All value is "perceived" value.

You say that like there's another kind.

Came out of a cafe in Manhattan a long time ago. A dude in a green jumpsuit was making a big show of getting on his matching Kawasaki Ninja or some such nonsense. He was so focused on drawing attention that he didn't notice the padlock in the front disc. But a couple of us did. Got on the bike, started it up, spun the back tire and *clunk* fell over like a stone. We all stood there just as intently watching him work his way out from under the bike and lift it up. No one lifted a finger. Some say he's still crying.

Norton was gold back in the day. The Peter Norton assembly language book and "programmers reference" were just awesome. Seems like nothings that damn good anymore.

".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010

That's about my position. Every 9 months or so I swap the sata cable on my primary desktop to a linux drive, boot it up, run updates and noodle around with it for a few days before getting furious and going back to windows. I love developing FOR it and running it as a server OS. But the desktop drives me to drink.

I don't understand your complaint. His verbiage is perfectly clear and discrete.

So do you guys really have no process for vetting noobcode?

Yep! Crescent Sun retinal burn in ftw!

Interesting idea. The problem with "...as if you're talking to the person directly" is that the first couple/few things (sometimes even people) that see the resume have no ability (much less desire) to actually interpret its contents and are more interested in keyword searches. It's a strange balance of tweaking a single document to show different things to different audiences. What it comes down to is that the cross section between "what I just did" and "what I want to do" is so VERY thin that highlighting it would be a bald faced lie. Sure I did some C++ legacy code remediation. But most of it was perl and csh/bash crap. I ended up listing technologies in a general sense, keeping specific details of "what language soandso was written in" out of it and highlighting "value to end users." At least that way I don't bury myself. We'll see what happens.

Well right. But going from what was largely a maintenance job, monitoring and developing nightly data load processes in perl back to c++ server side (or, hell, client side c++ if there even is such a thing any more) is a tough massage on a resume. Once I'm sitting in front of someone, I've no worries. I interview pretty well (15+ years of career contracting will do that to a guy.) But the search engines, hr pre-screens and recruiters are just going to blow past it for anything other than another craptacular ETL job. Alas. What I wouldn't give to get out of Financial.

GAK! Then they'd want me to be one of those prancing rubyists. No no. Perl stays perl. At least they'll know I write code that serves a function other than generating css.

For lack of a better phrase, yeah. That single chronological bite.

HA! Fair enough. Withdrawn.

So I just "finished" a job that was a remarkably ill fit. I took it as a matter of expedience. Now I'm in a really strange spot. It was full of very sparkly keywords. I'm writing up the resume synopsis block for it and I don't see how, aside from showing that I did have a programming job, it can do anything but market me straight for more miserable opportunities. I like perl feeds programming as much as the next nerd. But I've been a C++ guy for something distressingly close to 20 years. The resume block for this job just can't help but shoot me in the foot. GRUMPH!

psh. The stuff YOU put on your toast. *blergh* Using marmite to get rid of nasty shoe smell seems an awful lot like putting out a fire with gasoline. (with apologies to David Bowie.)

Nope. emacs. on everything, for everything.

bryce wrote:

no - holidays are not for development work
so it would not be useful

...A thousand times this.

NOW yer talkin'. I could use a few more boxes of .223 now that you mention it.

I just started going through my code base, trying to bone back up on my C++ after years of perl and shell work. I've gotta say, I'm actually startled by both how smart and how stupid I used to be. I've got some clever elegant (and clear!) code in there that I'm not sure I'd have written today. Now, there's far more of the standard window-licker idioms kicking around in there of course. "Opportunities for rework" *ugh*