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.
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 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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.”
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.
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
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).
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
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!
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 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
407 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadI don't mean to pick on this guy - I've seen an several repositories like this recently.
I personally have almost everything I write or do backed up in various git repo, why not? Literally my resume folder, with one file, has its own repo. Can I not push this to GitHub and share it?
Its not a source control system. I'm sure you know this but you are interacting with a website, not git itself.
Furthermore GitHub offers their pages feature which turns any repo into a website. If this was in gh-pages would that make it okay?
Or maybe it’s just easier to be overly-critical than to appreciate a cool way of sharing/saving information.
I mean, it’s a also a platform with an embeddable “gists” feature ostensibly for code snippets, but frequently used to access notes of all types. Clearly anyone who has ever typed a plaintext gist is also misusing GitHub.
/s
Dude, why do you care? It’s not a “project” in a traditional sense but it’s not hurting anything and if someone wants to store a cool readme in their account, why does it matter?
>For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
It's the simplicity. That's all. Making things easier and more accessible. I don't know how can I explain it more because that's the whole point of Github Pages, like on their site "Websites for you and your projects". And that's it.
As far as hosting dad's CV from 1980 goes, striving for "me too" good-enough web is exactly appropriate. Rational choice.
You know, facebook started off a social media and now it has become effectively a news outlet and entire Internet in some places. Google started as a search engine but now become many people's part of life.
When people start using services for everything, it's the service provider that is happily harvesting the data. Users end up being tied to a system that they find hard to replace. Github offers free hosting, free domain, free https certs, no need ssh, no need CMS, pretty neat and convenient, except now you depends on github's black box for hosting. Same for github APIs, which are not part of git, but github's proprietary technology. Wait until Github uses that as a leverage against you and you are forced to migrate off it.
Edit: I'm not saying don't use github. However, I would suggest not abusing it or become too dependent on it for things other than what it was designed to do.
:/
If Github Pages wouldn't be a thing, I'd have been inclined to agree. Ever since, though, such usage of Github strikes me as fair game.
Upvoting because as others have pointed out this is a valid question.
Almost 40 years later, phone numbers are on the way out, DOBs are "illegal" and github and email are more important information on a CV.
In the USA discrimination is 100% legal if 1) the group being discriminated against is not specifically defined as a protected group under law OR 2) it's a legitimate job requirement.
Requiring programmers to know how to program also discriminates against non-programmers but non-programmers aren't a protected group.
Requiring a stocker to be able to lift 30 pounds discriminates against the disabled. The disabled are a protected group, but it's a legitimate job requirement for a stocker to be able to move the stock around.
If you're hiring for a senior engineer it's not illegal discrimination because 1) it's a legitimate job requirement and 2) young people are not a protected group under law (only people over 40 are)
Nevertheless, once you go there in person for your interview, people will notice anyway.
I always go completely clean shaven with a bald head when I interview.
Or use a “functional” style resume.
> Cyber- is derived from "cybernetic," which comes from the Greek word κυβερνητικός meaning skilled in steering or governing
You might notice it's the same word from which 'Kubernetes' comes from, though Kubernetes is a more legitimate sounding word without the (modern) palatalization of C.
Weird, I feel the opposite way. To me "kubernetes" feels like someone couldn't come up with a name, so they obscured an existing word and hoped no one would notice. It's like calling "tumblr" "a more legitimate-sounding word than 'tumbler'". Why transliterate Greek the normal way when you can do it your own, less accurate way?
> without the (modern) palatalization of C
Huh? You could describe the change in Italian as palatalization; [s] is not a palatal sound at all, and the change in question took place many hundreds of years ago. Modern?
https://www.worldcat.org/title/cybernetics-or-control-and-co...
Incidentally, pronounced "cyber-NEET-iks", originally.
And explicitly intended to apply to biological and social systems. Also: The human use of human beings : cybernetics and society (1954).
https://www.worldcat.org/title/human-use-of-human-beings-cyb...
And yet recruiters frequently request them up top on resumes.
I remember that.
"Still in all, every night we does the tell, so that we 'member who we was and where we came from..."
I guess she doesn’t think that when reviewing 100 applications a screener might not want to constantly scroll.
So then, I exhaustively detailed every past project on my resume. At every interview: it's excruciatingly clear, nobody read the fucking thing.
Junior engineers who I interview, know this: Even if my boss hands me your resume the day before, I will read every single word, and I will pay attention, and understand what it means in context of your background. 3 pages is my upper-limit for patience. Your competence is usually demonstrated by about halfway down the second page.
Personally, after having seen quite a few for family reasons, there are a few I wouldn't mind living in.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
1980s programmer: sits down at the typewriter and bangs out a fixed width table, finishes with a signature.
But the smell of typewriter ink. Man, I miss it.
The mess is still there but only now one keeps the detritus of all of one's creative efforts, all the previous discarded attempts, silently gunked up in the recesses of the forgetful mind.
One would argue that version control might be sufficient to trace the evolution of ideas. But no. One would still miss the violence of the mind changes, of reckless scribbles or of reattempts that often take place in between the commits. Things are forever lost in the virtual trashcan and it's blunt implement, the backspace.
https://www.drexplain.com/press/articles/agile_technical_wri...
And I suspect that this went on longer in traditional big iron shops.
Knuth still does use a pencil and paper, as far as I know. He only types the manuscript in Emacs once he has composed it.
For bonus points, find a generic document preview library (a la macOS Preview), render images of everything in the Recycle Bin, and use these as the textures for all the crumpled bits of paper. And use a procedural physically-based renderer to make all the crumples move as you walk around the room!
Potentially also make all the videos in the Recycle Bin play on the crumples.
I'm completely serious; this will exist eventually. You might as well make it, you have the romantic motivation for it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_DTpQ4Kk2wA
it generally doesn't matter, because most HR employees probably have one where you're from.
My resume read RESUME(8) across the top. One person got the joke. One. I went back to using TeX until everyone refused anything but a word doc. Mostly so they could take your information off and replace it the agency info.
That's enough bling for most.
My boss specifically commented how my resume wasn't full of bullshit.
Mind you, that’s in Japan, so possibly not entirely representative.
Needless to say, I felt really embarrassed to find this out during the interview, and was baffled that the internal recruiter had even considered me.
I got the job.
— Jason Cohen
[1]: http://www.phrasemix.com/phrases/put-someone-in-a-home-insti...
A: A home is where they put you when they want the house.
That resume is from shortly after he turned 54.
It must have been hard looking for a job at that age and I don't think the economy was brilliant in 1980 either.
That was when Reagan got elected after Carter had only one term.
There was a recession, actually
Tomorrow I guide some teenage punk through the wasteland of mobile development. Undoubtedly he's gonna throw some new shit at me. Hah!
That said when young people blithely get their smart faces on and start talking about REST I cannot avoid the old fogey suspicion that they don't know a damn thing they're talking about.
It's also understandable that once people find a tool which they like enough to sink some time into learning properly, that they then cling to it a bit.
But I'm inclined to think that anyone who chose Spring for that position either has pretty bad taste, or simply hasn't bothered to look at a second tool.
http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-apl-programming-lan...
https://www.cengage.com/school/corpview/Mission-CriticalFunc...
I wish people would stop including the information as then it takes away the risk that they can't later claim that they didn't get the job because of their age, sex, martial status, etc.
They have some guidance on how to encourage equal opportunities in the job application process [0], the monitoring questions here [1] should be seen as things that should not be asked in a standard application process, nor included in a CV.
There's many attributes that we can't legally discriminate against when someone applies for a position [2]. We might be a little more aware of trying to ensure the process is fair and balanced, and it's certainly quite different from other parts of the UK and Europe.
[0] https://www.equalityni.org/ECNI/media/ECNI/Publications/Empl...
[1] https://www.equalityni.org/Employers-Service-Providers/Small...
[2] https://www.nibusinessinfo.co.uk/content/equality-law-and-ty...
*edit - fixed formatting of references
In the UK it seems it's perfectly alright to have a farm owner appear on a TV news station and be completely unchallenged as she is almost boastful about how she discards applications from one EU country's workers because another EU's countries workers are better and don't complain as much.
This is prima facie the very thing that equality legislation is there to prevent -- generalizations being applied to individuals based upon something beyond their control, such as nationality of birth.
If you found a way to survey small employers in a way they felt comfortable about answering truthfully, they will have notions about many nationalities. Some will be generalizations that on average apply poorly to the individual, some will apply better. Almost all will be based on a ridiculously unrepresentative sample size that is likely heavily biased towards a particular segment of the population. This is in spite of some of the most advanced equality legislation in the world.
The tech industry has some pretty poor generalizations about the work produced by certain nationalities.
For many employers equality starts and ends with an equal opportunities monitoring form stapled to the back of an application form that the applicant is to complete for a job that they already have no chance of getting. Even getting rid of names, education, past jobs and on CVs and application forms is not going to change that.
This is HN I suspect that no one on here is "casual labour"
It was implied that you had to fill out the template properly, including adding a photo, and as a result we were sending unnecessary personal information to all companies we applied to.
[0] https://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/editors/en/cv/compose
Here's an indeed.com search for "cm" that pulls them up: https://cn.indeed.com/jobs?q=cm
You don't need to be able to read Chinese to know that a 160cm bust size requirement is implausible...
I'd like to know the brand. Almost 40 years old and not yellowed - that's amazing.
Exposing it to sunlight and/or excessive heat will cause it to age. If it's high cellulose paper, like a newspaper, it will generally yellow quickly regardless of the storage because newspaper is cheap and acidic and not intended to last.
I've gotten almost every job I've applied for based on that + the interview. The few I haven't gotten, weren't because of the resume (I've always asked why, so I could improve).
I wrote my comment to inspire people to look at jobs they normally wouldn't, because I believe applying for a wide range of jobs is a good strategy for learning about the labor market.
It doesn’t matter as long as the company you got into was good lol (it wasn’t like that for me)
The company is getting a steal and I’m learning. I have one more aggressive jump I can do in the next 3 years before I top out in my market without going into management.
How do you get a response?
You had to seek out jobs in newspaper listings in local or national newspapers (international too). I would get people applying for jobs back in early 90s who thought that having a modem at home and having read one programming book qualified them for the job.
No coding interview in those days, but you were let go in a day or week if you could not perform what you said you could do during your first two tasks.
I think so and I wish it was the case. It was always frustrating, when I worked at large companies where poor performance wasn't an easily fireable offense, that it led to quality performance not being an easily laudable trait. I've also found in states and companies that are willing to fire bad developers (as opposed to, say, stringing them and the sub par side of the industry along), the cream has an easier time reaching the top. Sadly, due to sympathy for the employee and hate for the employer, many places make it harder for your signal flourish simply because of the protection of the noise.
If ten people apply for a position and their resumes all look good the company needs some way to determine who to hire.
If you wanna work in hip startups then I guess it's different but if youre like me and working in boring industry like IBM and defense contractors, it's still like this. I'm old and boring, my job is a means to gain money, nothing more.
I don't spend a weekend tweaking css either, just a simple text resume simply formatted that I created in Google Docs and FWIW since I started working in industry my resume has had 90%ish success rate in getting job interviews. Of course, I also have only applied to jobs I'm interested in and I don't job hop like crazy.
Many companies these days install tracking software on workstations, as well as for programming challenges during the interview process.
IBM and defense contractors are known for the good old boy game, so your mindset is not surprising. I used to work at Ball and was pushed out for complaining about every single face in every single meeting being white, so I'm something of an authority on this subject.
>I used to work at Ball and was pushed out for complaining about every single face in every single meeting being white
I doubt that's why you were "pushed out..." Or maybe "complaining" was not done in a constructive manner.
(My uncle thinks he gets "pushed out" of all the jobs he's ever had because of some silly reason like this[1] but it's actually because he has poor work ethic and doesn't get along with others. I used to listen to him talk to dispatch when he was a truck driver living with us...uhhh it was embarrassing to listen to...)
Also, I'm a woman myself, FWIW.
[1] stuff like "my boss promoted my coworker over me because she's pretty." That was the last "reason" he had.
While simpler times are attractive, I'm glad we have so much choice.
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...
Not typical of the 80s
AFAIR at least
> “The old air force designs were all based on finding pilots who were similar to the average pilot,” Daniels explained to me. “But once we showed them the average pilot was a useless concept, they were able to focus on fitting the cockpit to the individual pilot. That’s when things started getting better.”
https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
All this to say: the idea that resumes and interviews would stay out of your personal life is a rather modern concept.
https://i.imgur.com/btFE99N.jpg
And Paul Allen's -
https://i.imgur.com/0pDSVBS.jpg
Also looked up the cost of Harvard tuition in those days: $5,350 (about $27.5K in 2018 dollars)[https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1974/3/5/faculty-announce...]
I guess even programmer salaries haven't kept up with the cost increase in higher education...
Further, not more than 20 years ago, when I went to many interviews in person in Salt Lake (a very conservative town) I was asked about religion, at a car dealership where I was trying to get a job as a car salesman. I had a second interview at a bank, and when the interviewer saw a tiny diamond chip in my ear, told me to turn around, that he wasn't interested, and I was on my way. I was told that at a high-class tourist restaurant downtown that they didn't hire waiters, as they only had waitress uniforms, I was told at a grocery store in Ogden, that I couldn't be a cashier, as they only had women's uniforms for the cashiers, men/boys would only work as box boys.
As little as 8 years ago, I was told I was a bit old to keep up with walking around a college campus to perform the work on desktop PC's in a timely manner. (I was 48 at the time). I have been kept out of many positions due to my current age at this point, regardless of my mental abilities, and the fact that I had most definitely kept up with the current levels of technology as verified by my current Microsoft, and other certifications.
So yeah, discrimination is alive and well in the greater U.S. and we are screened via a multitude of forms using technology, or personal interviews, or whatever is at hand.
I don't look at someone's LinkedIn profile before interviewing them...
Or else he hasn't written a resume in 25 years because he's worked for the same company and just wrote it like the last time he did coming out of the military :D
An SSN was not designed to be a unique secret identifier held by every individual. But we have used it that way, and built a house of cards on it.
"In 1938, a leather factory in Lockport, New York attempted to capitalize on the excitement around the country’s newly-formed social insurance program by tucking duplicate Social Security cards into its wallets. Company vice president and treasurer Douglas Patterson thought it would be cute to use the actual Social Security number of his secretary, Hilda Schrader Whitcher.
Real Social Security cards had just begun circulating the year before, so many Americans were confused. Even though the display card was marked "specimen" and sold at Woolworth’s, more than 40,000 people adopted Hilda’s number as their own. According to the Social Security Administration, no fewer than 12 people were still using their Woolworth’s-issued SSN in 1977."
https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/26/3384416/social-security-n...
Suppose your number is 123-45-6789. If an attacker can uncover that you were born in Springfield in December 1989, they can deduce that the first 5 digits are likely 123-45. Now, there are only 9999 possibilities for what your full SSN might be.
Moreover, the only random bits are routinely used by utility companies, hospitals, etc. as an oral password and written identifier. If someone reads or overhears that your last 4 are 6789 and knows when/where you were born, they have a frighteningly good chance of discovering your SSN.
This is a loss. The competition was good. Success brought respect, and failure brought shame. Everybody had an extra incentive to put in more effort.
As to the discussion about 1 page v. multi-page c.v.'s: a c.v. is ADVERTISING. If you get the interview, you bring along a more comprehensive document in which you can go into detail about subject areas which may be relevant but don't merit inclusion on a one-pager.
As to his height: he worked on B-29's in the 1940's. Conceivably the ability to access cramped spaces was an issue then and he merely continued including this out of habit. Same as to his security clearance--most people are proud of holding one (look at all the brouhaha about Trump terminating a clearance) and like to include it on their c.v.'s.
BTW a "walt" is short for "walter mitty"
I don't understand Western opinion on this matter.
But on topic, that is one concise application letter. Cheers for your dad efforts back then!
Repayment for what exactly? I never asked for any of this.
It's a separate matter as to whether families make adequate effort to visit and spend quality time with their ageing parents/grandparents when they've been put into a home.
In the case of my family, my mother visited her parents daily for the last few years of their lives, and my partner's mother and aunt now visit their mother daily too - both before and since she was put into an aged care home.
Other families may not be as attentive and that's sad, but it's a separate issue as to whether aged care homes are good places for elderly people to live.
Not as much difference from what your family was and is doing with people with hospitalization, I think.
Because my parents are huge assholes, are intolerable as people, and abused me during my entire childhood. So I'd rather avoid them at all costs.
>Repayment of when you yourself was born into this one?
I didn't ask to be born, I don't owe my parents anything.
Even if you love your parents more than anything else in the world, it can be downright impossible to care for someone who needs 24 hour medical care if you aren't medically qualified. On top of that most people can't afford to quit their job and their entire lives to become permanent caregivers. It's often impossible.
I have an uncle-in-law who is extremely disabled and lives in a home. It's not possible for my (now dead) grandparents-in-laws (or anyone else) to give him the care he needs.
Please don't post like this to HN.
Also JavaScript in a few years.
aren't you expecting a little bit too much? Don't get me wrong, its great if you do... but knowing about upcoming encryption standards is imo something a security engineer should be fluent in, not a web developer.
Yes: it helps the developer to learn to code much more defensively - which is a very good thing. But then, that developer has no time to code. Defensively, or otherwise.
(depending on the environment, and management's willingness to invest in infrastructure - yeah, you can really get bogged down in this stuff).
Tuning performance and setting up logging is another matter.
We're talking about the changelog of TLS 1.2 to 1.3, not the general attack vectors for web applications.
My understanding is that there was a big cultural change in theory of management during the corporate raider era of the 1980s. Before, lifetime employment was common; employee loyalty was matched by defined-benefit pensions and the implicit commitment that you'd be kept on until retirement unless you did something terrible.
Corporate raiders, though, found that they could make a lot of money by buying a company and, among other things, ignoring all the implicit commitments. So they'd just lay off a lot of people, forcing out the older, more expensive workers. Getting rid of all that knowledge and loyalty might have long-term costs, but that didn't matter to corporate raiders, because they'd quickly sell off the company. Managers everywhere eventually adopted these tactics, both because it helped fend off corporate raiders and because narrow-focus financial evaluation of everything became the dominant management paradigm.
Now it's up to each worker to ensure that they stay marketable, and there's no particular incentive to stay around. Indeed, the incentives are often negative. At most places it's easier to get a raise if you move. And too many companies are stuck in legacy technology stacks; if you stay, you'll eventually become unemployable.
So I'd rather ask how many tech companies have programmers confident that their employer will stick with them until 67? Damned few, I'd guess.
It’s really sad to see 1000s of years of people’s work and toil washed away this way. Really drives home that nothing we do in this field has any meaning certainly not permanence.
This is still taught today in business schools.
When you take over a company, the first thing you do is fire a bunch of people. The market sees it as cutting costs, so the stock goes up.
It doesn’t matter who the people were or how essential to the company they were. This is simply a fundamental part of the theory of “business” as taught in top management courses.
The tiny (usually temporary) stock boost secures your employment for the the next six months. This buys you time to figure out how to run/fix the company.
So now our sales targets are higher than both combined (AFAICT), and we don't meet them at all. Since we're a "team" now they distribute the layoffs equally across the "team".
Not sure where these sales targets come from since we aren't publicly traded. I just feel we're being setup to fail.
Anyway, people are leaving in droves (2 best salesmen left, engineering is a revolving door) since our formerly generous performance based bonus is going away.
I am the only full-time left on my project, the rest are contractors (since we have a hiring freeze, but a large budget left over for contractors for some reason). They literally cannot do releases without me. And after asking for a raise to reflect that I'm managing 3 contractors instead of coding (the former lead left), I got scoffed at and told that there was a hiring freeze (that's not a promotion freeze, but ok, except you have 100k/year freed up from the last guy that left...), and that my project isn't under as much pressure as the other projects so no. Come back to me in a year and we'll talk.
Yeah ok. Wait a year for maybe 5%. Or jump ship for an easy 20%. And no managing/lead responsibilities. Go pound sand.
The company is clueless about keeping talent. No one mentions the massive churn at company update meetings. They just go "wow, didn't meet the sales targets... gotta work harder guys! Look at all these cool initiatives we're gonna do next year!"
I keep hearing the word death spiral among coworkers. Yep.
/rant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Christensen (inventor of the BBS and author of xmodem) is one, at 44 years for IBM. I knew a very small numbers of career Allstate folks at over 40 years.
The departments looking after things like websites think 5 years with the company is a long time.
The department I'm in tends to be lifers - I personally know two people who have made 50 years, a few more at 40. Certainly if you're under 10 years you're new.
Though EE (RF, Microwave, Antennas to be exact) still has the respect for the gray beard.
The record for my employer is 60+ years; a machinist who started at 18 and still working into his late 70’s as he enjoys it.
Now the age distribution is log-normal with 5 years average experience. Was just given a 25% retention bonus yesterday, which is unheard of. They are scared of the old people leaving, and rightly so.
The millennia’s job hop like crazy, and in my field there is a lot of institutional knowledge built up.