18 ms·

My dad's resume and skills from 1980

1482 points by metadat 4y ago

cratermoon 4y ago
Blue collar mechanical work during the war, used the GI Bill to get some college, went right to work for IBM, probably recruited by big blue. The Greatest Generation had both the worst and the best.
- 0x445442 4y ago
  Looks like he also got quite a bit of training at what I assume is UCSD Extension program. I received a certificate in C programming from there in the early 90’s. I wonder if they still offer similar programs today.
  - Discordian93 4y ago
    It would appear so, albeit now it's an online program: https://extendedstudies.ucsd.edu/courses-and-programs/c-c-programming https://extendedstudies.ucsd.edu/courses-and-programs/c-c-pr...
vjust 4y ago
I worked at a startup, in India's silicon valley, before the word startup ever existed. 1 PC, with 640Kb of Ram, 20Mb hard-disk, the owner took a loan to buy that thing. We were 4 programmers sharing that 1 PC. We each had 2 hour timeslots to code in C or whatever other language. Away from the keyboard, I'd write code on paper, so that I could make the most of my slot. Sometimes I would have to print my code, and my boss (the owner) would go over it with a red-ink pen. I was an apprentice. The boss (owner) would warn me, "beware of the day computers will be writing programs, it will be soon here (and maybe put me out of a job)" Bangalore was where it was all happening then (as far as India was concerned). It was a heady place and time. As a rookie customer support engineer I also got to see Data General's computers at various customer installations, spooled tape, and drum hard-drives, etc. This was early 90s in India. India's IT Export industry was in its infancy.
rossjudson 4y ago
Most "modern" resumes I see could learn a thing or two from this. Tight and to the point.
n_cusan 4y ago
Love the aesthetic of the letter.
screwgoth 4y ago
Why would you check-in these CV pics rather than creating a Medium article or a personal blog?
RamblingCTO 4y ago
I just love how non-bullshit, concise and precise this is! Love it!
boh 4y ago
Not to get off topic, but ending a formal letter to a business with "very truly yours" is weird and people still do it.
known 4y ago
machiste77 4y ago
Ok... but can he traverse a binary tree on a whiteboard?
metadat 4y ago
Direct links to the resumé: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/runvnc/dadsresume/master/IMG_20180817_232813.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/runvnc/dadsresume/master/I... https://raw.githubusercontent.com/runvnc/dadsresume/master/IMG_20180817_233142.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/runvnc/dadsresume/master/I...
rbanffy 4y ago
96 years old and still cooler than the current kids. Who else can say they used a computer with two ROUND screens?
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  If Moto 360 smartwatch counts as a computer, I used two.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    I keep looking at small round displays and think about building something with them. If we could get our hands on a legally available disk image for, day, DtCyber, it'd be feasible to build a cyberdeck-style laptop with 2 round OLEDs (or, more practically, a cheaper rectangular one and a with two circular cutouts. I am looking at https://www.panelook.com/VLT236-RDP-600-23-6inch-848x848-ROUND-LCD-Display-700nits-detail_97851.html https://www.panelook.com/VLT236-RDP-600-23-6inch-848x848-ROU... right now and thinking about making something cool (the resolution is crap, sadly)
- no-s 4y ago
  > Who else can say they used a computer with two ROUND screens? Hmm, that takes me back, heheh. I remember using some spanking new equipment in the late 60’s with round screens. I was just 8 or 9 then so my recall is unsure but think it was Digital. I do recall learning how to read and enter memory locations with toggles so I could cheat at Lunar Lander.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    The PDP-1 could be fitted with one (I believe you can play with it at the Computer Museum in Mountain View). The CDC-6xxx series had a magnificent console with two round screens (and vector graphics, although they weren't direct view storage tubes like the supercool Tektronix were). There were two such consoles at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle. And, BTW, it's not always that I meet a fellow Elder Thing. I am myself from 1968, so I didn't get near an interesting computer until much later.
spywaregorilla 4y ago
Why does he call out that he is 5'4" I wonder? The "Health: Excellent" seems amusing in today's context too.
- elteto 4y ago
  He is coming from an aerospace/military background so I assume he is providing this information in case the job requires working in confined spaces and/or lifting weights or other physically strenuous exercise.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Health: Excellent was also just pretty common to stick on resumes in that era.
- jakeinspace 4y ago
  Military
- AlmostAnyone 4y ago
  I've been to a military museum few days ago and I was surprised how incredibly small some of the cockpits are. I'm 6'3" and wouldn't fit in most of the fighter jets and other vehicles. Not that I wouldn't be comfortable with my legs pushed to something - my shoulders are literally too wide to get in, my thighs/ass are too wide to even try sitting there. Might be a problem for aerospace tech. And don't get me started on spaceships/capsules - I don't have any particular fear of confined spaces but this was a little too much (too less?).
  - taude 4y ago
    Your comments made me wonder if there were height restrictions, found this verbiage on US Airforce site: "For pilot and aircrew positions, height specifications vary by aircraft and most applicants can successfully pursue a career in aviation with the U.S. Air Force. Applicants who are significantly taller or shorter than average may require special screening to ensure they can safely perform operational duties. Applicants of all heights are encouraged to apply."
rmnclmnt 4y ago
Can we bring back this form of resume, please? Information is clearly organized, easy to read, easy to remember. No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colored backgrounds, unreadable fonts, and whatnot...
- akamaozu 4y ago
  I just updated my resume for a new round of job hunting, and I think its similar to what you're describing http://designbymobius.ca/resume http://designbymobius.ca/resume
- Arn_Thor 4y ago
  The replies here are hilarious: from people saying how much they loathe it to people saying they wish more resumes were like this. It just drives home how much of a crap shoot applying is...
- Kostic 4y ago
  You can use something similar, even today. My CV isn't *much* different than the one in the link and it seems that it does stand out as I've been complimented about it, twice.
  - rmnclmnt 4y ago
    I do too, but I see way too many people "over-thinking" their resumes, especially in the presentation layout: if the raw data is clearly organized, the layout should be minimal, not the other way around
- yupper32 4y ago
  I don't see many 5-star skill ratings, dual colored backgrounds (?), or unreadable fonts. Where do you see those? I would turn people away from that format if they asked my advice. My resume, and the resumes I've seen aren't too far away from this format. More bullet points and a bit more detail than this, I guess. But otherwise pretty similar
  - 4y ago
syntaxing 4y ago
Anybody knows what the “sd” means after his signature?
- fm2606 4y ago
  Initials of who typed up the letter. Standard practice back then. I learned about it in H.S. typing class in the late 80s Edit: s/resume/letter/g
  - glonq 4y ago
    Ditto! We had big dumb noisy electromechanical typewriters in my Typing 9 class, and then upgraded to some kind of semi-smart typewriter for Typing 10 that had a small buffer so that you could type+correct one line but it wouldn't print until you pressed the return/enter key. They only taught us a couple weeks of word processing on computers. Microsoft Works, if I recall correctly.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mbadros 4y ago
  Perhaps the initials of the person who typed it. In most business contexts at the time, something like "ABC/jed" at the end meant a secretary/assistant with initials "JED" typed something for a manager/employee with initials "ABC."
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jll29 4y ago
The interesting bit about this post is that with that resume, you can still feed a family in 2022 (okay, you won't need any assembler, and one from the set { Fortran, COBOL } will do). I wonder if Python and JavaScript will get you that far 50 years from now?
- Lio 4y ago
  Hard to say for sure but I'd bet that Unix/Linux/Posix and SQL skills might still be relevant.
- gautamdivgi 4y ago
  Java probably will for application development. Python should to with all that ML code. I don’t see anyone in a hurry to move it to Julia. C++ also, if you’re in the embedded space. I know Rust is coming but I don’t think c++ is going anywhere for a while.
  - arecurrence 4y ago
    There's so much production code in C++ that it will have a long tail like Fortran even if people were to stop launching new products with it.
- wyattpeak 4y ago
  One day, long after I'm gone, people will finally accept that Python and JavaScript are no longer young languages. JavaScript is 26 years old, Python is 31. They both continue to grow in importance year-on-year, JavaScript because there is nothing on the horizon which will plausibly replace it, and Python because a large number of industries and programmers genuinely love it. I think there's a nontrivial chance they'll both still be languages of primary importance in 50 years, but I'd bet my bottom dollar that they'll at least remain as relics yet needing support the way Fortran and COBOL exist today.
  - sergiotapia 4y ago
    Why did Python win the war with Ruby? Was it purely the math community deciding this is where we throw our weight and left Ruby the runt of the litter?
sergiotapia 4y ago
Excellent thank you so much for sharing this glimpse into our past.
lordnacho 4y ago
That job market seems like so long ago. See job ad, type out a letter with your CV, wait for them to write back, somehow organize a time to meet, more rounds, and so forth. At least it must have been hard to spam out CVs. The guy seems pretty hardcore from my perspective. University training for all those techs. Of course hardware back then cost a lot of money so you wanted people who knew what they were doing. What did people do for interviews back then? Reverse-a-linked-list? That would have been a relatively recent publication in 1980. Kadane's algo didn't arrive until 1984 IIRC. Was K&R published yet?
- KineticLensman 4y ago
  > What did people do for interviews back then? Reverse-a-linked-list? The last time I was hired for a purely software-related position was 1993. They were looking for an IC (they didn't call it that, then) who would quickly transition to tech lead / system architect. The technical part of the interview involved role-playing myself presenting an initial proposal to a potential customer who had provided a brief written requirement. One of the interviewers role played the customer. IIRC the interview schedule was something like 30 mins to read the requirement and think, 15 mins to ask initial questions, an hour (perhaps longer?) to develop the proposal, an hour (?) to present it and face customer questions. In essence I was being asked to spot ambiguities in the requirement and develop an initial estimate. I passed. I would have failed had I applied for the same job straight out of uni.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deeblering4 4y ago
  Up until the mid-late 2000s tech interviews consisted of a few conversations, followed by checking references. CS trivia interviews were largely introduced by Google, with other companies cargo culting that into their interview practices.
  - ddulaney 4y ago
    They were definitely influential, but it's way more complicated and probably has as much to do with The Guerilla Guide to Interviewing, which was Microsoft-based. Here's an article that digs into this specific history: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/
nsxwolf 4y ago
It is so simple. There's no "Experienced software architect with a proven track record of delivering high quality and performant blah blah blah" shit. What were the interviews like back then?
- insightcheck 4y ago
  > "Experienced software architect with a proven track record of delivering high quality and performant blah blah blah" What's wrong with that? Each part of the phrase sounds like something an experienced developer should strive for, and is objectively testable (e.g. delivered projects in a work setting or not, well-written code or not, the software runs quickly or not, etc.). Junior developers in particular may lack the track record part when starting out, so it's a good indicator that a person is applying for more senior positions.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    > What's wrong with that? You said it yourself: "Each part of the phrase sounds like something an experienced developer should strive for". Nobody will ever write the opposite. So it signals nothing.
    - insightcheck 4y ago
      But as I also wrote, at least one occurrence of this in a resume is still a good signal that the candidate understands what a hiring manager is looking for, and also signals that the candidate isn't totally junior. If a candidate is totally junior and still writes that they are are a junior an "experienced software architect with a proven track record of delivering high quality and performant..." but fails to back it up, they end up being judged next to people who actually do have this experience. In that case, it could be better to emphasize the "willing to learn quickly"/"excellent team member"/soft skills aspect to set expectations right, and/or develop better technical skills so a candidate can actually claim that. So, it's only really beneficial to write if you actually do have experience, and thus could be a worthwhile signal to include at least once in the resume to show you're at that level.
  - 4y ago
haxorito 4y ago
In 1980 - I’m expert in those 3 areas In 2020 - I’m aware of about 10000 different technologies but not expert in anything
- karmakaze 4y ago
  In 1985 I learned and shipped products using IBM Assembler, Cobol, JCL, TSO, and some others not listed. It was a bit of an unusual mainframe software spinoff company where I did my 1st year and later co-op work placements. My next co-op placement was more conventional embedded C.
- aasasd 4y ago
  Eh, I was pumping out PHP+MySQL and a bit of Python until the early 2010s, when a) I went to work on a larger site where disparate specialized tech was used to optimize every part of it, and b) hipster explosion of devops happened.
mrpippy 4y ago
Just curious, did he get the job at CDC? Where did his career go after 1980?
- ilaksh 4y ago
  If I remember correctly it was General Dynamics and then CSC.
alexjray 4y ago
The fact that he lists his height and health cracks me up
- pepy 4y ago
  old fella made it to 90s so, joke is on us.
bradhe 4y ago
Imagine the changes they saw between 1956 and 1980...that'd be so amazing.
- beezle 4y ago
  My father started at Univac just after the Korean War. He never did a lot of coding, instead he was a "systems man". He went from the room size mainframe systems with huge dedicated tape and disk machines to time sharing to buying me an Apple II around 1980. Unfortunately, systems and procedures is no longer sexy and is mostly an after thought today. But back in the hey day of the 1960/70s that was where the money was.
walnutclosefarm 4y ago
When I first entered the working world as a programmer and administrator of an "academic computing center", in the early 70s, you met men like Ray - ex-military, GI-bill educated, learned computers from the electricity on up in their mid-career, rather frequently, either as customer engineers for one of the big mainframe manufacturers (there were 7 or 8, depending on when and how you counted), or from the minicomputer upstarts who were then assaulting the mainframe world of computing with their smaller, cheaper, 12 and 16 bit newcomers. Sometimes you'd get the privilege of a lunch or dinner with one sent out "from the lab" who was actually designing and building the machines you were working on. It's hard to explain just how new it all felt, then. But in 1973, even though we were sitting on the cusp of the single chip microprocessor and personal computer revolution, the commercial computer was less than 20 years old, and college recruiting materials might well brag that at their institution, there were not one, but two computers on campus. I remember the day the total RAM at our institution passed the megabyte mark - closer to the end, than the beginning, of the 1970s. The ability to "program" was a rare skill - even the people who taught it were still just learning it.
- btilly 4y ago
  Computers are older than you think. Computers based on integrated circuits were more recent. But the foundations were much older. For example take the punchcard. Punchcards as a way to work with automatic computing devices go back to Hollerith machines and the 1890 census. That was how IBM got started. The phrase "Super Computing machine" dates back to 1931, and referred to a tabulating machine built for Columbia University. Raytheon was producing and selling analog computers starting in the late 1920s. Much of the calculations for the Manhattan project were done by machines - Feynman talks about this in Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman. And to give a sense of how much history there is, one of my favorite essays in the 1945 essay, As We May Think, which you can find at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m.... It provided the inspiration for both hypertext and the science citation index. The recombining of those ideas in the PageRank patent was the foundation of Google. But how could someone in 1945 understand computing that well? It is simple! Its author was the man who designed those computers Raytheon sold in the 1920s, and among other things was in charge of the development of mechanical computers for the Manhattan Project. (OK, he did a lot more than that...)
mussum_cacilds 4y ago
Metadat your photo has metadata on it. "...Norwich.." Ironic with your username btw
- mussum_cacilds 4y ago
  If this was a job advertisement ...
KerrAvon 4y ago
So did he get the job?
snapetom 4y ago
My dad was an electrical engineer in his home country. When he immigrated to the US in the Seventies, he had to basically start over because his certifications weren't recognized. He took it as an opportunity to try and change careers, and he looked at everything from locksmithing to programming. Several years ago, long after he passed, I found the C book he used. "Hey, I know C!" I thought. It was a weird feeling to have independently ended up in the field he strived to be in.
karaterobot 4y ago
I have a similar one for myself, let me scan in it: Front-end ninja 2006-2010 Full-stack unicorn 2010-present Follow me on twitter Times have really changed I guess.
- jenscow 4y ago
  Junior Developer 2020-2021 Senior Developer 2021-present GitHub repos 387
- Test0129 4y ago
  Ah classic mistake. This will never pass the automated review because you forgot "like, comment, and subscribe!"
SnooSux 4y ago
Interesting that this is like a cover letter and resume in one.
- no-s 4y ago
  > Interesting that this is like a cover letter and resume in one. Pre-email that was pretty much how it went. There was no point in overcomplicating things. People had to type these cover letters and resumes up, over and over. Or they would pay for a service which used one of those “word processor” gizmos. Fortunately for me in ’80 I had a selectric-like printer and a CRT, the very next year I got an IBM PC and could ditch the mainframe. As a result became tres marketable and enjoyed substantial career enhancement.
gwbas1c 4y ago
My mom passed about a month ago, and when going through a closet, my dad handed me some papers she wrote for a college course. Turns out she was the same age as me when her father died a similar death, and she wrote about similar feelings.
- djmips 4y ago
  That's very beautiful in a melancholy way.
remind_me_again 4y ago
xrd 4y ago
He lists telemetry on his resume. I haven't seen that on a resume before. I bet Microsoft (and the other FAANGs) would really value that experience.
enw 4y ago
> My dad is 92 and we just put him in a home. Can you stay healthy enough to die of old age in a regular home? “Put him in a home” sounds so ominous and forceful.
- Jolter 4y ago
  My mom used to joke that in our family, we don’t end up in homes because we all die of cancer before retirement. Well, joke’s on her, she’s still alive at 70 and I survived my first bout with cancer at 36 already so she was wrong on two counts. Still didn’t put any elderly family in any home though…
- sandyarmstrong 4y ago
  My generous interpretation is that dad needs full-time care that the family can't provide in-house. For example, alzheimer's and dementia patients often have very particular needs.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  I'm not sure it is a matter of health. An relative of mine in her upper 90's recently passed away at home -- fortunately a number of relatives were well off enough to move nearby and help out, and hire a nurse to check in occasionally, etc etc. If anything I suspect dying at your home would be easier if you weren't very healthy.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    My grandfather died in his home after a short but severe illness with round-the-clock care from the family. It was relatively easy, as far as these sort of things are ever "easy". My grandmother died a few years before that, after spending a year in a nursing home with a less severe illness. It just wasn't feasible to keep her at home: she couldn't really walk any more and half the family would have to pause their lives. I don't really know her opinion on that as we never really had that kind of heart-to-heart relationship, but I would certainly much rather be "put in a home" than be such a burden. My grandfather was very happy that his end was a swift one, so the family wouldn't have to put through a long drawn-out ordeal again.
sswaner 4y ago
That resume reinforces the argument that the GI Bill is the best legislation every passed in the US.
- UncleSlacky 4y ago
  Shame it wasn't available to everyone who qualified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill#Racial_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill#Racial_discriminatio...
  - sswaner 4y ago
    True. Imagine where we would be if that hadn’t happen. The lost opportunity is immense.
  - keepquestioning 4y ago
    If slavery is the original sin, this is the second sin.
alberth 4y ago
It's sad how a fraudster can abuse knowing a persons full legal name, date of birth, past home address and phone number. All of which was on this resume posted to the internet, and should probably be masked out. As an aside: loved reading the resume.
- fwr 4y ago
  It struck me as comforting to actually be able to post it all online without a major worry, I imagine a person of that age living with close supervision of their family can get fully disconnected of this paranoia and just enjoy actual life, sans administration and connectivity.
js2 4y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17787275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17787275
zackmorris 4y ago
If the minimalist resume is appealing, can we also bring back walk-on hiring? In warehouse and construction work, if someone shows up at 7:30 AM on a Monday morning, odds are quite good that the foreman will have something for them to do. Maybe not that day, but maybe tomorrow, or maybe someone on the list above them won't show up that week and they'll get called. I made rent doing that in my early 20s and they even let me leave early sometimes to work on my internet business because I didn't have a family to support and maybe someone else had a bill they needed to pay and wanted my shift. Why again does boutique startup need to interview 500 overqualified people? Hire someone right away and let them quit if they want to and hire someone else. It's just business for crying out loud.
- jaza 4y ago
  The closest equivalent to that today, in most white-collar roles at least, is contracting. Usually not a physical walk-on hire anymore, but it is often quite a quick process (sometimes as little as a few hours), from "I need a worker", to "I can do it", to "get cracking sonny". And it's then, days / weeks / months (usually not years) later, a similarly quick process, from "we don't need you anymore" / "I'm outta here", to "don't let the door hit you". But the contractor usually needs to be "employed by" some agency company, that guarantees his/her suitability, and that handles the (not insignificant) paperwork / legalities, and that takes a handsome cut.
- golergka 4y ago
  > Hire someone right away and let them quit if they want to and hire someone else. It's just business for crying out loud. You're not hiring construction workers, you're hiring architects. It often takes more than 3 months to get used to a new codebase and understand how and why things are done the way they are.
  - jacobr1 4y ago
    And sometimes you are hiring construction workers, and sometimes trade-specialists. I've hired contractors to address specific tech-debt, or accelerate QA on project, to implement a CRUD type stuff for things with well-known approaches that just take time.
eromReven 4y ago
I dearly miss my adoptive father, and his close friend, who introduced me to computers in the early 1980s, in a dreary backwater town of a backwater Middle-Eastern country, starting with a Sinclair ZX-81, soon followed by a ZX Spectrum :) We were always behind the rest of the world in everything; to get new software or books and magazines we had to wait for someone to make a 10-12 hour trip to the nearest major city, which happened once every couple months, so we had to prepare wishlists in advance ^^ Those 80s computer mags were the best part of my childhood: Your Sinclair and specially ZZAP! because those were all I had access to when someone else was using the TV, or the computer, or just waiting for the electricity to come back on (something which that part of the world still struggles with) I graduated to a Commodore 64 and fantasized about getting a Commodore Amiga, but by the time we could afford a new computer, the world had moved on, and I got my first "IBM PC" in 1993: a 286 with a 40 MB (megabyte) HD :) My dad's friend, my uncle, was pretty much a genius who had taught himself electronics, repaired his own TVs etc and even built his own audio equipment and other simple devices for his friends. He tried to teach me programming in BASIC but none of it stuck with me (I try to make up for that by learning Z80 and 6502 coding these days) The guy died relatively young, and his genius was never recognized outside our small town, but the children he influenced and instilled a love of technology in, always remember him and owe their skills to him.
gomox 4y ago
Whoever can type a resume of that length in a typewriter with no errors I would instantly hire. Such level of attention to detail is extremely rare these days.
- president 4y ago
  Sadly, communication and writing skills takes a backseat to algorithm interviews. I understand the company benefits massively from hyper-focusing on hard skills but quality of life suffers for your average IC mired by the daily failures of miscommunication.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  Most likely, someone with the initials "sd" typed out that resume rather than Ray Livesay
  - glonq 4y ago
    Can confirm. The convention back then was that the typist puts their initials at the bottom of letters or memos.
  - skrbjc 4y ago
    was wondering what that meant
- hondo77 4y ago
  Back in the 80s I would type up a resume and make corrections with correction paper (big upgrade from liquid paper!). Then I would go to a print shop and have them make copies of it but on nice paper. The copies would not show any signs of the corrections. The same thing could have been done with the cover letter in this case, since only the date and addressee at the top would need to be changed for each company.
major505 4y ago
Seens like beetween 60's and 80's every dev in US would inevitably ending up working for us military.
nathanvanfleet 4y ago
Height: 5'4" Health: Excellent I really need to add this to my resume.
snowwrestler 4y ago
Caught my eye: Listing gender, height, health on the resume (!) Can’t imagine getting a resume with that info these days. Listing corporate training under education. Again, wouldn’t expect to see that today. Not sure if that is because no one does employee training anymore, OR, if it’s just expected and understood that you’ll learn new stuff constantly as a programmer these days.
- ingenieros 4y ago
  Perhaps not in the U.S due to labor laws and the EEOC, but in some countries you must also attach a head shot. Not only that, but HR can casually drop by your house unannounced to inspect your living conditions and make a note of anything "unusual". I know it sounds straight out of Severance, but that's how things would be stateside if unions and others hadn't drawn the line somewhere.
  - dottedmag 4y ago
    What are the countries where this is practiced?
    - ingenieros 4y ago
      All throughout LATAM, look up "visita domiciliaria" in Colombia.
    - bobsmooth 4y ago
      I know in Japan head shot and blood type are expected with a resume.
      - Wohlf 4y ago
        Blood type is weird but in Japanese cultural it's similar to adding your Myers-Briggs type.
      - unsignedint 4y ago
        Headshot yes, blood type typically not. They do require to reveal a bit of other information including age, number of dependents, marital status, expected length of commute, etc. Funniest aspect is that a lot of employers expect applicants to handwrite their resumes and some actually goes as far as rejecting non-handwritten resumes.
gbourant 4y ago
what font is used?
no-s 4y ago
> resume and skills from 1980 Wow, I had a resume (with several years of experience) in 1980. Now I’m feeling really auld. My mom has roots in the era of programming where the program was entered by wiring a plugboard...
izzydata 4y ago
It's curious that anyone would put their health or height on a resume. It doesn't seem particularly relevant to anything.
davedx 4y ago
Poor fella never got to use React
smm11 4y ago
Impressive! Given today's resumes, everyone will look up what React or Node is, in 2064.
- poisonborz 4y ago
  And logging in monthly to a crumbling government website that still uses them.
malsheikh 4y ago
Hah. I used to live 2 doors down from your dad. Small world.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
orsenthil 4y ago
Good to see your dad's resume. Good recollections of the programming languages COBOL and FORTRAN. Hope your dad enjoyed and continues to enjoy whatever he does. I was born in 1981, learnt programming in college in 1999-2000. I learnt COBOL and FORTRAN too. To me, at this moment, all programming languages are almost the same. I am doing go now, will pick up rust by the end of this year. We have to the solve the problems they keep changing.
- still_grokking 4y ago
  > To me, at this moment, all programming languages are almost the same. COBOL, Fortran, Go, and Rust are all the same language… ;-) Have you tried out OCaml, Scala, or Idris? Or maybe something exotic like Mercury?
sizzzzlerz 4y ago
When I graduated college with a EE degree in 1977, my resume was damned sparse on experience, mainly because I didn't have any. All I could throw out were the EE and engineering classes I'd taken in school. Somehow, I got hired by a company in S.V.. By the time I retired after 43 years, I had so much experience, it wouldn't fit on 3 pages. Fortunately, I didn't need a resume any longer.
- dboreham 4y ago
  "What's a resume?", said in the voice of Maggie Smith ;) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhfpBW-nUWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhfpBW-nUWk)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
otras 4y ago
A LaTeX template for this style (from the last time this was posted): https://www.overleaf.com/read/cqscsqsqmskm https://www.overleaf.com/read/cqscsqsqmskm
- haunter 4y ago
  Restricted, you don’t have a permission
  - otras 4y ago
    My mistake, left over from the ShareLaTeX -> Overleaf transition. Updated.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
atmosx 4y ago
Amazing :D thanks for sharing!
purpleflame1257 4y ago
It's a shame he just went into a home, because we could always use some COBOL programmers.
coss 4y ago
Sorry must be at least 5'10.
tabtab 4y ago
During the early 2000's there was an IT slump in CA due to the dot-com crash, so I spent a lot of time sending out resumes. Eventually I created a script to quickly customize them for a given job ad. It had topic meta-tags, and each topic had four levels: high, medium, low, skip. The level would control the placement and amount of detail given to each topic. Medium would default to "low" if there were no medium-level content/detail. Thus, I didn't have to always type 3 variations per section+topic. There were other switches I won't go into. A found that highlighting applicable domain experience helped a lot: "billing", "budgeting", etc. I still did some hand customization, but the script allowed me to send out roughly 1,000 resumes and/or CV's all over the nation without getting carpel tunnel. (I preferred to stay in CA, but the market was really dry at the time. Plus, location mattered less if it were only a contract.) When feeling trapped, a programmer always "writes a script".
butz 4y ago
I'm going to borrow this layout for my new resume, also I'm definitely using typewriter font.
nimajneb 4y ago
That's cool. I may have worked in former IBM buildings in Endicott that he might have worked in. I worked there a few summers in the early/mid 2000's when it was Endicott Interconnect Technologies. I loved exploring those old buildings, lots of tunnels, abandoned sections, old equipment. I wish I took photos.
- mrzool 4y ago
  We wish too!
- avisser 4y ago
  I was born and raised in Endicott. My only cool visit was going into the quiet room in the IBM Glendale facility. It was covered with that angled studio foam. It was disconcertingly quiet. That sense of "oh this is a big room - I can tell by the echo" starts reporting strange readings.
mud_dauber 4y ago
I nearly switched from EE to CS, but decided against it after my first Fortran class. I had the semi-mythical shoebox of punchcards too - walking to the other end of campus was an exercise in fear.
quijoteuniv 4y ago
On my greatgrandfather inmigrations documents it stated that he could drive horse wagons. He was not able to drive a car yet :)
phamilton4 4y ago
How amazing it would have been to work for Convair or General Dynamics during that time! The absolute heyday of Convair! The B-58 Hustler would have been introduced around the same time your father worked there! One of my favorites! I wonder how many return calls you'd get if you used that resume format today!! I hope you (or whoever owns that repo/resume) gets the chance to talk to him about working there and what it was like to watch computers shrink in size while getting more powerful! Thanks for sharing!
tingletech 4y ago
should have [2018] in the title? previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17787275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17787275
cryptozeus 4y ago
Health = Excellent :)
freedomben 4y ago
Two thoughts immediately jump out to me: 1. As much proprietary stuff as we still have to deal with, we've really come a long way. 2. The approach that our parents took of working at one company for many years (or a whole career) (and retiring with a pension) really disappeared quickly.
- znpy 4y ago
  Regarding 2. : I’d stay at a company many years no problem if that meant i could get a livable wage, start a family, buy a large enough house, save money AND save for a pension… all on a single income. The reality though is that nowadays if you want to reach a salary level where you can start thinking about some of such things you have to do quite a bit of job hopping.
sunjester 4y ago
Your Father is a Gangster.
gchaincl 4y ago
love the format!
drewg123 4y ago
I really need to post something like this about my mom. She had a BS in math and was sent to learn how to program computers in the late 50s in her first job. I have a photo of her in a skirt moving jumpers around on a room sized computer. She programmed in Fortran for most of her career. She retired in the early 90s and passed away soon after. If anything, I followed in her footsteps. I still remember playing colossal cave adventure on the minicomputer (Harris?) in her office in the late 70s.
kasajian 4y ago
I'm at the age where the college I went to required us to take JCL, but it was already on its way out. I also took IBM 360 assembly language, which was WAY MORE high-level of a language than I was expecting it to be. Before then, my impression of assembly instruction set were from 6809E and 6502. In comparison, IBM 360 was a dream. But I never worked with it. It was just a class. The other thing that was interesting is that unlike the rest of our assignments which we could do in the lab, this one we had to send the code to a computer in a different city, which ran the job, and came back with results 4 hours later. You had only 4 runs to get your code to work. The most interesting about part of this story is that the every next semester after me, the same IBM 360 assembly language class use an IBM 360 emulator that ran on IBM PCs (this is at time of real-mode 640K DOS). So if I had just waited a semester, I could have done my assignments using an emulator on the PC.
princeharry86 4y ago
Loved the part in resume which says Health: Excellent
a4isms 4y ago
My mother was a systems analyst in the 1960s. She got a contract as part of a team installing a brand-new IBM/360 at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, her job was to write administration software. She told me it was a top-of-the-line model with 64K of RAM. At some point, it had a malfunction and they had to replace one of its memory "boards," which were lattices with ferromagnetic cores suspended on filaments. She brought the defective board home for me to play with. Although I went on to write software on punch cards, and built a PC in the 1980s, I think the moment that I held core memory in my hands was the closest I've really gotten to "the metal" in my life.
- unnouinceput 4y ago
  >...I think the moment that I held core memory in my hands was the closest I've really gotten to "the metal" in my life< Why is that? You don't build your own computers anymore? Or write a small for fun application on ESP32 that you slap on a board made by yourself? That's the fun, to have a helicopter toy flying your own board + software.
  - a4isms 4y ago
    No, even when I put together a PC, I was putting chips and boards together. But as a boy holding that memory board, I was looking at the cores that held individual bits of memory. Instead of connecting things with ribbon cables or whatever, I was looking at tiny wire that would transmit individual bits of information. Completely different level of abstraction.
  - beezle 4y ago
    I have some core memory - one batch in a small container, the other is wired and mounted inside a picture frame and hangs on the wall. Neat stuff
edfletcher_t137 4y ago
This is lovely and extremely interesting, thank you for sharing. Thinking of your father and your family.
smrtinsert 4y ago
I just wanted too say, this is a beautiful thing. I'm not sure why, but it seems so pure and wonderful.
lizardactivist 4y ago
Interesting to read. Also interesting: 14 people have forked the repo (???).
gcanyon 4y ago
I knew Richard Siegel. My stepfather Marty Einhorn was part of a developers' association in San Diego back in the '70s/'80s. I don't remember the name of it, but I used to go occasionally as a kid. I met Richard Siegel there several times -- seemed like a nice guy.
reader_x 4y ago
I love the resume itself: the non-fussy font, wording, and layout is refreshingly straightforward. It makes me want to take your dad to lunch and hear all his stories. My grandfather piloted a B-29 in 1945, and his brother was an early computer scientist; maybe their paths overlapped. Warm regards to your dad!
luispa 4y ago
This is great. Thanks for sharing.
asn1parse 4y ago
so cool!

1482 points by metadat 4y ago

Blue collar mechanical work during the war, used the GI Bill to get some college, went right to work for IBM, probably recruited by big blue. The Greatest Generation had both the worst and the best.

0x445442 4y ago
Looks like he also got quite a bit of training at what I assume is UCSD Extension program. I received a certificate in C programming from there in the early 90’s. I wonder if they still offer similar programs today.
- Discordian93 4y ago
  It would appear so, albeit now it's an online program: https://extendedstudies.ucsd.edu/courses-and-programs/c-c-programming https://extendedstudies.ucsd.edu/courses-and-programs/c-c-pr...

vjust 4y ago

I worked at a startup, in India's silicon valley, before the word startup ever existed. 1 PC, with 640Kb of Ram, 20Mb hard-disk, the owner took a loan to buy that thing. We were 4 programmers sharing that 1 PC. We each had 2 hour timeslots to code in C or whatever other language. Away from the keyboard, I'd write code on paper, so that I could make the most of my slot. Sometimes I would have to print my code, and my boss (the owner) would go over it with a red-ink pen. I was an apprentice. The boss (owner) would warn me, "beware of the day computers will be writing programs, it will be soon here (and maybe put me out of a job)" Bangalore was where it was all happening then (as far as India was concerned). It was a heady place and time. As a rookie customer support engineer I also got to see Data General's computers at various customer installations, spooled tape, and drum hard-drives, etc. This was early 90s in India. India's IT Export industry was in its infancy.

rossjudson 4y ago

Most "modern" resumes I see could learn a thing or two from this. Tight and to the point.

n_cusan 4y ago

Love the aesthetic of the letter.

screwgoth 4y ago

Why would you check-in these CV pics rather than creating a Medium article or a personal blog?

RamblingCTO 4y ago

I just love how non-bullshit, concise and precise this is! Love it!

boh 4y ago

Not to get off topic, but ending a formal letter to a business with "very truly yours" is weird and people still do it.

known 4y ago

machiste77 4y ago

Ok... but can he traverse a binary tree on a whiteboard?

metadat 4y ago

Direct links to the resumé: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/runvnc/dadsresume/master/IMG_20180817_232813.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/runvnc/dadsresume/master/I... https://raw.githubusercontent.com/runvnc/dadsresume/master/IMG_20180817_233142.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/runvnc/dadsresume/master/I...

rbanffy 4y ago

96 years old and still cooler than the current kids. Who else can say they used a computer with two ROUND screens?

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
If Moto 360 smartwatch counts as a computer, I used two.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  I keep looking at small round displays and think about building something with them. If we could get our hands on a legally available disk image for, day, DtCyber, it'd be feasible to build a cyberdeck-style laptop with 2 round OLEDs (or, more practically, a cheaper rectangular one and a with two circular cutouts. I am looking at https://www.panelook.com/VLT236-RDP-600-23-6inch-848x848-ROUND-LCD-Display-700nits-detail_97851.html https://www.panelook.com/VLT236-RDP-600-23-6inch-848x848-ROU... right now and thinking about making something cool (the resolution is crap, sadly)
no-s 4y ago
> Who else can say they used a computer with two ROUND screens? Hmm, that takes me back, heheh. I remember using some spanking new equipment in the late 60’s with round screens. I was just 8 or 9 then so my recall is unsure but think it was Digital. I do recall learning how to read and enter memory locations with toggles so I could cheat at Lunar Lander.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  The PDP-1 could be fitted with one (I believe you can play with it at the Computer Museum in Mountain View). The CDC-6xxx series had a magnificent console with two round screens (and vector graphics, although they weren't direct view storage tubes like the supercool Tektronix were). There were two such consoles at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle. And, BTW, it's not always that I meet a fellow Elder Thing. I am myself from 1968, so I didn't get near an interesting computer until much later.

spywaregorilla 4y ago

Why does he call out that he is 5'4" I wonder? The "Health: Excellent" seems amusing in today's context too.

elteto 4y ago
He is coming from an aerospace/military background so I assume he is providing this information in case the job requires working in confined spaces and/or lifting weights or other physically strenuous exercise.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Health: Excellent was also just pretty common to stick on resumes in that era.
jakeinspace 4y ago
Military
AlmostAnyone 4y ago
I've been to a military museum few days ago and I was surprised how incredibly small some of the cockpits are. I'm 6'3" and wouldn't fit in most of the fighter jets and other vehicles. Not that I wouldn't be comfortable with my legs pushed to something - my shoulders are literally too wide to get in, my thighs/ass are too wide to even try sitting there. Might be a problem for aerospace tech. And don't get me started on spaceships/capsules - I don't have any particular fear of confined spaces but this was a little too much (too less?).
- taude 4y ago
  Your comments made me wonder if there were height restrictions, found this verbiage on US Airforce site: "For pilot and aircrew positions, height specifications vary by aircraft and most applicants can successfully pursue a career in aviation with the U.S. Air Force. Applicants who are significantly taller or shorter than average may require special screening to ensure they can safely perform operational duties. Applicants of all heights are encouraged to apply."

rmnclmnt 4y ago

Can we bring back this form of resume, please? Information is clearly organized, easy to read, easy to remember. No need for 5-star skills ratings, dual-colored backgrounds, unreadable fonts, and whatnot...

akamaozu 4y ago
I just updated my resume for a new round of job hunting, and I think its similar to what you're describing http://designbymobius.ca/resume http://designbymobius.ca/resume
Arn_Thor 4y ago
The replies here are hilarious: from people saying how much they loathe it to people saying they wish more resumes were like this. It just drives home how much of a crap shoot applying is...
Kostic 4y ago
You can use something similar, even today. My CV isn't *much* different than the one in the link and it seems that it does stand out as I've been complimented about it, twice.
- rmnclmnt 4y ago
  I do too, but I see way too many people "over-thinking" their resumes, especially in the presentation layout: if the raw data is clearly organized, the layout should be minimal, not the other way around
yupper32 4y ago
I don't see many 5-star skill ratings, dual colored backgrounds (?), or unreadable fonts. Where do you see those? I would turn people away from that format if they asked my advice. My resume, and the resumes I've seen aren't too far away from this format. More bullet points and a bit more detail than this, I guess. But otherwise pretty similar
- 4y ago

syntaxing 4y ago

Anybody knows what the “sd” means after his signature?

fm2606 4y ago
Initials of who typed up the letter. Standard practice back then. I learned about it in H.S. typing class in the late 80s Edit: s/resume/letter/g
- glonq 4y ago
  Ditto! We had big dumb noisy electromechanical typewriters in my Typing 9 class, and then upgraded to some kind of semi-smart typewriter for Typing 10 that had a small buffer so that you could type+correct one line but it wouldn't print until you pressed the return/enter key. They only taught us a couple weeks of word processing on computers. Microsoft Works, if I recall correctly.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mbadros 4y ago
Perhaps the initials of the person who typed it. In most business contexts at the time, something like "ABC/jed" at the end meant a secretary/assistant with initials "JED" typed something for a manager/employee with initials "ABC."
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jll29 4y ago

The interesting bit about this post is that with that resume, you can still feed a family in 2022 (okay, you won't need any assembler, and one from the set { Fortran, COBOL } will do). I wonder if Python and JavaScript will get you that far 50 years from now?

Lio 4y ago
Hard to say for sure but I'd bet that Unix/Linux/Posix and SQL skills might still be relevant.
gautamdivgi 4y ago
Java probably will for application development. Python should to with all that ML code. I don’t see anyone in a hurry to move it to Julia. C++ also, if you’re in the embedded space. I know Rust is coming but I don’t think c++ is going anywhere for a while.
- arecurrence 4y ago
  There's so much production code in C++ that it will have a long tail like Fortran even if people were to stop launching new products with it.
wyattpeak 4y ago
One day, long after I'm gone, people will finally accept that Python and JavaScript are no longer young languages. JavaScript is 26 years old, Python is 31. They both continue to grow in importance year-on-year, JavaScript because there is nothing on the horizon which will plausibly replace it, and Python because a large number of industries and programmers genuinely love it. I think there's a nontrivial chance they'll both still be languages of primary importance in 50 years, but I'd bet my bottom dollar that they'll at least remain as relics yet needing support the way Fortran and COBOL exist today.
- sergiotapia 4y ago
  Why did Python win the war with Ruby? Was it purely the math community deciding this is where we throw our weight and left Ruby the runt of the litter?

sergiotapia 4y ago

Excellent thank you so much for sharing this glimpse into our past.

lordnacho 4y ago

That job market seems like so long ago. See job ad, type out a letter with your CV, wait for them to write back, somehow organize a time to meet, more rounds, and so forth. At least it must have been hard to spam out CVs. The guy seems pretty hardcore from my perspective. University training for all those techs. Of course hardware back then cost a lot of money so you wanted people who knew what they were doing. What did people do for interviews back then? Reverse-a-linked-list? That would have been a relatively recent publication in 1980. Kadane's algo didn't arrive until 1984 IIRC. Was K&R published yet?

KineticLensman 4y ago
> What did people do for interviews back then? Reverse-a-linked-list? The last time I was hired for a purely software-related position was 1993. They were looking for an IC (they didn't call it that, then) who would quickly transition to tech lead / system architect. The technical part of the interview involved role-playing myself presenting an initial proposal to a potential customer who had provided a brief written requirement. One of the interviewers role played the customer. IIRC the interview schedule was something like 30 mins to read the requirement and think, 15 mins to ask initial questions, an hour (perhaps longer?) to develop the proposal, an hour (?) to present it and face customer questions. In essence I was being asked to spot ambiguities in the requirement and develop an initial estimate. I passed. I would have failed had I applied for the same job straight out of uni.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deeblering4 4y ago
Up until the mid-late 2000s tech interviews consisted of a few conversations, followed by checking references. CS trivia interviews were largely introduced by Google, with other companies cargo culting that into their interview practices.
- ddulaney 4y ago
  They were definitely influential, but it's way more complicated and probably has as much to do with The Guerilla Guide to Interviewing, which was Microsoft-based. Here's an article that digs into this specific history: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/linked-lists/

nsxwolf 4y ago

It is so simple. There's no "Experienced software architect with a proven track record of delivering high quality and performant blah blah blah" shit. What were the interviews like back then?

insightcheck 4y ago
> "Experienced software architect with a proven track record of delivering high quality and performant blah blah blah" What's wrong with that? Each part of the phrase sounds like something an experienced developer should strive for, and is objectively testable (e.g. delivered projects in a work setting or not, well-written code or not, the software runs quickly or not, etc.). Junior developers in particular may lack the track record part when starting out, so it's a good indicator that a person is applying for more senior positions.
- morelisp 4y ago
  > What's wrong with that? You said it yourself: "Each part of the phrase sounds like something an experienced developer should strive for". Nobody will ever write the opposite. So it signals nothing.
  - insightcheck 4y ago
    But as I also wrote, at least one occurrence of this in a resume is still a good signal that the candidate understands what a hiring manager is looking for, and also signals that the candidate isn't totally junior. If a candidate is totally junior and still writes that they are are a junior an "experienced software architect with a proven track record of delivering high quality and performant..." but fails to back it up, they end up being judged next to people who actually do have this experience. In that case, it could be better to emphasize the "willing to learn quickly"/"excellent team member"/soft skills aspect to set expectations right, and/or develop better technical skills so a candidate can actually claim that. So, it's only really beneficial to write if you actually do have experience, and thus could be a worthwhile signal to include at least once in the resume to show you're at that level.
- 4y ago

haxorito 4y ago

In 1980 - I’m expert in those 3 areas In 2020 - I’m aware of about 10000 different technologies but not expert in anything

karmakaze 4y ago
In 1985 I learned and shipped products using IBM Assembler, Cobol, JCL, TSO, and some others not listed. It was a bit of an unusual mainframe software spinoff company where I did my 1st year and later co-op work placements. My next co-op placement was more conventional embedded C.
aasasd 4y ago
Eh, I was pumping out PHP+MySQL and a bit of Python until the early 2010s, when a) I went to work on a larger site where disparate specialized tech was used to optimize every part of it, and b) hipster explosion of devops happened.

mrpippy 4y ago

Just curious, did he get the job at CDC? Where did his career go after 1980?

ilaksh 4y ago
If I remember correctly it was General Dynamics and then CSC.

alexjray 4y ago

The fact that he lists his height and health cracks me up

pepy 4y ago
old fella made it to 90s so, joke is on us.

bradhe 4y ago

Imagine the changes they saw between 1956 and 1980...that'd be so amazing.

beezle 4y ago
My father started at Univac just after the Korean War. He never did a lot of coding, instead he was a "systems man". He went from the room size mainframe systems with huge dedicated tape and disk machines to time sharing to buying me an Apple II around 1980. Unfortunately, systems and procedures is no longer sexy and is mostly an after thought today. But back in the hey day of the 1960/70s that was where the money was.

walnutclosefarm 4y ago

When I first entered the working world as a programmer and administrator of an "academic computing center", in the early 70s, you met men like Ray - ex-military, GI-bill educated, learned computers from the electricity on up in their mid-career, rather frequently, either as customer engineers for one of the big mainframe manufacturers (there were 7 or 8, depending on when and how you counted), or from the minicomputer upstarts who were then assaulting the mainframe world of computing with their smaller, cheaper, 12 and 16 bit newcomers. Sometimes you'd get the privilege of a lunch or dinner with one sent out "from the lab" who was actually designing and building the machines you were working on. It's hard to explain just how new it all felt, then. But in 1973, even though we were sitting on the cusp of the single chip microprocessor and personal computer revolution, the commercial computer was less than 20 years old, and college recruiting materials might well brag that at their institution, there were not one, but two computers on campus. I remember the day the total RAM at our institution passed the megabyte mark - closer to the end, than the beginning, of the 1970s. The ability to "program" was a rare skill - even the people who taught it were still just learning it.

btilly 4y ago
Computers are older than you think. Computers based on integrated circuits were more recent. But the foundations were much older. For example take the punchcard. Punchcards as a way to work with automatic computing devices go back to Hollerith machines and the 1890 census. That was how IBM got started. The phrase "Super Computing machine" dates back to 1931, and referred to a tabulating machine built for Columbia University. Raytheon was producing and selling analog computers starting in the late 1920s. Much of the calculations for the Manhattan project were done by machines - Feynman talks about this in Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman. And to give a sense of how much history there is, one of my favorite essays in the 1945 essay, As We May Think, which you can find at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m.... It provided the inspiration for both hypertext and the science citation index. The recombining of those ideas in the PageRank patent was the foundation of Google. But how could someone in 1945 understand computing that well? It is simple! Its author was the man who designed those computers Raytheon sold in the 1920s, and among other things was in charge of the development of mechanical computers for the Manhattan Project. (OK, he did a lot more than that...)

mussum_cacilds 4y ago

Metadat your photo has metadata on it. "...Norwich.." Ironic with your username btw

mussum_cacilds 4y ago
If this was a job advertisement ...

KerrAvon 4y ago

So did he get the job?

snapetom 4y ago

My dad was an electrical engineer in his home country. When he immigrated to the US in the Seventies, he had to basically start over because his certifications weren't recognized. He took it as an opportunity to try and change careers, and he looked at everything from locksmithing to programming. Several years ago, long after he passed, I found the C book he used. "Hey, I know C!" I thought. It was a weird feeling to have independently ended up in the field he strived to be in.

karaterobot 4y ago

I have a similar one for myself, let me scan in it: Front-end ninja 2006-2010 Full-stack unicorn 2010-present Follow me on twitter Times have really changed I guess.

jenscow 4y ago
Junior Developer 2020-2021 Senior Developer 2021-present GitHub repos 387
Test0129 4y ago
Ah classic mistake. This will never pass the automated review because you forgot "like, comment, and subscribe!"

SnooSux 4y ago

Interesting that this is like a cover letter and resume in one.

no-s 4y ago
> Interesting that this is like a cover letter and resume in one. Pre-email that was pretty much how it went. There was no point in overcomplicating things. People had to type these cover letters and resumes up, over and over. Or they would pay for a service which used one of those “word processor” gizmos. Fortunately for me in ’80 I had a selectric-like printer and a CRT, the very next year I got an IBM PC and could ditch the mainframe. As a result became tres marketable and enjoyed substantial career enhancement.

gwbas1c 4y ago

My mom passed about a month ago, and when going through a closet, my dad handed me some papers she wrote for a college course. Turns out she was the same age as me when her father died a similar death, and she wrote about similar feelings.

djmips 4y ago
That's very beautiful in a melancholy way.

remind_me_again 4y ago

xrd 4y ago

He lists telemetry on his resume. I haven't seen that on a resume before. I bet Microsoft (and the other FAANGs) would really value that experience.

enw 4y ago

> My dad is 92 and we just put him in a home. Can you stay healthy enough to die of old age in a regular home? “Put him in a home” sounds so ominous and forceful.

Jolter 4y ago
My mom used to joke that in our family, we don’t end up in homes because we all die of cancer before retirement. Well, joke’s on her, she’s still alive at 70 and I survived my first bout with cancer at 36 already so she was wrong on two counts. Still didn’t put any elderly family in any home though…
sandyarmstrong 4y ago
My generous interpretation is that dad needs full-time care that the family can't provide in-house. For example, alzheimer's and dementia patients often have very particular needs.
bee_rider 4y ago
I'm not sure it is a matter of health. An relative of mine in her upper 90's recently passed away at home -- fortunately a number of relatives were well off enough to move nearby and help out, and hire a nurse to check in occasionally, etc etc. If anything I suspect dying at your home would be easier if you weren't very healthy.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  My grandfather died in his home after a short but severe illness with round-the-clock care from the family. It was relatively easy, as far as these sort of things are ever "easy". My grandmother died a few years before that, after spending a year in a nursing home with a less severe illness. It just wasn't feasible to keep her at home: she couldn't really walk any more and half the family would have to pause their lives. I don't really know her opinion on that as we never really had that kind of heart-to-heart relationship, but I would certainly much rather be "put in a home" than be such a burden. My grandfather was very happy that his end was a swift one, so the family wouldn't have to put through a long drawn-out ordeal again.

sswaner 4y ago

That resume reinforces the argument that the GI Bill is the best legislation every passed in the US.

UncleSlacky 4y ago
Shame it wasn't available to everyone who qualified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill#Racial_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill#Racial_discriminatio...
- sswaner 4y ago
  True. Imagine where we would be if that hadn’t happen. The lost opportunity is immense.
- keepquestioning 4y ago
  If slavery is the original sin, this is the second sin.

alberth 4y ago

It's sad how a fraudster can abuse knowing a persons full legal name, date of birth, past home address and phone number. All of which was on this resume posted to the internet, and should probably be masked out. As an aside: loved reading the resume.

fwr 4y ago
It struck me as comforting to actually be able to post it all online without a major worry, I imagine a person of that age living with close supervision of their family can get fully disconnected of this paranoia and just enjoy actual life, sans administration and connectivity.

js2 4y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17787275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17787275

zackmorris 4y ago

If the minimalist resume is appealing, can we also bring back walk-on hiring? In warehouse and construction work, if someone shows up at 7:30 AM on a Monday morning, odds are quite good that the foreman will have something for them to do. Maybe not that day, but maybe tomorrow, or maybe someone on the list above them won't show up that week and they'll get called. I made rent doing that in my early 20s and they even let me leave early sometimes to work on my internet business because I didn't have a family to support and maybe someone else had a bill they needed to pay and wanted my shift. Why again does boutique startup need to interview 500 overqualified people? Hire someone right away and let them quit if they want to and hire someone else. It's just business for crying out loud.

jaza 4y ago
The closest equivalent to that today, in most white-collar roles at least, is contracting. Usually not a physical walk-on hire anymore, but it is often quite a quick process (sometimes as little as a few hours), from "I need a worker", to "I can do it", to "get cracking sonny". And it's then, days / weeks / months (usually not years) later, a similarly quick process, from "we don't need you anymore" / "I'm outta here", to "don't let the door hit you". But the contractor usually needs to be "employed by" some agency company, that guarantees his/her suitability, and that handles the (not insignificant) paperwork / legalities, and that takes a handsome cut.
golergka 4y ago
> Hire someone right away and let them quit if they want to and hire someone else. It's just business for crying out loud. You're not hiring construction workers, you're hiring architects. It often takes more than 3 months to get used to a new codebase and understand how and why things are done the way they are.
- jacobr1 4y ago
  And sometimes you are hiring construction workers, and sometimes trade-specialists. I've hired contractors to address specific tech-debt, or accelerate QA on project, to implement a CRUD type stuff for things with well-known approaches that just take time.

eromReven 4y ago

I dearly miss my adoptive father, and his close friend, who introduced me to computers in the early 1980s, in a dreary backwater town of a backwater Middle-Eastern country, starting with a Sinclair ZX-81, soon followed by a ZX Spectrum :) We were always behind the rest of the world in everything; to get new software or books and magazines we had to wait for someone to make a 10-12 hour trip to the nearest major city, which happened once every couple months, so we had to prepare wishlists in advance ^^ Those 80s computer mags were the best part of my childhood: Your Sinclair and specially ZZAP! because those were all I had access to when someone else was using the TV, or the computer, or just waiting for the electricity to come back on (something which that part of the world still struggles with) I graduated to a Commodore 64 and fantasized about getting a Commodore Amiga, but by the time we could afford a new computer, the world had moved on, and I got my first "IBM PC" in 1993: a 286 with a 40 MB (megabyte) HD :) My dad's friend, my uncle, was pretty much a genius who had taught himself electronics, repaired his own TVs etc and even built his own audio equipment and other simple devices for his friends. He tried to teach me programming in BASIC but none of it stuck with me (I try to make up for that by learning Z80 and 6502 coding these days) The guy died relatively young, and his genius was never recognized outside our small town, but the children he influenced and instilled a love of technology in, always remember him and owe their skills to him.

gomox 4y ago

Whoever can type a resume of that length in a typewriter with no errors I would instantly hire. Such level of attention to detail is extremely rare these days.

president 4y ago
Sadly, communication and writing skills takes a backseat to algorithm interviews. I understand the company benefits massively from hyper-focusing on hard skills but quality of life suffers for your average IC mired by the daily failures of miscommunication.
aidenn0 4y ago
Most likely, someone with the initials "sd" typed out that resume rather than Ray Livesay
- glonq 4y ago
  Can confirm. The convention back then was that the typist puts their initials at the bottom of letters or memos.
- skrbjc 4y ago
  was wondering what that meant
hondo77 4y ago
Back in the 80s I would type up a resume and make corrections with correction paper (big upgrade from liquid paper!). Then I would go to a print shop and have them make copies of it but on nice paper. The copies would not show any signs of the corrections. The same thing could have been done with the cover letter in this case, since only the date and addressee at the top would need to be changed for each company.

major505 4y ago

Seens like beetween 60's and 80's every dev in US would inevitably ending up working for us military.

nathanvanfleet 4y ago

Height: 5'4" Health: Excellent I really need to add this to my resume.

snowwrestler 4y ago

Caught my eye: Listing gender, height, health on the resume (!) Can’t imagine getting a resume with that info these days. Listing corporate training under education. Again, wouldn’t expect to see that today. Not sure if that is because no one does employee training anymore, OR, if it’s just expected and understood that you’ll learn new stuff constantly as a programmer these days.

ingenieros 4y ago
Perhaps not in the U.S due to labor laws and the EEOC, but in some countries you must also attach a head shot. Not only that, but HR can casually drop by your house unannounced to inspect your living conditions and make a note of anything "unusual". I know it sounds straight out of Severance, but that's how things would be stateside if unions and others hadn't drawn the line somewhere.
- dottedmag 4y ago
  What are the countries where this is practiced?
  - ingenieros 4y ago
    All throughout LATAM, look up "visita domiciliaria" in Colombia.
  - bobsmooth 4y ago
    I know in Japan head shot and blood type are expected with a resume.
    - Wohlf 4y ago
      Blood type is weird but in Japanese cultural it's similar to adding your Myers-Briggs type.
    - unsignedint 4y ago
      Headshot yes, blood type typically not. They do require to reveal a bit of other information including age, number of dependents, marital status, expected length of commute, etc. Funniest aspect is that a lot of employers expect applicants to handwrite their resumes and some actually goes as far as rejecting non-handwritten resumes.

gbourant 4y ago

what font is used?

no-s 4y ago

> resume and skills from 1980 Wow, I had a resume (with several years of experience) in 1980. Now I’m feeling really auld. My mom has roots in the era of programming where the program was entered by wiring a plugboard...

izzydata 4y ago

It's curious that anyone would put their health or height on a resume. It doesn't seem particularly relevant to anything.

davedx 4y ago

Poor fella never got to use React

smm11 4y ago

Impressive! Given today's resumes, everyone will look up what React or Node is, in 2064.

poisonborz 4y ago
And logging in monthly to a crumbling government website that still uses them.

malsheikh 4y ago

Hah. I used to live 2 doors down from your dad. Small world.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

orsenthil 4y ago

Good to see your dad's resume. Good recollections of the programming languages COBOL and FORTRAN. Hope your dad enjoyed and continues to enjoy whatever he does. I was born in 1981, learnt programming in college in 1999-2000. I learnt COBOL and FORTRAN too. To me, at this moment, all programming languages are almost the same. I am doing go now, will pick up rust by the end of this year. We have to the solve the problems they keep changing.

still_grokking 4y ago
> To me, at this moment, all programming languages are almost the same. COBOL, Fortran, Go, and Rust are all the same language… ;-) Have you tried out OCaml, Scala, or Idris? Or maybe something exotic like Mercury?

sizzzzlerz 4y ago

When I graduated college with a EE degree in 1977, my resume was damned sparse on experience, mainly because I didn't have any. All I could throw out were the EE and engineering classes I'd taken in school. Somehow, I got hired by a company in S.V.. By the time I retired after 43 years, I had so much experience, it wouldn't fit on 3 pages. Fortunately, I didn't need a resume any longer.

dboreham 4y ago
"What's a resume?", said in the voice of Maggie Smith ;) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhfpBW-nUWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhfpBW-nUWk)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

otras 4y ago

A LaTeX template for this style (from the last time this was posted): https://www.overleaf.com/read/cqscsqsqmskm https://www.overleaf.com/read/cqscsqsqmskm

haunter 4y ago
Restricted, you don’t have a permission
- otras 4y ago
  My mistake, left over from the ShareLaTeX -> Overleaf transition. Updated.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

atmosx 4y ago

Amazing :D thanks for sharing!

purpleflame1257 4y ago

It's a shame he just went into a home, because we could always use some COBOL programmers.

coss 4y ago

Sorry must be at least 5'10.

tabtab 4y ago

During the early 2000's there was an IT slump in CA due to the dot-com crash, so I spent a lot of time sending out resumes. Eventually I created a script to quickly customize them for a given job ad. It had topic meta-tags, and each topic had four levels: high, medium, low, skip. The level would control the placement and amount of detail given to each topic. Medium would default to "low" if there were no medium-level content/detail. Thus, I didn't have to always type 3 variations per section+topic. There were other switches I won't go into. A found that highlighting applicable domain experience helped a lot: "billing", "budgeting", etc. I still did some hand customization, but the script allowed me to send out roughly 1,000 resumes and/or CV's all over the nation without getting carpel tunnel. (I preferred to stay in CA, but the market was really dry at the time. Plus, location mattered less if it were only a contract.) When feeling trapped, a programmer always "writes a script".

butz 4y ago

I'm going to borrow this layout for my new resume, also I'm definitely using typewriter font.

nimajneb 4y ago

That's cool. I may have worked in former IBM buildings in Endicott that he might have worked in. I worked there a few summers in the early/mid 2000's when it was Endicott Interconnect Technologies. I loved exploring those old buildings, lots of tunnels, abandoned sections, old equipment. I wish I took photos.

mrzool 4y ago
We wish too!
avisser 4y ago
I was born and raised in Endicott. My only cool visit was going into the quiet room in the IBM Glendale facility. It was covered with that angled studio foam. It was disconcertingly quiet. That sense of "oh this is a big room - I can tell by the echo" starts reporting strange readings.

mud_dauber 4y ago

I nearly switched from EE to CS, but decided against it after my first Fortran class. I had the semi-mythical shoebox of punchcards too - walking to the other end of campus was an exercise in fear.

quijoteuniv 4y ago

On my greatgrandfather inmigrations documents it stated that he could drive horse wagons. He was not able to drive a car yet :)

phamilton4 4y ago

How amazing it would have been to work for Convair or General Dynamics during that time! The absolute heyday of Convair! The B-58 Hustler would have been introduced around the same time your father worked there! One of my favorites! I wonder how many return calls you'd get if you used that resume format today!! I hope you (or whoever owns that repo/resume) gets the chance to talk to him about working there and what it was like to watch computers shrink in size while getting more powerful! Thanks for sharing!

tingletech 4y ago

should have [2018] in the title? previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17787275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17787275

cryptozeus 4y ago

Health = Excellent :)

freedomben 4y ago

Two thoughts immediately jump out to me: 1. As much proprietary stuff as we still have to deal with, we've really come a long way. 2. The approach that our parents took of working at one company for many years (or a whole career) (and retiring with a pension) really disappeared quickly.

znpy 4y ago
Regarding 2. : I’d stay at a company many years no problem if that meant i could get a livable wage, start a family, buy a large enough house, save money AND save for a pension… all on a single income. The reality though is that nowadays if you want to reach a salary level where you can start thinking about some of such things you have to do quite a bit of job hopping.

sunjester 4y ago

Your Father is a Gangster.

gchaincl 4y ago

love the format!

drewg123 4y ago

I really need to post something like this about my mom. She had a BS in math and was sent to learn how to program computers in the late 50s in her first job. I have a photo of her in a skirt moving jumpers around on a room sized computer. She programmed in Fortran for most of her career. She retired in the early 90s and passed away soon after. If anything, I followed in her footsteps. I still remember playing colossal cave adventure on the minicomputer (Harris?) in her office in the late 70s.

kasajian 4y ago

I'm at the age where the college I went to required us to take JCL, but it was already on its way out. I also took IBM 360 assembly language, which was WAY MORE high-level of a language than I was expecting it to be. Before then, my impression of assembly instruction set were from 6809E and 6502. In comparison, IBM 360 was a dream. But I never worked with it. It was just a class. The other thing that was interesting is that unlike the rest of our assignments which we could do in the lab, this one we had to send the code to a computer in a different city, which ran the job, and came back with results 4 hours later. You had only 4 runs to get your code to work. The most interesting about part of this story is that the every next semester after me, the same IBM 360 assembly language class use an IBM 360 emulator that ran on IBM PCs (this is at time of real-mode 640K DOS). So if I had just waited a semester, I could have done my assignments using an emulator on the PC.

princeharry86 4y ago

Loved the part in resume which says Health: Excellent

a4isms 4y ago

My mother was a systems analyst in the 1960s. She got a contract as part of a team installing a brand-new IBM/360 at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, her job was to write administration software. She told me it was a top-of-the-line model with 64K of RAM. At some point, it had a malfunction and they had to replace one of its memory "boards," which were lattices with ferromagnetic cores suspended on filaments. She brought the defective board home for me to play with. Although I went on to write software on punch cards, and built a PC in the 1980s, I think the moment that I held core memory in my hands was the closest I've really gotten to "the metal" in my life.

unnouinceput 4y ago
>...I think the moment that I held core memory in my hands was the closest I've really gotten to "the metal" in my life< Why is that? You don't build your own computers anymore? Or write a small for fun application on ESP32 that you slap on a board made by yourself? That's the fun, to have a helicopter toy flying your own board + software.
- a4isms 4y ago
  No, even when I put together a PC, I was putting chips and boards together. But as a boy holding that memory board, I was looking at the cores that held individual bits of memory. Instead of connecting things with ribbon cables or whatever, I was looking at tiny wire that would transmit individual bits of information. Completely different level of abstraction.
- beezle 4y ago
  I have some core memory - one batch in a small container, the other is wired and mounted inside a picture frame and hangs on the wall. Neat stuff

edfletcher_t137 4y ago

This is lovely and extremely interesting, thank you for sharing. Thinking of your father and your family.

smrtinsert 4y ago

I just wanted too say, this is a beautiful thing. I'm not sure why, but it seems so pure and wonderful.

lizardactivist 4y ago

Interesting to read. Also interesting: 14 people have forked the repo (???).

gcanyon 4y ago

I knew Richard Siegel. My stepfather Marty Einhorn was part of a developers' association in San Diego back in the '70s/'80s. I don't remember the name of it, but I used to go occasionally as a kid. I met Richard Siegel there several times -- seemed like a nice guy.

reader_x 4y ago

I love the resume itself: the non-fussy font, wording, and layout is refreshingly straightforward. It makes me want to take your dad to lunch and hear all his stories. My grandfather piloted a B-29 in 1945, and his brother was an early computer scientist; maybe their paths overlapped. Warm regards to your dad!

luispa 4y ago

This is great. Thanks for sharing.

asn1parse 4y ago

so cool!