<story><title>My dad&apos;s resume and skills from 1980</title><url>https://github.com/runvnc/dadsresume</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hnlmorg</author><text>Universities are always several years behind the curve. At college in the 90s they were still teaching token ring networking despite Ethernet already being common place. The same college told me that programmers didn’t design any of the code they write; they only transcribe code from flow charts.&lt;p&gt;Just yesterday I was talking to a grad about DevOps. He said the field sounded boring from what he was taught at uni. Then when we discussed it more it turned out his “DevOps” course was actually just teaching them how to be a scrum master and didn’t include a single thing about automation, infrastructure as code, etc.&lt;p&gt;I also remember just how garbage general publications were with regards to IT. And to be fair they still are now. But there was always a wealth of better information in specialist publications as well as online (particularly by the late 90s).</text></item><item><author>lambdasquirrel</author><text>&amp;gt; &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#x27;t thought this thing about computers would go too far.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I almost didn&amp;#x27;t major in Computer Science because in the late 90s, there were so many negative articles in the New York Times, vis-a-vis software. People don&amp;#x27;t remember it now, but the media and the culture were utterly hostile towards us, and loved to say our jobs were going to India, that everything there was to know about Computer Science could be studied in railyard switching, in existing abstract math textbooks, etc.&lt;p&gt;By a combination of luck, and my dad&amp;#x27;s insistence, I ended up at Carnegie Mellon, and while I was there, I saw what folks at Google were doing, and I thought to myself, no, this stuff is hard, and this is just going to be the beginning.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;It was way too tedious to do. You&amp;#x27;d spend hours getting the cards just right. We used to put them in a shoebox and mark them with a pen in case we dropped them on the way to the lab. Then you&amp;#x27;d wait until the next day to get your results. If you had a mistake you&amp;#x27;d repeat the whole process&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Even what came after that, e.g. in C &amp;#x2F; C++ was considerably tedious compared to what we do today. Folks sometimes had to do objdumps of compiled binaries to debug what was going on. We had to get coredumps, load them up, and try to determine what memory error had caused things to crash (this is an entire class of problems that doesn&amp;#x27;t exist today). You used to legit need that CS degree in order to code in your day-to-day because you had to understand the function stack, the network stack, basic syscalls like wait and poll, etc.&lt;p&gt;It was a lot of work, for relatively little product, and I think part of the reason why software is paid more today is in part because of 1. faster processing speeds and 2. better tooling and automation, and higher-level programming languages – all of which were enabled in part by cheaper &amp;#x2F; faster CPU speeds (e.g. people don&amp;#x27;t have to care about how slow Python is – you can optimize it after you find product-market-fit), and 3. a better understanding of how software should be developed, at all levels of management.</text></item><item><author>nervousvarun</author><text>We probably are close to the same age.  My dad was an engineer who also learned to program FORTRAN in the 70&amp;#x27;s.&lt;p&gt;When I asked him a similar question his reply was (quotes are paraphrased): &amp;quot;It was way too tedious to do.   You&amp;#x27;d spend hours getting the cards just right.  We used to put them in a shoebox and mark them with a pen in case we dropped them on the way to the lab.  Then you&amp;#x27;d wait until the next day to get your results.  If you had a mistake you&amp;#x27;d repeat the whole process&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Basically it was considered tedious, grunt work in his opinion (at the time...he later of course has come to understand the importance).</text></item><item><author>marcodiego</author><text>My father was a physicist. He learned to program in FORTRAN in the university in the 70&amp;#x27;s.&lt;p&gt;Decades later I, still a teenager, asked him something like this: &amp;quot;Dad, you were a FORTRAN programmer and  physicist in the 70&amp;#x27;s, you could be a very well paid developer anywhere in the developed world... why didn&amp;#x27;t you?&amp;quot;; he answered me: &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#x27;t thought this thing about computers would go too far.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>walnutclosefarm</author><text>When I first entered the working world as a programmer and administrator of an &amp;quot;academic computing center&amp;quot;, 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&amp;#x27;d get the privilege of a lunch or dinner with one sent out &amp;quot;from the lab&amp;quot; who was actually designing and building the machines you were working on.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;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 &amp;quot;program&amp;quot; was a rare skill - even the people  who taught it were still just learning it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>walnutclosefarm</author><text>That may well be true of some universities today.   In 1970, they were pretty much the only place you could get hands on experience with a computer unless you somehow slid into a programming job in the financial industry, or a one of the few other areas that actually used them. And they were not behind the curve on the technology, although they tended to have lower end hardware than industry, because any compute was very expensive.   The invoice on a 64k byte HP3000 in 1972, which on a good day could support half a dozen users actually doing any work, was over $100K.  Memory upgrades to 128K ran you about $1&amp;#x2F;byte installed - maybe $8 in today&amp;#x27;s money.   It was a big deal to be allowed hands on use of them.</text></comment>
<story><title>My dad&apos;s resume and skills from 1980</title><url>https://github.com/runvnc/dadsresume</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hnlmorg</author><text>Universities are always several years behind the curve. At college in the 90s they were still teaching token ring networking despite Ethernet already being common place. The same college told me that programmers didn’t design any of the code they write; they only transcribe code from flow charts.&lt;p&gt;Just yesterday I was talking to a grad about DevOps. He said the field sounded boring from what he was taught at uni. Then when we discussed it more it turned out his “DevOps” course was actually just teaching them how to be a scrum master and didn’t include a single thing about automation, infrastructure as code, etc.&lt;p&gt;I also remember just how garbage general publications were with regards to IT. And to be fair they still are now. But there was always a wealth of better information in specialist publications as well as online (particularly by the late 90s).</text></item><item><author>lambdasquirrel</author><text>&amp;gt; &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#x27;t thought this thing about computers would go too far.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I almost didn&amp;#x27;t major in Computer Science because in the late 90s, there were so many negative articles in the New York Times, vis-a-vis software. People don&amp;#x27;t remember it now, but the media and the culture were utterly hostile towards us, and loved to say our jobs were going to India, that everything there was to know about Computer Science could be studied in railyard switching, in existing abstract math textbooks, etc.&lt;p&gt;By a combination of luck, and my dad&amp;#x27;s insistence, I ended up at Carnegie Mellon, and while I was there, I saw what folks at Google were doing, and I thought to myself, no, this stuff is hard, and this is just going to be the beginning.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;It was way too tedious to do. You&amp;#x27;d spend hours getting the cards just right. We used to put them in a shoebox and mark them with a pen in case we dropped them on the way to the lab. Then you&amp;#x27;d wait until the next day to get your results. If you had a mistake you&amp;#x27;d repeat the whole process&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Even what came after that, e.g. in C &amp;#x2F; C++ was considerably tedious compared to what we do today. Folks sometimes had to do objdumps of compiled binaries to debug what was going on. We had to get coredumps, load them up, and try to determine what memory error had caused things to crash (this is an entire class of problems that doesn&amp;#x27;t exist today). You used to legit need that CS degree in order to code in your day-to-day because you had to understand the function stack, the network stack, basic syscalls like wait and poll, etc.&lt;p&gt;It was a lot of work, for relatively little product, and I think part of the reason why software is paid more today is in part because of 1. faster processing speeds and 2. better tooling and automation, and higher-level programming languages – all of which were enabled in part by cheaper &amp;#x2F; faster CPU speeds (e.g. people don&amp;#x27;t have to care about how slow Python is – you can optimize it after you find product-market-fit), and 3. a better understanding of how software should be developed, at all levels of management.</text></item><item><author>nervousvarun</author><text>We probably are close to the same age.  My dad was an engineer who also learned to program FORTRAN in the 70&amp;#x27;s.&lt;p&gt;When I asked him a similar question his reply was (quotes are paraphrased): &amp;quot;It was way too tedious to do.   You&amp;#x27;d spend hours getting the cards just right.  We used to put them in a shoebox and mark them with a pen in case we dropped them on the way to the lab.  Then you&amp;#x27;d wait until the next day to get your results.  If you had a mistake you&amp;#x27;d repeat the whole process&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Basically it was considered tedious, grunt work in his opinion (at the time...he later of course has come to understand the importance).</text></item><item><author>marcodiego</author><text>My father was a physicist. He learned to program in FORTRAN in the university in the 70&amp;#x27;s.&lt;p&gt;Decades later I, still a teenager, asked him something like this: &amp;quot;Dad, you were a FORTRAN programmer and  physicist in the 70&amp;#x27;s, you could be a very well paid developer anywhere in the developed world... why didn&amp;#x27;t you?&amp;quot;; he answered me: &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#x27;t thought this thing about computers would go too far.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>walnutclosefarm</author><text>When I first entered the working world as a programmer and administrator of an &amp;quot;academic computing center&amp;quot;, 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&amp;#x27;d get the privilege of a lunch or dinner with one sent out &amp;quot;from the lab&amp;quot; who was actually designing and building the machines you were working on.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;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 &amp;quot;program&amp;quot; was a rare skill - even the people  who taught it were still just learning it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mgkimsal</author><text>I was having to deal with token ring in &amp;#x27;96-&amp;#x27;97, and have not touched it since.  Seems like it went away quite quickly.  Cue up someone replying that they&amp;#x27;re still maintaining a token ring system in 2022... :)</text></comment>