enclosed resume? Looks more like a cover letter to me given the way it's addressed and signed. Very neat indeed, but op may yet come across another document.
"May I ask that you read the enclosed, resume. Thank you very much."
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