How much should I charge for fixed-price software contract?

[Tim X]

Are you talking about after I patiently waited more than ten years for
even one of them to find me an interview, and finally after more than
ten years of their total incompetance, finally I start speaking out in
public and they don't like me telling the world how incompetant they
are? Frankly I don't care if I piss them off at this point.

Robert, the mere fact these people didn't get you a single interview
during a period which most would have considered a boom time for
programmers should be tellng you something. These agencies get paid
for filling positions - they don't really care about you as an
individual - your just another commodity to them - if they can fit you
in somewhere, they will. Now, if you were dealing with them for 10
years, you cannot claim they were incompetent because incompetent
agencies of this type simply do not survive for 10 years.

So, what we have is a situation where you provided some details and a
resume to job agencies during a boom period in which they undoubtably
found positions for thousands of other programmers, but did not find
you a single interview - hmmm, lets think about that and possibly
consider that maybe its you who is not doing something right. Maybe
its a simple as you not putting your resume into an acceptable format?
Having seen some of the staff you have on the web and only just a
while ago following one of the links you posted to your "resume", I
would say this is almost certainly a contributing factor.

Your resume is completely incorrect - its too long, its badly
formatted and lots of it is totally irrelevent in the current
market. You need to do a well formatted CV, clearly labelled in
sections with brief but informative text. Something like (but properly
formatted)


Name:
Address:


Phone

Key Skill (dot points only!)

e.g. * Strong written and verbal communications skill
* Self-motivated and able to work independently or within a team
* Proven ability to multi-task and prioritise effectively in an
environment involving rapid change and conflicting priorities
* Familiar with xxxxx project management methodologies
* etc

Employment Histor (from most recent to oldest)

Period Position
Employer
Key Duties
.....

Education/Training (from most recent to oldest)

Date Qualification
Institution
(Optional Details - such as thesis topic or research project)

Programming Lnaguages
(Usually, you would only include languages you have used commercially)
Language | Period Used | Last Used |

Publications
(List of any publications you have, where they were published and an
indication if, for journals etc, they were refereed)

Hobbies/Interest/Private Projects (very brief)

References/Referees
Name
Position
company
contact details

Or are you saying that somehow I pissed them off way back in 1991 when
I first started the current sequence of asking them if they can find me
a job because I have just recently (1991.Sep.01) become unemployed
after being steadily employed for ten years? If you're making that
claim, please present evidence of something I said or did way back in
1991 to piss off all appx. hundred of them such that that's the reason
they haven't gotten me even one interview in all the time from 1991.Sep
until the more recent time when my patience was exhausted and I started
my public complaining about their incompetance.

You may not have pissed them off - but its obvious you either didn't
present yourself well or failed to provide the right sort of
information.

My interactions with them during the first several years since I became
unemployed was totally different. I was totally polite and patient. I
never contacted them unless there was a job ad that I wanted to respond
to, except for some cases where I used the Yellow Pages to call them at
random to ask whether they knew of any openings in my area and might be
able to help me find a job. Never a complaint about them for quite a
number of years. I was the total nice guy who is ignored by everyone in
favor of the squeeky wheel that is irritating enough gets noticed.

Its not about being irritating enough to be noticed - its about
presenting yourself in such a way that they immediately think of you
when an appropriate position comes up. For example, if you only listed
all your experience with assembler on PDPs etc, then its unlikely you
would be considered except in the very unlikely case where some
company had an old PDP-10 and just happened to need an assembly
programmer. However, if on the other hand you presented yourself as
someone with a proven track record of workinig in assembler, someone
with a good grasp of low level hardware programming and someone
capable oflearning, then possibly you would be thought of when that
job comes up workinig on developing software for that new chip
xxxxxx.

Even now my interactions with them are non-complaining, merely sending
my tailored resume in response to their job ad, and waiting patiently
for them to respond, and occasionally when I have a new general resume
I FAX it to a whole bunch of them to alert them that I'm still looking
for employment and to get back onto their "hot list" of resumes at the
top of their attention spam, and only one responded in any way, to
complain that they're accepting resumes *only* via MicroSoft word
attachment to e-mail, which I have no way to send from my Unix shell
account, so it took several months before I could find a way to get a
resume to that agency, and then it just went into a black hole.
(Does anybody want the name of that MS-Word-only agency?)

I'm sorry, but this is just more pathetic moaning and not at all a
good advertisment for your abilities or even your problem solvinig
skills. Technically, there is no reason you can't sent an MS Word
document as an attachment from a Unix shell account - I've been doing
this since MS Word first existed. There are plenty of Unix utilities
to help do this. If your argument is that you couldn't get your MS
Word file to your unix shell account because you only have a dumb
terminal connect, thats rubbish as well - there are utilites to allow
this - kermit, rz/sz etc. You could probably even do it from your
library. Where there is a will there is a way!

I would really like to bill that way, but I've never found anyone
willing to contract or otherwise pay for my services on that basis.
By the way, how much money (US$ please) would you charge for a feature
that took you only a half hour to implement and debug and test and
integrate with the overall program and fully document as addendum to
the regular program documentation?

I especially like that idea during the initial stages of working with a
given client/employer, when I am not sure I'll ever get paid, and they
aren't sure I can really do the work, so we incrementally build trust
by my delivering and their paying for a little bit at a time.

But nobody has any money to pay for any custom software, only packaged
software from the big vendors. I can't even find somebody to let me
implement something for free as a demo of my ability to do the
particular kind of software work. For example, there's a guy with
offices near here who has written a desktop C++ application that he
would like to interface to CGI. I explained how I like to write CGI
applications, and it'd be easy for me to write a CGI front-end to his
C++ application if he just tells me which two or three use cases to
start with as my demo and then after I get a toy version of the
interface running he tells me the actual C++ function/method calls into
his program so I can convert my toy interface into a real interface
into his real program. But he hasn't been able to get any new buyers
for his program, CGI or otherwise, and he's spending all his time
looking for buyers, so he doesn't even have time to spend ten minutes
writing me an e-mail listing the use cases he'd like to see in my first
free demo, and as far as I know he hasn't even had time to try the
CGI/C++ demo I already have online as part of my how-to-HelloPlus
tutorial project, wherein my demo calls a routine to decode the
URL-encoded.form contents, then fetches the various fields by name to
demonstrate that it really does have them decoded individually. That
guy is the closest I've come to finding anyone interested in
contracting/hiring my services in the past several years.

Firstly, I would be extremely skeptical about how well a CGI wrapper
to provide a web interface to an already written program would
work. I've seen this attempted before and its never very robust or
reliable unless the underlying program itself is extremely basic.

Secondly, forget all about that stuff regarding decoding URI elements
etc - thats just trivial stuff, a real no brainer for which you can
usually find pre-existing libraries/modules to do all the work
anyway. You need to come up with really original and inovative stuff
if you want to impress anyone with your abilites - decoding URI
strings is a student exercise.

Actually I interpret it oppositely to you: If I bill on the basis of
half-hour tasks, then it means I need at the end of a half hour to get
feedback whether my estimate was correct or not before I proceed to the
next half hour, that I don't trust my own estimates longer than a half
hour into the future. This is great for me just starting at contract
work like this, where if I make a horrible mistake in estimation, it
takes me five hours instead of the half hour I estimated, off by a full
order of magnitude, still it's only 4.5 hours of unpaid work for my
mistake, no big deal, less time than I spend responding to newsgroup
posts in the average day. It's not like if I contract for a job on the
basis it'll take me a half year and it actually takes me five years of
which I get paid only for the first half year, and I don't get paid one
penny until after the product is finally delivered 4.5 years after
promised, if the buyer hasn't found a way to back out of the contract
already by then.

Forget about consulting - you are almost guaranteed never to get any
ral work consulting because you have no recent proven track record and
no track record in current technologies. Most people who move into
consulting do so after working commercially for some time and usually
have customers (at least one decent one) lined up before they even
begin.

Robert, I hate to say it, but I don't think you will get a programming
job. Apart from the problem of not having working for 14 years, your
age is going to work against you. Assuming you were 18 when you
started your degree in 1963, you must be now in your late 50s. Your
technical commercial experience is outdated and if your lucky, you
probably only have around 10 more years of productive work left in you
(I'm being devils advocate here and looking at it from the orientation
of a prospective employer). Why would we employ you at this stage when
there are both plenty of experienced younger programmers around and
even the recent graduates have more experience with current
technologies than you? Unless you can convince an employer that you
have something which the others don't and its something the employer
considers valuable, you have no hope.

I have to wonder why you haven't been trying to get more specific
programming jobs that relate to what seems to have been one of your
strength areas. If you have a strong and sound math background, why
not look for jobs with companies doing software which has a strong
mathematical basis - modelling, communications, signal processing
etc. Why are you even bothering trying to compete in an area which is
flooded with programmers (Java/Web) when thre are companies out therer
who are constantly frustrated at not being able to find enough skilled
programmers who also have skills in mathemtaics?

Play to your strengths!

Tim

 

[Ulrich Hobelmann]

Are you talking about after I patiently waited more than ten years for
even one of them to find me an interview, and finally after more than

Maybe you shouldn't have waited for others to come to you.

ten years of their total incompetance, finally I start speaking out in
public and they don't like me telling the world how incompetant they
are? Frankly I don't care if I piss them off at this point.

But you should. Nobody cares if they suck or not. This is about you
selling yourself to an employer.

Or are you saying that somehow I pissed them off way back in 1991 when
I first started the current sequence of asking them if they can find me
a job because I have just recently (1991.Sep.01) become unemployed
after being steadily employed for ten years? If you're making that
claim, please present evidence of something I said or did way back in
1991 to piss off all appx. hundred of them such that that's the reason
they haven't gotten me even one interview in all the time from 1991.Sep
until the more recent time when my patience was exhausted and I started
my public complaining about their incompetance.

But why do *you* complain about *them*? If they can't get you a job,
it's *your* job to do so! Manna doesn't fall from the sky.

My interactions with them during the first several years since I became
unemployed was totally different. I was totally polite and patient. I
never contacted them unless there was a job ad that I wanted to respond
to, except for some cases where I used the Yellow Pages to call them at
random to ask whether they knew of any openings in my area and might be
able to help me find a job. Never a complaint about them for quite a
number of years. I was the total nice guy who is ignored by everyone in
favor of the squeeky wheel that is irritating enough gets noticed.

That tells me that you should have made more noise. Maybe you find it
irritating. Maybe you despise that kind of people. But nobody cares.
They got a job, and you didn't. It's about priorities.

Even now my interactions with them are non-complaining, merely sending
my tailored resume in response to their job ad, and waiting patiently

These are claims you make, but I'd like to question how well these
resumes are tailored, and how well they're presented. Since you don't
have a graphical browser, maybe your word processors aren't too modern,
either. (just assuming, maybe I'm wrong here)

for them to respond, and occasionally when I have a new general resume
I FAX it to a whole bunch of them to alert them that I'm still looking
for employment and to get back onto their "hot list" of resumes at the
top of their attention spam, and only one responded in any way, to
complain that they're accepting resumes *only* via MicroSoft word
attachment to e-mail, which I have no way to send from my Unix shell
account, so it took several months before I could find a way to get a
resume to that agency, and then it just went into a black hole.
(Does anybody want the name of that MS-Word-only agency?)

Sure, .doc isn't cool, but if it's what everybody wants, you should get
used to it. It's your choice to stay out in the rain, but you're
complaining about that, so start playing by *their* rules.

It's a problem with several dependencies. If you need a PC with
MS-Word, get one *before* tackling the job application problem. Good
ones are on ebay for cheap.

You pay $20 every month for a shell account. What does it do? Some
file storage, a C compiler, ...? Great, I bet everybody in this ng and
every single CS student has all that on their home computer, running
Linux, BSD or whatever. And it even runs a graphical browser.

For word processing you can get OpenOffice for free, if they don't
accept resumes in TeX.

If you need to, live without web access for a year, save the $20 a
month, and go buy a decent machine then. It seems that sitting at your
shell account, writing news articles here doesn't buy you anything, so
save those $20.

 

[Pascal Bourguignon]

Sure, .doc isn't cool, but if it's what everybody wants, you should
get used to it. It's your choice to stay out in the rain, but you're
complaining about that, so start playing by *their* rules.

I've already wrote about this. This is a spurious problem: just take
an ASCII file and rename it cv.doc and voilà! you've got a MS-Word file.

 

[Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t]

I think Robert has successfully pissed off every head-hunter in town.

So my WebSite is really that bad? My attempt to make small-screen
WebPages suitable for displaying on handheld devices is just pissing
off everyone on the net? Fine, you're the straw that broke this camel's
back. I decided within the past hour to dismantle nearly all my
attempts to make small-scrreen WebPages. As a starter, I've written
this WebPage to explain my reasons for this decision:
http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/WAP/WhyInactive.html
Before I link it from my main uh3t WebPage, I want you and everyone
else in this thread to look at it and tell me how I might re-word it to
avoid pissing off anyone any further. As soon as all of you are happy
with this *one* (1) WebPage, I'll link it from my main uh3t page and
start the dismantling transformation.

 

[Phlip]

So my WebSite is really that bad?

It was just a charitable assessment why you seem to be having trouble. I
don't think I implicated your web site. As others have stated, if you treat
potential hirers the way you treat this newsgroup, then...

http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/WAP/WhyInactive.html

As yet another torrent of pure negativity, and _again_ completely lacking
the <body bgcolor=""> tags to save us from the Windows default of middle
grey (I know I know "I don't have a windows computer because etc. etc."),
this page doesn't seem to discuss why anyone would want to review a resume
in a cell phone. A few more years, and the cellphone and palmtop will finish
merging, and you'l have an 8 by 5 inch paper-white screen serving native
HTML.

Until then, please provide a link to a single resume, neatly formatted in
high-quality HTML, with a little care taken to make it easy to read and
print out.

What you seem to have now is a maze of links to fragments of multiple
resumes. Remember that good written and verbal communication skills _should_
be critical for any job. I'm aware they usually are not, but they help...

BTW I added the More tags to mine. Now someone delirious with curiosity
about one of my gigs can click More and instantly expand an inline list of
its projects and their challenges.

Tell me what y'all think (and _no_, I'm not shopping here, thank you!).

http://flea.sourceforge.net/resume.html

 

[Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t]

if you treat potential hirers the way you treat this newsgroup,

Vague derogatory innuendo is of no value in tracking down a bug and
fixing it. You need to state the precise bug-behaviour you observe so
that it can be tracked down and diagnosed and possibly even fixed.

For example, I don't bash Yahoo! Mail with vague remarks about how it
sucks. I point out specific features that used to work years ago but
were dismantled in May of last year. Just today when I was on an
InterNet terminal at the public library trying to a very important
search, namely to find all instances of a certain class of spam within
certain folders, I discovered that the checkboxes for selecting which
folders to search is now totally broken. I checked only four of those
boxes, and then initiated my search, but it searched *all* folders,
just the same as I had done check-all-boxes.

And I don't bash Google Groups 2 vaguely either. I point out many
really serious bugs they've introduced compared with GG1 that was in
effect until the beginning of this year and in effect on some foreign
sites until just a couple weeks ago.

So please stop bashing me with derogatory generalities. If there's a
specific WebPage that I wrote which you don't like, cite the exact URL
and state your exact problem with it. (I see you did this just below,
thank you, but your derogatory remark above is not of that quality.)

... completely lacking the <body bgcolor=""> tags to save us from the
Windows default ...

Is it impossible on Windows to set your own local default to override
the factory setting? If so, yet another reason to put MicroSoft out of
business so that other companies are no longer destroyed by Bill's
preditory tactics, so that better companies can have a chance to
produce much better software than what MicroSoft produces.

Oh, you want *me* to make up for your cruddy MicroSoft-ware by
providing *your* favorite color as background in every one of *my*
WebPages? Fine. Please make an appointment to come over here with your
laptop MS-Windows computer and local (from Sunnyvale) PPP-access ports,
and we'll connect to the InterNet from here and simultaneously run
TELNET to my shell account (for editing the HTML) and MS-IE/HTTP to my
Web site (for viewing my Web pages), and I'll put what you want in my
style sheet and link it from one of my Web pages, and then later I'll
have the bgcolor stuff in a known working state so that I could easily
link the same stylesheet in any other WebPage of mine that you suggest.

Am I willing to edit my WebPage blind using VT100 mode from my
apartment, then bicycle to the public library and sign up for an hour
of InterNet MS-IE time just to view my work, write down on paper in
what way it didn't work, bicycle back home to try to guess how to fix,
again without being able to see the result as I make the edit, then
another day bicycle back to the library to see if I have it fixed yet,
make more notes how it doesn't work, then bicycle back home to try to
fix it again, then back to the library to view it again, as many times
as necesary to get one command in one WebPage the way you like it? No,
no, and never. The last time I suffered 24-hour turnaround on
submitting batch jobs was in 1968, and I never want to suffer that ever
again, especially for something like this.

So I hope you don't mind if I put your critique on the back burner
until such time as I ever have fast turnaround on submitting changes
and seeing the result of such matters?

this page doesn't seem to discuss why anyone would want to review a
resume in a cell phone.

Correct, because that's not the purpose of the WAP pages, hence
irrelevant to my explanation of why I'm dismantling almost all my WAP
work.

When I had a cellphone (2003.Nov) I tried one of the WebSites that was
supposed to be designed for small screens of cell phones, which was
supposed to show a map of any selected city in California. It had about
ten or twenty names of cities in alphabetical order, with a NEXT link
to the next group of ten or twenty, with a NEXT link to the next group
of ten or twenty, etc. I wanted to find San Jose, which would have been
about a hundred screens down the list, and on a cellphone it takes
about a minute to step the cursor one link at a time downward and
thereby scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the NEXT link,
and I lost patience after about ten screens like that. That's when I
decided even the most feeble effort on my part could do better than
that already-existing small-screen WebSite that had been touted.

But the first step was simply to make *any* WAP-compatible WebPage
whatsoever. It took several tries before I got the size of the file
below the limit of 2k bytes or whatever it was, but once that was
achieved (my "Hello World" for WAP), then I knew what the size limit
was, and I started coding a few more useful Web pages for WAP, and
tested them all on my Nokia cellphone. That's when I got the tinyurl to
link to it, because on a cellphone it's very painful typing
alphanumeric characters by multiple presses on the telephone keypad,
but if you have to type only four characters after going to your
bookmarked tinyurl.com or google.com starting point then it's not a
pain at all to select my Web site. Since then I've tried to build a Web
site with that uh3t as my home page, by making very small Web pages,
but in regard to making it work with WAP I've been doing it blind, with
never again even one chance to see my work on a cellphone, to see if it
even worked at all (within the 2k bytes limit) much less whether it
actually looked reasonable on a cellphone screen. Still I tried. But
today I gave up. There's no reward, only rebukes, for my efforts.

please provide a link to a single resume, neatly formatted in
high-quality HTML,

Please tell me what you consider "high-quality HTML".
If I can't view it with lynx, then I can't do it unless and until you
bring your laptop over here so that I can see the results as I edit the
HTML source. HTML is not anything that is easy to do blind!!

Ignoring the HTML aspect for the moment, which of my plain-text resumes
do you like best, for content, not presentation style, so that I might
use that as a starting point for conversion to HTML format?

Also, still ignoring HTML formatting, what changes in content would you
like in my best-so-far resume to yield a better-than-ever resume?

What you seem to have now is a maze of links to fragments of multiple
resumes.

I have online 11 complete resumes, plus one set of reference notes:

Specialty resumes, sent only regarding particular kinds of jobs:
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.921-LISP.txt
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.92Mac.txt
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.921-CAI.txt
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.92Util.txt
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.93Games.txt
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.947-ISR.txt
General resumes, sent when none of the specialty resumes is appropriate:
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.91C.txt
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.928.txt
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.942.txt
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.98B.txt
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Robert_Elton_Maas.doc
Reference notes for filling out appliations, never sent to a potential employer:
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/RESUME.REM.txt

Please tell me in what way (other than HTML formatting) each of these
resumes is, in your opinion, not complete.

http://flea.sourceforge.net/resume.html
See resume.doc

I can't read that online. Please provide a plain-text version.

I support high quality and responsive process.

That's not grammatically correct English. If "process" is plural, it
needs to be spelled "processes", but if it's singular, then you need
the word "a" before the word "high".

I keep you in the driver's seat

Bullshit, unless your profession is driving instructor where your
student is literally in the driver's seat while you sit on the
passenger side with your foot ready to hit the emergency brake if
needed. I would toss this in the trash can at this point if I were
screening resumes. So far you've beat around the bush with metaphor but
you haven't given me the slightest idea what kinds of projects you have
done (landscaping/gardening, driving instructor, DMV person who
administers driving tests, astronaut trainer, etc.).

and give you a system that you can steer accurately
towards business goals.

More stupid metaphor. Maintenance had a laugh when they were emptying
the trash can and your resume happened to blow out of the catcher so
they had to retrieve it and they happened to glance at it.

I have worked in many industries and solved
every kind of technical problem imaginable

Fucking liar. It's unlikely you solved more than one percent of all the
technical problems imaginable.

from inventing languages

OK, now you're finally getting down to specifics, too late for the
resume screener to see it. But what kind of languages?? Experanto? CAD?
Klingon?

to debugging embedded hardware,

Aha, something actually useful! Do you debug it after it's already
embedded, or so you debug it in a test rig before it's ever embedded in
an actual device? (That would be an interview question if you hadn't
already shot yourself in the foot earlier.)

using adaptive planning and
sustainable, disciplined techniques that hold value and enable
teamwork.

That's a little bit too vague for my tastes. Is "adaptive planning" a
buzz phrase that everyone in that particular industry knows, so it
doesn't need to be explained? Or is this more handwaving, beating
around the bush as to what you actually did? For example, do you set up
a dependencies graph for the whole project, and then use dynamic
programming or branch-and-bound to optimize the allocation of resources
toward finishing the project in minimal time with maximal effective use
of your teams?

"disciplined techniques" sounds like something appropriate for a book
review for the book "Positive Parenting for Teens", not anything about
computer technology. This is getting back to sounding like Bob&Ray's
interview about the Komodo Dragon, or the standard bad example of a
term paper that is all fluff but no substances, or the live game
commentary (in a Chess match) that I saw on PBS about 15 or 20 years
ago where the host was asking pre-teens for their analysis of each move
as it occurred, and the pre-teens gave comments similar to"WOW, that's
strong. No, that's very very strong" with not the slightest explanation
why it's strong, leading me to believe the pre-teen hadn't the
slightest idea what was really happening either tactically or
strategically in the game. Compare that to high-quality kibitzing of a
live game such as "I think that was a mistake. Now his queen is
vulnerable to the following sequence .... I think he should have played
... which would have given his queen an escape route." or "That takes
advantage of his mistake. Now the queen is in danger."

requirements gathering

That is an important thing to do in commercial projects. An interview
question would be about how that process breaks down. For example, do
you explicitly brainstorm with the customer about use cases, or do you
talk more loosely with the customer, and later try to guess which use
cases he/she really wanted in your product? (Note that use cases
usually refer to application software, showing the transactions between
user/client and software/server. But analagous requirements occur in
hardware design, transactions between the CPU or other controlling
device and the device under question, such as CPU issues a READ
operation on memory-mapped-register CTLSTAT which then returns a 32-bit
word of status data in the following format with the following meaning
in terms of the function of the device, or CPU issues a WRITE operation
to CTLSTAT with the CONFIG bit turned on, then issues consecutive WRITE
operations to the DATA register with a configuration record in the
following format, then issues a WRITE operation to CTLSTAT with the
CONFIG bit off and the DOIT bit on, then waits 3 microsceonds then
ussues a WRITE operation to CTLSTAT with both CONFIG and DOIT bits off.
The effect is to establish a new configuration for the device.)

Programming
( click any item

You've mixed together in a single menu, as if they were somehow
brothers in concept, all of: programming languages, text formatting
languages, Web browsers, operating systems, serverside frameworks,
software application suites, data communication protocols, admin tools,
software development frameworks, software development methodologies,
and qualatitive aspects of work. Furthermore you've run them down one
very tall and skinny vertical column, wasting an awful lot of paper if
anyone were to print this as offline familiarization and then handy
reference when online to browse the links more fully.

The only one of those which interested me was:
Test-Driven Development
but clicking on it took me to:
http://flea.sourceforge.net/resume.html#anonymizer

For Anonymizer, I used TDD to build a DHTML web page hosting a CAB
file providing an OCX control and a helper ATL DLL file.

I was hoping for more description of what flavor of TDD you used. These
two lines are completely useless in deciding whether you even know what
TDD means much less whether your use of TDD if any is in any way
compatible with the way we do it here at our company (the garbage
collector saw past the humorous crap at the start and noticed this TDD
mention, circled it in brightly colored highlighter, and put it on my
desk, so I looked at it, went online out of curiosity, and was
disappointed).

Test Engineer
Linkname: Broadband Feedback
URL: http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?BroadbandFeedback
OK, so the primary thing you test is animation interfaces for games, by
capturing a sequence of screen shots while the game is being played and
later building them into a animated GIF? I still don't see how that
qualifies as TDD in the sense that I saw it defined/described.

Used Test-Driven Development to write test scripts in Ruby
and Perl, via CygWin and XML, to generate HTML reports.

How exactly did you get from TDD to test scripts and HTML reports??

TDD, OO, HTML, refactoring, tracking, and acceptance tests.

Again you mention TDD like a buzzword but give not the slightest
indication that you know what it means much less telling the reader
which type of TDD you were doing.

The book extends the Test Driven
Development concept into GUIs, demonstrating tests, written at the
same time as the source code, aggressively resisting bugs and
preventing the need to operate a debugger.

That's still too much fluff and not enough saying what people really
did which you described in this book.

SVG Canvas - Combining Ruby, Tk, XML, XPath and GraphViz via
Test-Driven Development to display graphs in a canvas.

Again you use TDD like a buzzword, never saying what you really did.

Family Tree - Extending the previous case study to add interactive
editing.
Embedded GNU-C++ Mophun) Games - A tiny game for color cell phones.
Fractal Life Engine - Grow rotating fractals in OpenGL.

Why is this in the TDD section?? It seems to all be orthoginal to TDD.

SYSTRAN Software

Was, arbeiteten Sie auf dem Entwickeln der BabelFish Technologie?

Eingef|hrte Software-Produktserien, Tageszeitung Bauten und die
automatisierten Tests, zum ihrer desktop Produktserie zu stabilisieren
und zu beschrdnken, geschrieben |ber TDD in VB und in WTL, verbanden
durch ActiveX mit kundenspezifischem MS B|ro und Internet Explorer
toolbars. F|hren Sie die Logitech Toolbar Bem|hung. Kundenspezifische
HTTP Transportschichten. Vorger|cktes XML und XSLT und vorger|ckte
Internationalisierung Techniken und Bauindexe in Perl, das auf Linux
und MS Windows arbeitet. Automatisch konfigurierbare, mehrsprachige
MSI Installateure. [ TASTE

Pas de comment.

Back to the main "resume": After two full screens of one word per line:

Mission
Objected-oriented design, advanced user interfaces, art,
and "Agile" development.

OOD is a methodology, not a goal, so it doesn't belong here in your
mission. The rest here is appropriate. By the way, virtually all my
software from as far back as I can remember was "Agile" development.
Should I mention that in my resume, or is that just fluff?
(Yeah, I have you in a double bind here.)

Experience

This seems to be the same information that I got when I followed the
TDD link.

 

[Ulrich Hobelmann]

Please tell me what you consider "high-quality HTML".
If I can't view it with lynx, then I can't do it unless and until you
bring your laptop over here so that I can see the results as I edit the
HTML source. HTML is not anything that is easy to do blind!!

You keep turning in circles. You run Redhat, as you mentioned, so your
computer *can* do PPP. Your computer can run a graphical browser. Fix
the f***ing problem instead of complaining. (or go to another newsgroup
for that)

Five years ago I ran a laptop with 32MB memory and it ran Mozilla on
Linux just fine (slow, but it looked good), so I know it works.

I can't read that online. Please provide a plain-text version.

That's weird. It looks like ok HTML. Read the source if you have to.

I support high quality and responsive process.

That's not grammatically correct English. If "process" is plural, it
needs to be spelled "processes", but if it's singular, then you need
the word "a" before the word "high".

Great! Nitpick about others' SPELLING, but ignore the crap in your own
yard. Making me laugh right now

I keep you in the driver's seat

Bullshit, unless your profession is driving instructor where your
student is literally in the driver's seat while you sit on the
passenger side with your foot ready to hit the emergency brake if
needed. I would toss this in the trash can at this point if I were
screening resumes. So far you've beat around the bush with metaphor but
you haven't given me the slightest idea what kinds of projects you have
done (landscaping/gardening, driving instructor, DMV person who
administers driving tests, astronaut trainer, etc.).
Raaaant.

and give you a system that you can steer accurately
towards business goals.

More stupid metaphor. Maintenance had a laugh when they were emptying
the trash can and your resume happened to blow out of the catcher so
they had to retrieve it and they happened to glance at it.

Who gives a ...?

I have worked in many industries and solved
every kind of technical problem imaginable

Fucking liar. It's unlikely you solved more than one percent of all the
technical problems imaginable.

Well, I don't think he's stupid, his resume looks
well-formatted/structured, even if it uses tables, and he doesn't keep
bitching about the whole, bad, world all the time.

Programming
( click any item

You've mixed together in a single menu, as if they were somehow
brothers in concept, all of: programming languages, text formatting
languages, Web browsers, operating systems, serverside frameworks,
software application suites, data communication protocols, admin tools,
software development frameworks, software development methodologies,
and qualatitive aspects of work. Furthermore you've run them down one
very tall and skinny vertical column, wasting an awful lot of paper if
anyone were to print this as offline familiarization and then handy
reference when online to browse the links more fully.

Maybe he formatted it badly (but I like it). Or your browser does. You
know you can just read the raw HTML instead? If you want, there's tools
that strip the HTML tags as well.

 

[Tim X]

Robert, Robert, Robert,

This time you have just made my day - rolling around here laughing so
much I'm in danger of choking. It is now confirmed - my suspicions
werer correct, you are definitely a very sad person who has absolutely
no ability to take any responsibility for your own situation.

In this lovely last rant of yours, you attack someone for suggesting
that you do some *really* basic html to set foreground and background
colour to give your pages a better DEFAULT look and you immediately
attack them as if its their fault you have no money. Moaning that
your too poor to have easy access to a gui browser which would allow
you to see what it would look like and lots of other excuses. I wold
have thought that even you would be able to imagine what it would look
like as long as you did something pretty normal, like, maybe just
white background with black text - I'm sure you would have seen that
somewhere before. It is also wonderful how you blame the user for not
setting decent defaults in their browser to cover up for your
inability to set reasonable colours in your pages - the good old
attack being the best defence strategy - your probably best off
sticking to the tried and true tactics.

Then your post gets even better!!!!

Robert Mass, the guy who has not been able to even get an interview
for a programming job in 15 years because a resume critic. This part
of your post is priceless and gets even funnier when you compare the
resumes with the one referenced by your victim - this truely was a
blast. While I could certainly see ways phlip could improve his
resume, yours are not even close to been what I could call a
resume. You then proceed to slice and dice for paragraphs, effectively
showing why you have no clue and rather than take on some advice and
actively improve your situation, you will just hit out attacking
anyone for criticising what you do - I can see why you would be such a
great asset in any team!

Oh, and just in case there is a chance you can accept criticism, I
would recommend you take a copy of your resume to one of those
recruting agencies and ask them for some suggestions on how you could
improve it. From your earlier posts and definitely confirmed by this
most recent one, you have absolutely no clue on how to put together a
resume. If your lucky enough to get a compassionate staff person who
takes you seriously and doesn't fall into fits of laughter while
reading what you give them, you may actually learn something. I'm sure
you will not believe this recruitment professional and will disagree
with any advice he/she may give, but I would just suggest you sit and
listen and maybe just try out doing it their way. After all, they are
exactly the types of people who will be looking at your resume when
you apply for jobs - or of course you can just fight against it as
they are all so wrong and be the rebel you dream of. I'm really sure
that one day, somewhere, somehow you will find that one other
enlightened individual who will get where your coming from and not
only give you a job, but make you a senior principal analyst
programmer team leader boss!

Tim (still laughing loudly and heading to the kitchen for a glass of
water)

 

[Guest]

Am I willing to edit my WebPage blind using VT100 mode from my
apartment,

Are you running X on your BSD box ?

 

[Phlip]

Vague derogatory innuendo is of no value in tracking down a bug and
fixing it. You need to state the precise bug-behaviour you observe so
that it can be tracked down and diagnosed and possibly even fixed. ....

Is it impossible on Windows to set your own local default to override
the factory setting? If so, yet another reason to put MicroSoft out of
business so that other companies are no longer destroyed by Bill's
preditory tactics, so that better companies can have a chance to
produce much better software than what MicroSoft produces.

Oh, you want *me* to make up for your cruddy MicroSoft-ware by
providing *your* favorite color as background in every one of *my*
WebPages? Fine. Please make an appointment to come over here with your
laptop MS-Windows computer and local (from Sunnyvale) PPP-access ports...

I stand corrected.

So please stop bashing me with derogatory generalities. If there's a
specific WebPage that I wrote which you don't like, cite the exact URL
and state your exact problem with it. (I see you did this just below,
thank you, but your derogatory remark above is not of that quality.)

All of them. Other web pages don't make me change my own browser settings.
Why should yours?

This exchange leads me to imagine conversations like this:

Headhunter: Thank you for the resume, but can we change the colors
before it goes out? Everyone has different default settings, so you
should configure your resume to look the same across all of them.

You: [Long screed against Microsoft, who did not invent web pages or
their default color system...]

Headhunter: I'm going to add you to my "special" list, okay?

Specialty resumes, sent only regarding particular kinds of jobs:
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.921-LISP.txt
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.92Mac.txt
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.921-CAI.txt
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.92Util.txt
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.93Games.txt
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.947-ISR.txt
General resumes, sent when none of the specialty resumes is appropriate:
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.91C.txt
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.928.txt
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.942.txt
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.98B.txt
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Robert_Elton_Maas.doc
Reference notes for filling out appliations, never sent to a potential
employer:
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/RESUME.REM.txt

Which one is the best? And is there a _clear_ link from your tinyurl to the
_best_ one?

I picked Resume.93Games.txt, because games have different entry requirements
than normal gigs. The top doesn't contain an objective or an acronym list.
Then it leaps into a bunch of computer science stuff. Real game shops need
to read, "I worked on a videogame where, as you dismember your opponent, you
get to see the blood spurt out of their head and the stumps of their limbs
in slow motion, forming permanent, alpha-blended splotches all over the
ground and nearby props."

Please tell me in what way (other than HTML formatting) each of these
resumes is, in your opinion, not complete.

_"Each"_? You have a gift for setting each of your conversations up for
failure.

Mission
Objected-oriented design, advanced user interfaces, art,
and "Agile" development.

OOD is a methodology, not a goal, so it doesn't belong here in your
mission.

That's specious. I put in the acronym list all my acronyms. An HR guy has
been told to look for NBQ, and they find it in my list, in the Ns. The HR
guy is not required to know if NBQ is a database, or a chip, or whatever.

Similarily, my "mission" is to improve OO designs. If it's here, it's a
goal. This is an example of a literary art, to provide tension and drama.
(The good kinds.)

The rest here is appropriate. By the way, virtually all my
software from as far back as I can remember was "Agile" development.
Should I mention that in my resume, or is that just fluff?
(Yeah, I have you in a double bind here.)

Ah, so you wrote lots of unit tests, and passed them after every few edits,
way back when?

 

[Phlip]

Ulrich, before we start, please oggle this legendary list:

http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/target.htm

The target provides elaborate arguments that everyone knows to be incredibly
wrong. The target generates endless and complex double-speak to lead us
around why their position is right, when their position is commonly
dismissed as trivially wrong for the simplest reasons. An example is posting
to endless screeds why OO programming is wrong.

'When Warriors unleash their collective fury upon him his usual reaction is
"Hey, what did I do?" or "Why do you all hate me?"'

This activity must be identified for what it is, before we have fun with it.
So here we go...

Five years ago I ran a laptop with 32MB memory and it ran Mozilla on Linux
just fine (slow, but it looked good), so I know it works.

Me too. It worked great in both Mozilla and Konqueror. And the DHTML in my
resume is still compliant.

Irrelevant. Those who can read DOC get DOC. Those who can see this resume
don't need text. And hirers should request a format before I submit, so this
isn't really a showstopper.

That's weird. It looks like ok HTML. Read the source if you have to.

He means the outlink to resume.doc.

Great! Nitpick about others' SPELLING, but ignore the crap in your own
yard. Making me laugh right now

Grammar. In this case, it's a literary tension. From my point of view, there
is One Process, flowing through all my projects. (_Not_ One True Process for
everyone, either...)

Raaaant.

It's a wink to Kent Beck's driving metaphor in XPX. When you give me feature
requests, I return them rapidly, giving you visibility into the project's
current state. That allows you to deliver a right-sized stream of requests
that steer the project towards a goal. You steer, I work the engine.

Who gives a ...?

Well, when someone devolves to empty flaming it generally shows they have no
point.

Well, I don't think he's stupid, his resume looks
well-formatted/structured, even if it uses tables, and he doesn't keep
bitching about the whole, bad, world all the time.

I rescued our server from a fire in the server room once. Everyone else just
ran away. I didn't want to admit I was qualified due to prior experience in
.... pyromania ;-)

Maybe he formatted it badly (but I like it). Or your browser does. You
know you can just read the raw HTML instead? If you want, there's tools
that strip the HTML tags as well.

I formatted it with a table, hence it is correct HTML, and easy on the eyes.

If someone needs a given acronym, they find it in alpha order. I don't make
them play Easter Eggs with it. Ohh, if you Really Loved Me, you would Find
my Acronym Needle in this Haystack of Mixed Metaphors! Oh, I'm going to list
irrelevancies at the top, so you have to Prove you really Deserve to Hire
me!!

 

[Guest]

Headhunter: I'm going to add you to my "special" list, okay?

My favourite parts of his resume are:

"Games included are Sprouts, pile Nim, urinary Nim, NimLine, domino Nim."

I guess that faecal Nim is the R rated version.
And it cant be a typo.
The allusion to micturition has been pointed out to him earlier.

and

"TestWords.Lisp - Educational game for vocabulary.
My wife, ... says it's great for improving English
vocabulary."

I wonder why he hasnt included comments from his
children and his pets.

 

[Phlip]

The allusion to micturition has been pointed out to him earlier.

My Cod, until this moment I thought Douglas Adams made up "micturition",
among his other made-up words, to scansify Vogon poetry.

Thanks! I think...

 

[Chris Sonnack]

My Cod, until this moment I thought Douglas Adams made up "micturition",
among his other made-up words, to scansify Vogon poetry.

Think the folks at Google will wonder about all the hits for:

define micturition

 

[Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t]

It's been more than 24 hours since I asked for suggestions about the
wording in this explanation why I'm discontinuing my work on WAP and
dismantling most of what I previously did. So-far I haven't seen any
followup that gives any specific comments about anything I may have
worded wrong that needs improvement. If I don't get any feedback soon,
I don't know what I'll do.
http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/WAP/WhyInactive.html
Please, everybody, hurry up and tell me any improvements in wording
that you can suggest.

 

[Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t]

Your resume is completely incorrect - its too long

Let me check it right now:
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.98B.txt
That's 60 lines of text. You're correct, it's too long too many lines.
How many lines is the maximum for a resume?

its badly formatted

It looks formatted pretty well given the one-page restriction and plain
ASCII text, but perhaps you have some specific changes you'd like?

and lots of it is totally irrelevent in the current market.

What specifically? I'd be glad to cut out parts that the majority of
people in this newsgroup consider so grossly worthless that I shouldn't
include them even though I spent a lot of time doing those things and
it would really be dishonest to exclude them, but if dishonesty by
omission is necessary to get a job I'm willing to bend. So which items
specifically should I delete?

You need to do a well formatted CV

No, I most definitely do not want a CV for applying for non-academic
jobs doing software development.
http://jobsearch.about.com/cs/curriculumvitae/a/curriculumvitae.htm
http://www.careers.ucr.edu/students/graduates/cvsample.html
http://jobsearch.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.eurograduate.com/plan2.html
http://www.quintcareers.com/curriculum_vitae.html
http://www.careers.ucr.edu/Students/Graduates/CV/
I want a resume, not a CV, because a resume, not a CV, is what is asked
by *all* job ads I've seen in this area.

clearly labelled in sections with brief but informative text.

It's already that. What are you complaining about??

Employment Histor (from most recent to oldest)

My most recent employment is more than ten years ago. I've gotten good
advice *not* to make my lack of recent employment a major attraction in
my resume, or it'd be tossed before any of the good stuff would ever be
seen.

I've also been advised very strongly not to include any employment more
than ten years ago, and to only summarize anything between five and ten
years ago, not list it individually.

Programming Lnaguages
(Usually, you would only include languages you have used commercially)

I've never used any programming language commercially, except 2.5 weeks
of Think C 9n 1992.

if you only listed all your experience with assembler on PDPs etc,
then its unlikely you would be considered except in the very unlikely
case where some company had an old PDP-10 and just happened to need an
assembly programmer. However, if on the other hand you presented
yourself as someone with a proven track record of workinig in
assembler, someone with a good grasp of low level hardware programming
and someone capable oflearning, then possibly you would be thought of
when that job comes up workinig on developing software for that new
chip xxxxxx.

Well there was one resume I wrote that didn't say any specifics at all,
no PDP-10 or 6502 or 8080 or 68000 or IBM-1620 or IBM-1130, only the
number/variety of different things I did to emphasize how I've learned
so many different languages/environments/applicationAreas that surely I
can easily learn five or ten more on a new job.
http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/SeekJob/Resume.942.txt
It's only 57 lines, three lines shorter than the other. Maybe you'd
like it better?

forget all about that stuff regarding decoding URI elements
etc - thats just trivial stuff, a real no brainer for which you can
usually find pre-existing libraries/modules to do all the work
anyway.

I agree. That's why for C and C++ I used Google to find a free set of
code to do the form-contents-decoding, not part of a large library, but
just a standalone piece of already-debugged (almost, I had to fix a few
bugs before they'd work on this system) that would be small enough that
I could show it as part of my demo of how to do CGI/C and CGI/C++
software. I made sure the C code was pure C, no cheating by using stuff
that the Gnu C/C++ compiler or Visual-C++ compiler could fake in C
program even though it wasn't valid ANSI C but was actually C++. Also I
made sure the C++ code was true C++ code in both standard and style,
not C code that got minimal transformation to run under C++
environment but which was actually C at heart and only sham of C++.

you are almost guaranteed never to get any ral work consulting
because you have no recent proven track record and no track record in
current technologies.

I tried looking for regular employment for years, but lots of people
told me that was impossible, that I need to get some short-term
contract work, and then with that proven track record some company
might risk hiring me on the longer term, in fact one of the short-term
contracts might develop into a long-term job. So you see I get so much
contradictory advice that I really have to ignore most of it, and
accept only that which doesn't contract a lot of other advice I also
get.

Your technical commercial experience is outdated

My only technical commercial experience, except for 2.5 weeks in 1992,
is within the past 2.2 years. How can you say such recent experience is
outdated? Are Visual Basic, C, C++, and Java, all outdated, in your
opinion?

Unless you can convince an employer that you have something which the
others don't and its something the employer considers valuable, you
have no hope.

I have a lot of good talent and skills, valuable to an employer, that
most others don't have. Maybe you can help me convince an employer to
recognize that?

I have to wonder why you haven't been trying to get more specific
programming jobs that relate to what seems to have been one of your
strength areas.

Your question is based on a false premise. I **have** been trying to
get programming jobs in areas where I have expertise (educational
software, information retrieval/access, etc.), but I've never been able
to find anyone interested in my skills in those areas. The closest I
ever came was when my former boss referred me to a company that did
educational software for children, and took me on a tour of what they
were doing, but none of it was actually educational where it actually
makes sure a child learns something, it was all play-explore stuff
which is fine for spending idle time getting familiar with some stuff
that looks interesting but is totally insufficient at making sure the
child ever really learned anything. It's like a computer version of the
child watching Sesame Street all day. Yeah, the child eventually picks
up a few things here and there, but there's no competance at anything.
So anyway I was told they aren't interested in any software that
actually teaches the child anything, only in making sure the child
enjoys the experience of playing with the computer games, so none of my
experience is of any value there.

why not look for jobs with companies doing software which has a
strong mathematical basis - modelling, communications, signal
processing etc.

I have no experience in the kind of modeling you're talking about, nor
in any signal processing whatsoever. The only communications jobs I've
seen required specific experience managing/configuring TCP/IP stacks,
which I've never done.

Why are you even bothering trying to compete in an area which is
flooded with programmers (Java/Web)

Because Java is my second-best language, my best being Lisp, and there
are no jobs whatsoever in Lisp, whereas 2.5 years ago I actually saw a
job ad for Java that I would have qualified for a year later. So I'm
only one year away from a chance at a Java job, whereas twenty years
away from any other kind of job.

Play to your strengths!

Show me one job opening that matches my strenghths in Lisp programming
or computer-assisted instruction.

 

[Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t]

you should have made more noise. Maybe you find it irritating.
Maybe you despise that kind of people. But nobody cares. They got a
job, and you didn't. It's about priorities.

Please give me advice: After I have already FAXed my resume to a given
employment agency, how long should I wait before I FAX them another
copy?

I'd like to question how well these resumes are tailored, and how
well they're presented.

OK, you be the judge. Here is a resume I sent in response to a job ad
on May 26:

Robert Elton Maas, Sunnyvale, CA
Voice: 408-749-0453
Internet electronic-mail: (e-mail address removed)

EDUCATION:
Mathematics major at University of Santa Clara, Bachelor of Science
degree

ACADEMIC/INTELLECTUAL HONORS, PROFESSIONAL LICENSES, AND PUBLISHED WORKS:
- Among top five (in whole United States) in William Lowell Putnam
undergraduate mathematics competition
- Report on nuclear magnetic resonance relaxation published
- Report on English-language programming for robot published

PROGRAMMED IN THESE LANGUAGES:
- Java (on 3 platforms)
- C (on 4 platforms) C++ (on 2 platforms)
- Visual Basic
- Fortran (on 5 platforms)
- Lisp (on 5 platforms)
- Assembly/machine language on 7 different CPUs

Platforms (programming environments) include: Macintosh, Unix+CGI, MS-Windows,
RedHat Linux

MAJOR PROGRAMMING PROJECTS:
- Computer-assisted instruction for Calculus
- Laying out text mixed with mathematical formulas for printing or
display
- Information retrieval and indexing, including linked-text frames
- Packet-based client/server telecommunications, including handling
interrupts from I/O devices
- Effective algorithm for flashcard drill

ADDITIONAL SPECIFIC ACCOMPLISHMENTS/ACTIVITIES/EXPERTISE/EXPERIENCE:
- Wrote software to use SAX parser in Java/J2EE to convert XML to SQL
for update to relational database.
- Wrote software to build&update tables in relational database using JDBC/SQL.
- Used ANT to maintain compiled versions of J2EE applications as source edited.
- Wrote white-box unit-testing at all levels of software modules from
single lines of code to full application use-cases.
- HTTP, HTML, CGI.
- Used JCreator to build Java projects.

Here's another customized resume I sent for a different job ad on Jun1.15:

Robert Elton Maas, Sunnyvale, CA
Voice: 408-749-0453
Internet electronic-mail: (e-mail address removed)

EDUCATION:
Mathematics major at University of Santa Clara, Bachelor of Science
degree

ACADEMIC/INTELLECTUAL HONORS, PROFESSIONAL LICENSES, AND PUBLISHED WORKS:
- Among top five nationwide in William Lowell Putnam undergraduate
mathematics competition
- Report on nuclear magnetic resonance relaxation published
- Report on English-language programming for robot published
- Toplevel meta-index to the Internet (including Usenet and Bitnet)
published electronically and available via HTTP/WWW

PROGRAMMED IN THESE LANGUAGES:
- Java (on 3 platforms), including: applets, JDBC/ODBC, JSP, J2EE servlets,
XML parsing (SAX), JavaDoc
- JavaScript, including calls to Java packages
- C (on 4 platforms) C++ (on 2 platforms)
- Visual Basic
- Fortran (on 5 platforms)
- Lisp (on 5 platforms)
- Assembly/machine language on 7 different CPUs
* Platforms (programming environments) include: Unix+CGI,
Macintosh (systems 6.0.3, 6.0.5, 6.0.7, 7.5.5), MS-Windows, RedHat Linux

MAJOR PROGRAMMING PROJECTS:
- Computer-assisted instruction for Calculus
- Laying out text mixed with mathematical formulas for printing or
display
- Information retrieval and indexing, including linked-text frames
- Packet-based client/server telecommunications, including handling
interrupts from I/O devices
- Effective algorithm for flashcard drill

OTHER SKILLS/EXPERIENCE/EXPERTISE:
- HTML, SQL/databases (MicroSoft Access, CloudScape), WebServer applications

ONLINE (Web-accessible) DEMOS:
- Unix+CGI: http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/demos.html
- Applet: http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/Lab7a.class
- JavaDoc: http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/JavaDoc/Blab2/index-all.html
- JavaScript: http://www.geocities.com/rem642b/JavaScript/js1.html
- Multi-CGI-language education: http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/HelloPlus/hellos.html
- XML parsing (SAX): http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/New/2005.6.12a.zip

Here's another tailored resume I sent to another job ad on the same day:

Robert Elton Maas, Sunnyvale, CA
Voice: 408-749-0453
Internet electronic-mail: (e-mail address removed)

EDUCATION:
Mathematics major at University of Santa Clara, Bachelor of Science
degree

ACADEMIC/INTELLECTUAL HONORS, PROFESSIONAL LICENSES, AND PUBLISHED WORKS:
- Among top five nationwide in William Lowell Putnam undergraduate
mathematics competition
- Report on nuclear magnetic resonance relaxation published
- Report on English-language programming for robot published
- Toplevel meta-index to the Internet (including Usenet and Bitnet)
published electronically and available via HTTP/WWW

PROGRAMMED IN THESE LANGUAGES:
- Java (on 3 platforms), including: applets, JDBC/ODBC, JSP, J2EE servlets,
XML parsing (SAX), JavaDoc
- JavaScript, including calls to Java packages
- C (on 4 platforms) C++ (on 2 platforms)
- Visual Basic
- Fortran (on 5 platforms)
- Lisp (on 5 platforms)
- Assembly/machine language on 7 different CPUs
* Platforms (programming environments) include: Unix+CGI,
Macintosh (systems 6.0.3, 6.0.5, 6.0.7, 7.5.5), MS-Windows, RedHat Linux

MAJOR PROGRAMMING PROJECTS:
- Computer-assisted instruction for Calculus
- Laying out text mixed with mathematical formulas for printing or
display
- Information retrieval and indexing, including linked-text frames
- Packet-based client/server telecommunications, including handling
interrupts from I/O devices
- Effective algorithm for flashcard drill

OTHER SKILLS/EXPERIENCE/EXPERTISE:
- UML, API documentation of my own modules via JavaDoc
- proficient at rapid protyping&development&deployment via TDD
(Test-Driven Development based on unit-testing at all levels)
- developed major application which explored multiple data sources to
collect the best information, and consolidated it into database

ONLINE (Web-accessible) DEMOS:
- Unix+CGI: http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/demos.html
- Applet: http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/Lab7a.class
- JavaDoc: http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/JavaDoc/Blab2/index-all.html
- JavaScript: http://www.geocities.com/rem642b/JavaScript/js1.html
- Multi-CGI-language education: http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/HelloPlus/hellos.html
- XML parsing (SAX): http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/New/2005.6.12a.zip

Here's another custom version I sent to yet another job ad the same day:

Robert Elton Maas, Sunnyvale, CA
Voice: 408-749-0453
Internet electronic-mail: (e-mail address removed)

EDUCATION:
Mathematics major at University of Santa Clara, Bachelor of Science
degree
Computer-programming classes at De Anza college, Cupertino, CA

ACADEMIC/INTELLECTUAL HONORS, PROFESSIONAL LICENSES, AND PUBLISHED WORKS:
- First place in University of Santa Clara High School Mathematics
contest for three years
- Undergraduate mathematics research project at University of Santa
Clara for five summers
- Among top five (in whole United States) in William Lowell Putnam
undergraduate mathematics competition
- Abstract on differential algebra published in Notices of the AMS
- Passed California civil service exam for Programmer/Analyst I
- Report on nuclear magnetic resonance relaxation published
- Report on English-language programming for robot published
- Passed Mensa exam, achieving top 1% on BOTH tests, whereas achieving
top 2% on EITHER test is sufficient to qualify for Mensa
- Toplevel meta-index to the Internet (including Usenet and Bitnet)
published electronically and available via HTTP/WWW
- Passed federal civil service exam for Writing & Public Info

PROGRAMMED IN THESE LANGUAGES:
- Java (on 3 platforms), including: applets, JDBC/ODBC, JSP, J2EE servlets,
XML parsing (SAX), GUI (AWT & swing), JavaDoc
- JavaScript, including calls to methods in Java classes
- C (on 4 platforms) C++ (on 2 platforms)
- Visual Basic
- Fortran (on 5 platforms)
- Lisp (on 5 platforms)
- Assembly/machine language on 7 different CPUs
* Platforms (programming environments) include: Unix+CGI, Macintosh,
MS-Windows, RedHat Linux

MAJOR PROGRAMMING PROJECTS:
- Computer-assisted instruction for Calculus
- Laying out text mixed with mathematical formulas for printing or
display
- Information retrieval and indexing, including linked-text frames
- Packet-based client/server telecommunications, including handling
interrupts from I/O devices
- Effective algorithm for flashcard drill

OTHER SKILLS/EXPERIENCE/EXPERTISE:
- Client/server applications (with both developed together by same person,
and with client written to adapt to an existing server previously
developed by somebody else and publicly available)
- Well-documented code, and separate user/API documentation

ONLINE (Web-accessible) DEMOS:
- Unix+CGI: http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/demos.html
- Applet: http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/Lab7a.class
- JavaDoc: http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/JavaDoc/Blab2/index-all.html
- JavaScript: http://www.geocities.com/rem642b/JavaScript/js1.html
- Multi-CGI-language education: http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/HelloPlus/hellos.html
- XML parsing (SAX): http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/New/2005.6.12a.zip

Finally here's a customized version I sent for yet another job on Jul.06:

Robert Elton Maas, Sunnyvale, CA
Voice: 408-749-0453
Internet electronic-mail: (e-mail address removed)

EMPLOYMENT OBJECTIVE: Developing Web-accessible serverside appliations,
for RDBS (Relational DataBase System) access and other business utilities

EDUCATION:
Mathematics major at University of Santa Clara, Bach. of Science degree
Computer-programming classes at De Anza college, Cupertino, CA

ACADEMIC/INTELLECTUAL HONORS, PROFESSIONAL LICENSES, AND PUBLISHED WORKS:
- Top five nationwide in William Lowell Putnam
undergraduate mathematics competition
- Passed Mensa exam, achieving top 1% on BOTH tests, whereas achieving
top 2% on EITHER test is sufficient to qualify for Mensa
- Toplevel meta-index to the Internet (including Usenet and Bitnet)
published electronically and available via HTTP/WWW
- Passed federal civil service exam for Writing & Public Info

PROGRAMMED IN THESE LANGUAGES:
- Java (on 3 platforms), including: applets, JDBC/ODBC, JSP, J2EE servlets,
XML parsing (SAX), GUI (AWT & swing), JavaDoc, CGI
- JavaScript, including calls to methods in Java classes
- C (on 4 platforms, includig CGI) C++ (on 2 platforms, includig CGI)
- Visual Basic
- Fortran (on 5 platforms)
- Lisp (on 5 platforms, includig CGI)
- Assembly/machine language on 7 different CPUs
- Shell scripts (on Unix/Linux, including CGI interfaces)
* Platforms (programming environments) include: Unix+CGI, Macintosh,
MicrosoftWindows+MicrosoftACCESS, RedHatLinux+CloudScape

MAJOR PROGRAMMING PROJECTS:
- Computer-assisted instruction for Calculus
- Laying out text mixed with mathematical formulas for printing or
display
- Information retrieval and indexing, including linked-text frames
- Packet-based client/server telecommunications, including handling
interrupts from I/O devices
- Effective algorithm for flashcard drill
- Data compression
- Generating custom large prime numbers for cryptographic use
- Manipulating vectors to discover closest linear relationships
- Researching & organizing & publishing tutorial WebPages
- Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) research to identify organic molecules

ONLINE (Web-accessible) DEMOS:
- Unix+CGI: http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/demos.html
- Applet: http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/Lab7a.class
- JavaDoc: http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/JavaDoc/Blab2/index-all.html
- JavaScript: http://www.geocities.com/rem642b/JavaScript/js1.html
- Multi-CGI-language tutorials: http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/HelloPlus/hellos.html
- XML parsing (SAX): http://members.tripod.com/~MaasInfo/New/2005.6.12a.zip

Notice how they're all based on that same starting resume but I removed
different items in each and put in special stuff in each to better fit
the job from among the experience I have but which is relevant to only
a few jobs?

.doc isn't cool, but if it's what everybody wants, you should get
used to it.

I don't have any money to pay for MicroSoft Word for Macintosh, so
that's not an option for me here.

For word processing you can get OpenOffice for free

I have only 17 megabytes of unused space on my Macintosh hard disk.
How much space does the Macintosh version of OpenOffice need?

 

[Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t]

Let me make sure I understand this... you are looking for Ruby on
FreeBSD?

Yeah. Somebody said they really liked Ruby, so I thought maybe I'll
give it a try and see what I think of it. But when I said whereis ruby
nothing turned up, so I guess it's not installed here.

If so, it's a fundamental part of the portupgrade system.

Then I suppose the Unix shell ISP where my account is located, doesn't
have the portupgrade system installed.

 

[Robert Maas, see http://tinyurl.com/uh3t]

His idea of skills is displaying his Hello World programs on his web site.

You blindly walk up to an elephant, reach out, and feel one tooth, and
immediately conclude that tooth is the entire elephant.

I suggest you play this game: Connect to this URL:
http://shell.rawbw.com/~rem/cgi-bin/topscript.cgi
Select the radio button titled "Random words from file"
Click on the submit button titled "Start the demo of SegMat per ..."
then try to guess the missing words. Each time you get one correct,
read the enlarged text to get an idea of something I have accomplished.
Then press BACK button on your browser until you're back at the big
form, then press the submit button again to start the game with a new
random world. While you're playing that game repeatedly, see if you can
find *any* mention whatsoever of Hello World programs among the
accomplishments I'm proud of.

 

[Phlip]

It's been more than 24 hours since I asked for suggestions about the
wording in this explanation why I'm discontinuing my work on WAP and
dismantling most of what I previously did.

The first few sentences should "hook" the readers, and make them "care"
about the story.

In your case, you start with negative complaints about yourself, like this
post. "In the first place" and "briefly" are complaintful, and "stopped work
soon after beginning" & "cruddy" are negative and self-abasing.

Then, readers have trouble getting started without at least expository
verbiage about what WAP is. (Yes, I _know_ what WAP is. The expository
verbiage is still necessary, to entrain the readers and help you lead them.)
For example, "WAP is a growing and frequently meaningful miniaturization of
HTML, targeting cell phones, and enabling a whole new realm of pop-up ads".
Start with a joke that burns the industry, not yourself.

Next, I used to think that Free Software emulators for WAP were available.
Maybe they are not, so you seem to complain that without a cell phone with
good "service" (signal? tech support?) you can't continue to experiment with
WAP.

And the reason you didn't whip out your computer science credentials and
_write_ a WAP emulator are..?

I can't read farther, but at least I read enough to offer [more!]
constructive criticism.

http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/WAP/WhyInactive.html
Please, everybody, hurry up and tell me any improvements in wording
that you can suggest.

Nope. No improvements to suggest in the wording. Each of your words
successfully conveys how you feel about yourself and your situation.