7 ms·

Notice the lack of reference to rockstars, ninjas, or brogramming.

Groxx 14y ago
Which serves as exhibit A in the evidence against time travel being invented within a decade.
look_lookatme 14y ago
And also notice, with transparency, that your work will ultimately contribute to strategies and innovations in the field of power acquisition and, by proxy, literally the death of other humans. Worth noting, also, minus the overt militaristic references, how similar these job descriptions are to a modern quantitative finance position.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- gaius 14y ago
  This was 1959. Cold War in full swing, WW2, Korea a recent memory for many,
  - look_lookatme 14y ago
    And today is the greatest time to be a programmer in the history of the profession. If ninjas and rockstars and brogrammers are part of it, it's certainly better than building war simulations and calculating civilian casualty rates in the case of mutually assured destruction in order to advance your profession and provide for your loved ones. Those were not halcyon days for mathematicians, physicists and engineers. I'll take the juvenilization of the profession instead.
    - mjwalshe 14y ago
      Where do you think most of the research funding an AI and ML came from? At my first job we did some work in expert systems and Ai(applying it to engineering problems) and one guy moved from those projects because of his concerns sbout the source of the funding.
    - robatsu 14y ago
      I think the early, mid 90's were a lot more interesting time to be a programmer than now, just before the Internet explosion. Back then, a bigger percentage of the focus was on using computers to do something, solve a problem directly (as opposed to implicitly) and the computers were actually getting powerful enough to do things on a cheap basis. People's cat pictures were a vanishingly small portion of the landscape. As an example, cheap computing power is one of the reasons that while at the beginning of the 90's, nuclear power was considered a money losing proposition by electric utilities and everyone was trying to get out from under them but by the end of the decade, all the utilities were hanging on to their nukes for dear life and trying to figure out how to extend their licenses/service life. Now, a much bigger percentage of the focus is simply getting information out of one spot, tranporting it to another, dolling it up w/some marketing glitz. That's not to say that the cool stuff isn't still going on, but that it is a smaller percentage and the profession has been dumbed down significantly (hence brogrammers and all).
      - radagaisus 14y ago
        Things that weren't in the mid 90's: stack overflow, google, gmail, google docs, os x, github, git, torrents, and basically every tool I use to make things with my computer (besides bash). No I don't want to go back.
        deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
        ams6110 14y ago
        Yeah, back then you actually had to read documentation (yes, it existed) and more or less know what you are doing. Copy/paste coding and questions from colleagues like "How to connect to datbase, pls help urgently!" were unheard of.
        angersock 14y ago
        You are certainly welcome to your opinion, but it's unfortunate that you seem so heavily defined by your tools (especially when they aren't even one's you've written).
    - quacker 14y ago
      I agree with your sentiment, but it's plain ignorance to believe that those "war simulations" or any other software developed by the military is always intended to raise the kill count and not prevent casualties. To make my point, I would bet the invention of C made the military more effective in some fashion or other, but that's only a consequence of solving the more basic problems C was intended to address. I think it's hard to argue that the problems IBM was solving, or those that the military solves, are really any different in that respect. They solve one problem and then the solution can and will be adapted for other purposes, and it's often hard to judge whether that's a net good or not.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
    - philwelch 14y ago
      The mathematicians, physicists, and engineers of that era helped to preserve the survival of our civilization so you could have the luxury of being an idealistic pacifist.
      - DanBC 14y ago
        Some of them worked for Nazi Germany or Stalinist regime or horrific Japanese medical "science" / torture so not all of them were working for freedom. Scientists sometimes say that science is neutral, and it's up to society to use the results wisely. I appreciate that scientists don't always have freedom of choice under a brutal regime.
        philwelch 14y ago
        I was talking about American scientists ("our civilization"), though the other western allies would qualify as well. Sorry about the confusion.
        DanBC 14y ago
        EDIT: My reply sounds bickering. Sorry, it isn't meant to! Stalin was a western ally. Stalin was, without doubt, evil. German scientists worked for the US; they were recruited through Operation Paperclip. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip) There's interesting stuff about President Truman's anti-Nazi directive (tl;dr: Don't use scientists who were (or were supportive of) Nazis) and the way that was ignored.
        philwelch 14y ago
        > Stalin was a western ally. No he wasn't; he was just an ally. The term "western allies" excludes the Soviet Union, that's why I intentionally chose it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Allies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Allies German scientists that helped the US, to whatever extent they helped the US, did help to preserve our civilization, even if they tried to destroy it during the war. But let's ignore them; I'm talking about the thousands of American scientists and engineers worked on defense applications in the 20th century, and to some extent about those of Britain, Canada, France, and so forth.
- CamperBob 14y ago
  Those strategic innovations seem to have forestalled WWIII, so I don't know that I would be quite that disrespectful.
- javert 14y ago
  The military is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for bad things, and it can be used for good things. Without having a military, we would be up shit's creek. I think you should be more thankful of and respectful towards the people "in the trenches," and also the technologists, who make it possible for you to live in a safe place and spend your time according to your desires.
  - burgerbrain 14y ago
    Consider for a moment who that military decided needed killing en mass during the decade following the topic of discussion. Where all those communal farmers really threatening our way of life? When this army got it's ass kicked and left with it's tail between its legs a few years later, leaving those farmers to live their own lives as they chose to, did our society come crashing down? Why didn't it? There are no Mongol hoards waiting to invade, suggestions to the contrary come from those who profit from the fiction and those who buy into it.
    - javert 14y ago
      that military decided needed killing No, politicians decided that. That's an important distinction. If we don't like what the military is doing, we need to place blame where it belongs: on the politicians. There are no Mongol hoards waiting to invade The military is still highly important. Think about the role it played in the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and WWII, to name a few wars that most consider to have been justified for the US to enter. More recently, the Gulf War where Hussein invaded Kuwait. I personally believe that in the future, Iran and/or North Korea will acquire a nuclear weapon that threatens US citizens. Somali pirates. Who knows what else will come up. We still need a military.
      - burgerbrain 14y ago
        So if the military does something and it is bad, then it isn't their fault because politicians made them do it. But if the military does it and it is good, then they deserve our praise and thanks.... Do you recognize the problem here? Regardless, this whole thought that we should be "thankful" to the American military is absurd. They have billions of dollars to spend every year, why do they also require thanks? Do tanks run on thanks? No. Thanks is needed because without the blinding effect of popular societal support, their actions do not stand for themselves. The military requires praise to be shovelled onto it like coal into a furnace 24/7 so that its hired guns can continue to lie to themselves and sleep at night. Listen, if you think they should have thanks, then do it yourself; however it is not your place to scold others who want nothing to do with it.
- ImprovedSilence 14y ago
  Believe it or not, there are also plenty of "Defense" jobs that contribue to safety and the preservation of human lives.
  - cmagahern 14y ago
    Can you name a specific example?
    - The_Fox 14y ago
      Yes, easily. One responsibility of the Canadian Air Force is search and rescue on land and at sea.
      - batista 14y ago
        Yeah, right. Couldn't that be implemented by some specialty rescue team? Looks more like something that was assigned to the Air Force mostly for public relations ("look, we also save lives").
        ImprovedSilence 14y ago
        You mean like this specialty rescue team?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_Pararescue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_Parares...
        batista 14y ago
        Yes, except not having ANYTHING to do with the military.
    - philwelch 14y ago
      Easily: thanks to the development and maintenance of the US nuclear forces, the US will never enter into a direct military conflict with any other first-world country with nuclear weapons of its own. Thanks to the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction, what could have easily been a massively destructive total war between two superpowers was restricted to a half-century of posturing and proxy warfare, all of which killed at least an order of magnitude fewer people than would have died in a direct, total war. No, it's not warm and fuzzy to think about things in this way, but we're not children and we don't have the luxury of idealistic naivety.
- appleaintbad 14y ago
  Valid points, but isn't it awful also to have a company that basically wastes people's time and keeps them from doing anything but consuming? I think computers should be employed to do useful things like 1. help us colonize space, 2. stop world hunger, 3. stop poverty, 4. stop war, 5. help people to love each other, 6. help us understand and love God/a higher being (assuming you believe in God/a higher being). If your work is for some SAAS app that doesn't work toward those things- it is contributing to the death of humans just like a military application- only in a different way.
sawyer 14y ago
Notice that some things haven't changed at all: "We're solving tough problems!"
marshallp 14y ago
Or "developer". You can probably plot the demise of programming as a respected profession as their titles changes from programmers to "software developers" or "architects", maybe using google books n-gram.
eternalban 14y ago
On the other hand, note that even back then a "senior" programmer is spec'd as having "2 years" of experience.
- angersock 14y ago
  "Qualified candidates will have at least 5 years of experience with using Flowmatic in an enterprise setting."

Groxx 14y ago

Which serves as exhibit A in the evidence against time travel being invented within a decade.

And also notice, with transparency, that your work will ultimately contribute to strategies and innovations in the field of power acquisition and, by proxy, literally the death of other humans. Worth noting, also, minus the overt militaristic references, how similar these job descriptions are to a modern quantitative finance position.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
gaius 14y ago
This was 1959. Cold War in full swing, WW2, Korea a recent memory for many,
- look_lookatme 14y ago
  And today is the greatest time to be a programmer in the history of the profession. If ninjas and rockstars and brogrammers are part of it, it's certainly better than building war simulations and calculating civilian casualty rates in the case of mutually assured destruction in order to advance your profession and provide for your loved ones. Those were not halcyon days for mathematicians, physicists and engineers. I'll take the juvenilization of the profession instead.
  - mjwalshe 14y ago
    Where do you think most of the research funding an AI and ML came from? At my first job we did some work in expert systems and Ai(applying it to engineering problems) and one guy moved from those projects because of his concerns sbout the source of the funding.
  - robatsu 14y ago
    I think the early, mid 90's were a lot more interesting time to be a programmer than now, just before the Internet explosion. Back then, a bigger percentage of the focus was on using computers to do something, solve a problem directly (as opposed to implicitly) and the computers were actually getting powerful enough to do things on a cheap basis. People's cat pictures were a vanishingly small portion of the landscape. As an example, cheap computing power is one of the reasons that while at the beginning of the 90's, nuclear power was considered a money losing proposition by electric utilities and everyone was trying to get out from under them but by the end of the decade, all the utilities were hanging on to their nukes for dear life and trying to figure out how to extend their licenses/service life. Now, a much bigger percentage of the focus is simply getting information out of one spot, tranporting it to another, dolling it up w/some marketing glitz. That's not to say that the cool stuff isn't still going on, but that it is a smaller percentage and the profession has been dumbed down significantly (hence brogrammers and all).
    - radagaisus 14y ago
      Things that weren't in the mid 90's: stack overflow, google, gmail, google docs, os x, github, git, torrents, and basically every tool I use to make things with my computer (besides bash). No I don't want to go back.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - ams6110 14y ago
        Yeah, back then you actually had to read documentation (yes, it existed) and more or less know what you are doing. Copy/paste coding and questions from colleagues like "How to connect to datbase, pls help urgently!" were unheard of.
      - angersock 14y ago
        You are certainly welcome to your opinion, but it's unfortunate that you seem so heavily defined by your tools (especially when they aren't even one's you've written).
  - quacker 14y ago
    I agree with your sentiment, but it's plain ignorance to believe that those "war simulations" or any other software developed by the military is always intended to raise the kill count and not prevent casualties. To make my point, I would bet the invention of C made the military more effective in some fashion or other, but that's only a consequence of solving the more basic problems C was intended to address. I think it's hard to argue that the problems IBM was solving, or those that the military solves, are really any different in that respect. They solve one problem and then the solution can and will be adapted for other purposes, and it's often hard to judge whether that's a net good or not.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - philwelch 14y ago
    The mathematicians, physicists, and engineers of that era helped to preserve the survival of our civilization so you could have the luxury of being an idealistic pacifist.
    - DanBC 14y ago
      Some of them worked for Nazi Germany or Stalinist regime or horrific Japanese medical "science" / torture so not all of them were working for freedom. Scientists sometimes say that science is neutral, and it's up to society to use the results wisely. I appreciate that scientists don't always have freedom of choice under a brutal regime.
      - philwelch 14y ago
        I was talking about American scientists ("our civilization"), though the other western allies would qualify as well. Sorry about the confusion.
        DanBC 14y ago
        EDIT: My reply sounds bickering. Sorry, it isn't meant to! Stalin was a western ally. Stalin was, without doubt, evil. German scientists worked for the US; they were recruited through Operation Paperclip. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip) There's interesting stuff about President Truman's anti-Nazi directive (tl;dr: Don't use scientists who were (or were supportive of) Nazis) and the way that was ignored.
        philwelch 14y ago
        > Stalin was a western ally. No he wasn't; he was just an ally. The term "western allies" excludes the Soviet Union, that's why I intentionally chose it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Allies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Allies German scientists that helped the US, to whatever extent they helped the US, did help to preserve our civilization, even if they tried to destroy it during the war. But let's ignore them; I'm talking about the thousands of American scientists and engineers worked on defense applications in the 20th century, and to some extent about those of Britain, Canada, France, and so forth.
CamperBob 14y ago
Those strategic innovations seem to have forestalled WWIII, so I don't know that I would be quite that disrespectful.
javert 14y ago
The military is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for bad things, and it can be used for good things. Without having a military, we would be up shit's creek. I think you should be more thankful of and respectful towards the people "in the trenches," and also the technologists, who make it possible for you to live in a safe place and spend your time according to your desires.
- burgerbrain 14y ago
  Consider for a moment who that military decided needed killing en mass during the decade following the topic of discussion. Where all those communal farmers really threatening our way of life? When this army got it's ass kicked and left with it's tail between its legs a few years later, leaving those farmers to live their own lives as they chose to, did our society come crashing down? Why didn't it? There are no Mongol hoards waiting to invade, suggestions to the contrary come from those who profit from the fiction and those who buy into it.
  - javert 14y ago
    that military decided needed killing No, politicians decided that. That's an important distinction. If we don't like what the military is doing, we need to place blame where it belongs: on the politicians. There are no Mongol hoards waiting to invade The military is still highly important. Think about the role it played in the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and WWII, to name a few wars that most consider to have been justified for the US to enter. More recently, the Gulf War where Hussein invaded Kuwait. I personally believe that in the future, Iran and/or North Korea will acquire a nuclear weapon that threatens US citizens. Somali pirates. Who knows what else will come up. We still need a military.
    - burgerbrain 14y ago
      So if the military does something and it is bad, then it isn't their fault because politicians made them do it. But if the military does it and it is good, then they deserve our praise and thanks.... Do you recognize the problem here? Regardless, this whole thought that we should be "thankful" to the American military is absurd. They have billions of dollars to spend every year, why do they also require thanks? Do tanks run on thanks? No. Thanks is needed because without the blinding effect of popular societal support, their actions do not stand for themselves. The military requires praise to be shovelled onto it like coal into a furnace 24/7 so that its hired guns can continue to lie to themselves and sleep at night. Listen, if you think they should have thanks, then do it yourself; however it is not your place to scold others who want nothing to do with it.
ImprovedSilence 14y ago
Believe it or not, there are also plenty of "Defense" jobs that contribue to safety and the preservation of human lives.
- cmagahern 14y ago
  Can you name a specific example?
  - The_Fox 14y ago
    Yes, easily. One responsibility of the Canadian Air Force is search and rescue on land and at sea.
    - batista 14y ago
      Yeah, right. Couldn't that be implemented by some specialty rescue team? Looks more like something that was assigned to the Air Force mostly for public relations ("look, we also save lives").
      - ImprovedSilence 14y ago
        You mean like this specialty rescue team?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_Pararescue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_Parares...
        batista 14y ago
        Yes, except not having ANYTHING to do with the military.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    Easily: thanks to the development and maintenance of the US nuclear forces, the US will never enter into a direct military conflict with any other first-world country with nuclear weapons of its own. Thanks to the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction, what could have easily been a massively destructive total war between two superpowers was restricted to a half-century of posturing and proxy warfare, all of which killed at least an order of magnitude fewer people than would have died in a direct, total war. No, it's not warm and fuzzy to think about things in this way, but we're not children and we don't have the luxury of idealistic naivety.
appleaintbad 14y ago
Valid points, but isn't it awful also to have a company that basically wastes people's time and keeps them from doing anything but consuming? I think computers should be employed to do useful things like 1. help us colonize space, 2. stop world hunger, 3. stop poverty, 4. stop war, 5. help people to love each other, 6. help us understand and love God/a higher being (assuming you believe in God/a higher being). If your work is for some SAAS app that doesn't work toward those things- it is contributing to the death of humans just like a military application- only in a different way.

sawyer 14y ago

Notice that some things haven't changed at all: "We're solving tough problems!"

marshallp 14y ago

Or "developer". You can probably plot the demise of programming as a respected profession as their titles changes from programmers to "software developers" or "architects", maybe using google books n-gram.

eternalban 14y ago

On the other hand, note that even back then a "senior" programmer is spec'd as having "2 years" of experience.

angersock 14y ago
"Qualified candidates will have at least 5 years of experience with using Flowmatic in an enterprise setting."