6 ms·

I am an extremely accomplished engineer: 40 years developing professionally, over 40 published consumer software titles, I've written from C/C++ the entire crit

I am an extremely accomplished engineer: 40 years developing professionally, over 40 published consumer software titles, I've written from C/C++ the entire critical path pipeline for multiple animation studios... yet in a recent job interview the moron interviewer says to me mid way through "sounds like you're tech light, do you even write code?" (cue a record scratching) After questioning, this person has no idea my describing 40 years of professional coding was writing software - this HIRING MANAGER did not know any of the terminology I used describing being a key player in the transition from optical and video to all digital media productions everywhere. How to describe a successful career when that very success eliminated the reference points for what the career was, now it seems like we made the air itself as the digital media takeover was 100% successful, the young hiring managers have no idea what the world was before we (the developers who lived through the 70's to 2000's) changed everything.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I am sorry you went through that. I can relate. Today, we have “jargonauts.” These are folks that key on certain terms and acronyms. I remember, back in the 1990s, hearing everyone gushing about “AJAX,” and wondering what the big deal was (after being laughed at, for not knowing the term). No one would explain what it was. I looked it up, and go “Oh, they mean HTTPRequestObject!” Turned out, that I actually already knew a lot more about “AJAX,” than most of the folks gushing about it, and the reason no one would explain it, was that they didn’t actually understand it. Lot of that, going around…
- maxwell 5y ago
  Did you really hear anyone talk about AJAX in the '90s? Looks like there was some work done on XHR in '99, but it seemed to roll out across browsers in the early '00s and seemed peak hype when I started my career in the mid '00s, after the Web 2.0 conf in '04.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    It may have been the early 2000s, but it was very early on. It "came to a head," on a trip to San Francisco, on one particular project (I am not at liberty to discuss). It would not have been beyond about 2002. I think it was pre 9/11, but my memory of that time is a bit fuzzy. I did a lot of traveling. I'm pretty sure that HTTPRequest debuted in IE 5 or 6.
    - foobarian 5y ago
      The way I remember it is it became widely known once gmail and google maps shocked everyone with its effective use. So that's quite a bit later than 2002. But it's likely that it is just when I noticed, being pretty far removed from web development at the time.
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        AFAICR, it started in the mid-to-late 90s, although as with all things web in that period, was a non-standard cobbling together of feature and functionality using whatever technologies were available, while browsers themselves lurched in the dark and added features. It's more akin to saying "We want to do this thing that's never been done on the web before, and no one ever thought to do. How do we assemble it out of this box of scraps that HTML and browsers currently give us?" Consequently, there was probably proto-AJAX with ActiveX, the early js landscape, and iframes. But it would have certainly depended on where you worked. Critically, internet connections were much slower (in latency and bandwidth), so partial page loads were more of an advantage.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    AJAX was a catch-all term meaning “the page does things without reloading the whole page” if I remember correctly - or that’s how people were using it.
- BlargMcLarg 5y ago
  Sounds like today's "dependency injection", and people writing 5 pages on it. Except then it turns out what they mean isn't DI, but some other concept related to it and largely taken care of by their framework of choice.
  - ravenstine 5y ago
    It also sounds fancier than it really is. "Dependency injection" can literally mean just passing some arguments or setting properties on a hash. The target doesn't even need to be a singleton or long-lived. Honestly, I've never found the term particularly useful. The meaning is so amorphous that it could really just be described as a form of decoupling. But it sure was great to say it during interviews early in my career!
    - Akronymus 5y ago
      Indeed, it is simply passing some dependency as a parameter. Personally I find DI to make it harder to reason about in a sizeable portion of cases (20ish%) without actually providing a benefit. So that makes me prefer going for rejection (Passing the result of the dependency instead of the dependency itself) or just keeping it there. Altough, those approaches depend heavily on the rest of the codebase. (FP makes rejection relatively easy for example)
      - Aeolun 5y ago
        DI makes testing nice. People approximate it with hacks, but you need DI for truly good unit tests.
        Akronymus 5y ago
        Really depends on the whole structure. If it is mainly FP, dependency rejection usually is actually the easiest to test with
        Aeolun 5y ago
- plorkyeran 5y ago
  The term AJAX was coined in 2005 by https://web.archive.org/web/20150910072359/http://adaptivepath.org/ideas/ajax-new-approach-web-applications/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150910072359/http://adaptivepa.... People had been talking about the idea for a few years at that point, but not with that name.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    Might be right. I would be surprised, though. I do remember that it was a "brand new" buzzword. Not worth fighting over. Time is flying, and even the early 2000s was a couple of decades ago.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  Just to set the record straight, the skeptics were correct. I was off by 5 years. I asked someone that was on that trip with me, and it was late 2007. You know how it is, with us doddering old geezers; we forget stuff...
OneEyedRobot 5y ago
As someone with a similar time in harness in industries that rhyme with that, I feel your pain. While I'd prefer to work, not needing the money implies the ability to avoid the interview process. It's a funny thing being in an industry where people retire not because they can't do the work at a professional level, but because getting a job is such a PITA.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  > It's a funny thing being in an industry where people retire not because they can't do the work at a professional level, but because getting a job is such a PITA. I feel that this is a desired result. I am pretty convinced that folks like to have an "ideal culture" at their workplaces. I hear the term "cultural fit" so often, that I guess it means something that I'm missing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk
evanmoran 5y ago
As a game engineer I can relate. Many of these deep technical areas are completely unknown to people outside of gaming / modeling / animation / graphics, and even then you are way outside my expertise with optical/pre-digital work. It is a great point that interviewers focused on typescript or redux (just to mention stuff worth knowing but that seem far from C++ graphics coding) won’t get the nuance of your technical contributions. It then becomes a storytelling challenge, which is a different interviewing skill entirely.
- bsenftner 5y ago
  I was on the OS teams of the 3D0 and the first PlayStation, 2/3rds of my published software are console games. My games stint was the EA Spouse era.
  - romanhn 5y ago
    EA Spouse... that takes me back to the time when I decided to let my dream of becoming a game developer remain a dream.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I am sorry you went through that. I can relate. Today, we have “jargonauts.” These are folks that key on certain terms and acronyms. I remember, back in the 1990s, hearing everyone gushing about “AJAX,” and wondering what the big deal was (after being laughed at, for not knowing the term). No one would explain what it was. I looked it up, and go “Oh, they mean HTTPRequestObject!” Turned out, that I actually already knew a lot more about “AJAX,” than most of the folks gushing about it, and the reason no one would explain it, was that they didn’t actually understand it. Lot of that, going around…

maxwell 5y ago
Did you really hear anyone talk about AJAX in the '90s? Looks like there was some work done on XHR in '99, but it seemed to roll out across browsers in the early '00s and seemed peak hype when I started my career in the mid '00s, after the Web 2.0 conf in '04.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  It may have been the early 2000s, but it was very early on. It "came to a head," on a trip to San Francisco, on one particular project (I am not at liberty to discuss). It would not have been beyond about 2002. I think it was pre 9/11, but my memory of that time is a bit fuzzy. I did a lot of traveling. I'm pretty sure that HTTPRequest debuted in IE 5 or 6.
  - foobarian 5y ago
    The way I remember it is it became widely known once gmail and google maps shocked everyone with its effective use. So that's quite a bit later than 2002. But it's likely that it is just when I noticed, being pretty far removed from web development at the time.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      AFAICR, it started in the mid-to-late 90s, although as with all things web in that period, was a non-standard cobbling together of feature and functionality using whatever technologies were available, while browsers themselves lurched in the dark and added features. It's more akin to saying "We want to do this thing that's never been done on the web before, and no one ever thought to do. How do we assemble it out of this box of scraps that HTML and browsers currently give us?" Consequently, there was probably proto-AJAX with ActiveX, the early js landscape, and iframes. But it would have certainly depended on where you worked. Critically, internet connections were much slower (in latency and bandwidth), so partial page loads were more of an advantage.
- bombcar 5y ago
  AJAX was a catch-all term meaning “the page does things without reloading the whole page” if I remember correctly - or that’s how people were using it.
BlargMcLarg 5y ago
Sounds like today's "dependency injection", and people writing 5 pages on it. Except then it turns out what they mean isn't DI, but some other concept related to it and largely taken care of by their framework of choice.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  It also sounds fancier than it really is. "Dependency injection" can literally mean just passing some arguments or setting properties on a hash. The target doesn't even need to be a singleton or long-lived. Honestly, I've never found the term particularly useful. The meaning is so amorphous that it could really just be described as a form of decoupling. But it sure was great to say it during interviews early in my career!
  - Akronymus 5y ago
    Indeed, it is simply passing some dependency as a parameter. Personally I find DI to make it harder to reason about in a sizeable portion of cases (20ish%) without actually providing a benefit. So that makes me prefer going for rejection (Passing the result of the dependency instead of the dependency itself) or just keeping it there. Altough, those approaches depend heavily on the rest of the codebase. (FP makes rejection relatively easy for example)
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      DI makes testing nice. People approximate it with hacks, but you need DI for truly good unit tests.
      - Akronymus 5y ago
        Really depends on the whole structure. If it is mainly FP, dependency rejection usually is actually the easiest to test with
        Aeolun 5y ago
plorkyeran 5y ago
The term AJAX was coined in 2005 by https://web.archive.org/web/20150910072359/http://adaptivepath.org/ideas/ajax-new-approach-web-applications/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150910072359/http://adaptivepa.... People had been talking about the idea for a few years at that point, but not with that name.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  Might be right. I would be surprised, though. I do remember that it was a "brand new" buzzword. Not worth fighting over. Time is flying, and even the early 2000s was a couple of decades ago.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Just to set the record straight, the skeptics were correct. I was off by 5 years. I asked someone that was on that trip with me, and it was late 2007. You know how it is, with us doddering old geezers; we forget stuff...

OneEyedRobot 5y ago

As someone with a similar time in harness in industries that rhyme with that, I feel your pain. While I'd prefer to work, not needing the money implies the ability to avoid the interview process. It's a funny thing being in an industry where people retire not because they can't do the work at a professional level, but because getting a job is such a PITA.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
> It's a funny thing being in an industry where people retire not because they can't do the work at a professional level, but because getting a job is such a PITA. I feel that this is a desired result. I am pretty convinced that folks like to have an "ideal culture" at their workplaces. I hear the term "cultural fit" so often, that I guess it means something that I'm missing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk

evanmoran 5y ago

As a game engineer I can relate. Many of these deep technical areas are completely unknown to people outside of gaming / modeling / animation / graphics, and even then you are way outside my expertise with optical/pre-digital work. It is a great point that interviewers focused on typescript or redux (just to mention stuff worth knowing but that seem far from C++ graphics coding) won’t get the nuance of your technical contributions. It then becomes a storytelling challenge, which is a different interviewing skill entirely.

bsenftner 5y ago
I was on the OS teams of the 3D0 and the first PlayStation, 2/3rds of my published software are console games. My games stint was the EA Spouse era.
- romanhn 5y ago
  EA Spouse... that takes me back to the time when I decided to let my dream of becoming a game developer remain a dream.