10 ms·
IBM 1959 Job Post
- rollypolly 14y agoNotice the lack of reference to rockstars, ninjas, or brogramming.
- Groxx 14y agoWhich serves as exhibit A in the evidence against time travel being invented within a decade.
- look_lookatme 14y agoAnd 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 agoThis was 1959. Cold War in full swing, WW2, Korea a recent memory for many,
- look_lookatme 14y agoAnd 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.
- robatsu 14y agoI 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 agoThings 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 agoYeah, 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 agoYou 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).
- CamperBob 14y agoThose strategic innovations seem to have forestalled WWIII, so I don't know that I would be quite that disrespectful.
- javert 14y agoThe 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 agoConsider 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 agothat 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 agoSo 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 agoBelieve it or not, there are also plenty of "Defense" jobs that contribue to safety and the preservation of human lives.
- cmagahern 14y agoCan you name a specific example?
- The_Fox 14y agoYes, easily. One responsibility of the Canadian Air Force is search and rescue on land and at sea.
- batista 14y agoYeah, 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 agoYou 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 agoYes, except not having ANYTHING to do with the military.
- philwelch 14y agoEasily: 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 agoValid 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 agoNotice that some things haven't changed at all: "We're solving tough problems!"
- marshallp 14y agoOr "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 agoOn 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 agoI'm noticing that a lot of the expectations / requirements are a lot lower. Most are "up to 2 years" experience. Last time I was job hunting, everything was asking for 5+ years experience in one software stack and multiple frameworks. Sometimes 5+ years in multiple fields. What changed?
- tim_h 14y agoProbably the availability of people with 5+ years of programming experience. It was 1959! :)
- Groxx 14y agoI don't know. Essentially every place I've contacted I've asked about that clause. Not one actually expected to find it, but they all listed it. 5+ years seems to me to be a strange expectation. That would mean you've had either multiple failing jobs and might be an undesirable, or you've been somewhere for 5+ years. If you've been there for 5+ years, what's motivating you to leave? Where do people expect to find these vast pools of highly-skilled jobless people who have experience with <software stack X> in <field which employs a couple thousand people nationally> within <narrow time window>? That they never find any seems to underscore how irrational the 'requirement' is in the first place, but I see it everywhere.
- groovy2shoes 14y agoI remember reading a job ad back in 2003 that wanted someone with 5+ years of C# and .NET experience. I assume the position was filled before 2006. (It's possible but unlikely that they were solely looking to poach Microsoft employees.)
- richardlblair 14y agoThis happens a lot. HR ends up being in charge and comes up with requirements that don't make much of any sense.
- kylemaxwell 14y agoI love the fact that the problem domains remain so static. Well, that's not strictly true: we have a lot more problem domains with which to contend now, but even our tremendously improved knowledge in operations research, military science, and meteorology haven't led us to consider these "solved problems". Though I personally wish we focused much more on (1) and (3) than (2) as a society.
- bialecki 14y agoThe funny thing about the problems stated at the top is I could imagine seeing a job posting today (maybe even from IBM) with the same problems and thinking, "Wow, I have no idea how I'd go about solving those problems." It makes me wonder what they were really doing back then vs what a job in those fields would look like today. Related, I find it somewhat annoying when people abstract the job to such a degree that you can't see the tangible things you'd be working on in that field. I'm all for a "change the world" vision -- I really am, not just qualifying --, but sometimes I'd like to hear up front how they plan to solve that problem.
- jmspring 14y agoThe saddest thing for me is just what an institution IBM has been for America over the years. Having gone to UC Santa Cruz, the Computer Engineering department was started by IBM alums (my advisor was Glen Langdon of Langdon and Rissanen / Arithmetic Coding fame. Other friends/faculty spent time working at IBM Almaden Research where several advances in storage technologies have been produced. These days, IBM is in decline. Friends/tech blogs/even sites like Cringely -- http://www.cringely.com/ http://www.cringely.com/ -- note how IBM is quickly trying to shed any semblance to it's old self in names of meeting investor expectations. IBM isn't the only legacy company in the same situation, we have seen this happen with HP as well as AT&T over the years. Microsoft Research, Google to a point, and Xerox Parc (after a period of decline) are stepping up for some long term/basic research. But, I wonder, will we every see the hey day of IBM Research, PARC, Bell Labs, etc. ever again?
- tgflynn 14y agoWhat about Watson ? IBM is still one of only very few companies doing truly interesting research.
- jmspring 14y agoI hope Watson survives, but based on what I've heard out of Almaden over the years, I'm skeptical.
- ilamont 14y agoIBM is still one of only very few companies doing truly interesting research. Can you qualify that? Almost every big technology company and thousands of small ones have teams of smart people conducting interesting research across many fields. Take a look at any issue of Wired or Technology Review (or the top links to HN on any given day) to see some examples.
- joshaidan 14y agoThe first thing I noticed that none of the positions were asking for degrees in Computer Science. All math and physics. Before its time I guess.
- jaredsohn 14y agoWikipedia says the first CS degree in the US was at Purdue in 1962. (And the first internationally was at Cambridge in 1953.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science
- petegrif 14y agoLove the pencil. Nice period touch.
- petegrif 14y agoLove the pencil. Nice period touch.
- savrajsingh 14y agoIt's amazing how so many of those projects remain largely unsolved today.
- derleth 14y agoIt was a time when people thought Artificial Intelligence was either on the way shortly (those who actually used computers) or already here with those Atomic Brains we have now (everyone else). I just watched the Svengoolie episode of "This Island Earth" and, early on, one of the characters mentioned how that era was called the "pushbutton age". Well, we live in more of a "pushbutton age" now but familiarity breeds contempt; conversely, unfamiliarity breeds a kind of awe, and unreasonable expectations that can leave a bad taste in peoples' mouths. I personally remember going through it when the Internet was first beginning to trickle down to the masses, pre-Bubble, and I remember thinking that some of those ideas then were patently idiotic. But which! And in the 1920s, radio went through the same thing, if not bigger. Radio!
- jroseattle 14y agoA few observations: - Lots of reference to military applications - Nuclear reactors and shielding - FORTRAN! An interesting note about the applications on the nuclear side: I worked in a semi-high security clearance environment on certain nuclear operations. One item we dealt with in particular was a very old algorithm implemented in FORTRAN. We were attempting to scale the system involved, and the implementation of the algorithm was a major bottleneck. The algorithm was phenomenally complex (it's nuclear science, after all). And, we had a challenge in documentation that was impossible to clear up with the original algorithm implementors: most of the team involved had passed away more than a decade earlier. It was one of the neatest programming challenges I've ever encountered. Those old-school engineers were cool, and I wish our industry could keep more of those people around to pass along what they learned and help teach our industry going forward. The technologies may change, but logic never goes out-of-date.
- Natsu 14y agoWhat I noticed is how many references there were to wanting mathematicians to learn to code. It's weird because it's a good idea and I don't see that in job ads any more.
- vinutheraj 14y agoI guess at 1959 there was no(not many?) computer science majors, and it might have been the norm for a mathematician to start programming, then.
- sakopov 14y agoPerhaps computer science wasn't widespread as formal area of study in universities at the time, so people were looking for the next best candidate, who is someone good at physics and math?
- hughw 14y agoLol "the next best candidate". C'mon. [edit to explain that gut reaction] Physics and math practitioners would be far better candidates than a general computer scientist, for the domains described in this ad, even today.
- randomStuff 14y agoI noticed none of the software jobs were in India.
- sakopov 14y agoCompare this to a more recent job posting, which more frequently reads like "Looking for a code ninja to make our photo-sharing app beautiful. You need to be awesome and make shit happen." Funny and sad at the same time.
- helmut_hed 14y agoMost of these problems, and jobs (with appropriate changes in technologies applied), still exist today, and in greater numbers than in 1958. It's just that the other parts of the industry have grown at a much more rapid pace. This is good to bear in mind when you hear people treat "technology" as synonymous with "web site programming".