Re: Last Voyager engineer retires, NASA needs Fortran/Algol pros

[Nyssa]

artie wrote:

> In article <slrnn3aai7...@foxtrot.local>, Howard S
> Shubs <how...@shubs.net> wrote:
>
>> On 2015-10-31, Peter Flass <peter...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> > I can't believe that no one "wants to." What I would
>> > believe is that NASA is not willing to take someone
>> > with enthusiasm but no experience with this
>> > specific hardware and train them. Like most employers
>> > they want someone who can step into a position with no
>> > learning period.
>>
>> What I find amusing is that, as an experienced Fortran
>> programmer on things from IBM 1130 and newer, I've never
>> heard of these positions. I've just tried finding them on
>> the NASA@Careers site, with no luck.
>> Perhaps no one is applying because they CAN'T FIND THE
>> DAMN JOBS. But that'd be too obvious.
>
> I'll sing in that chorus -- one of my first programming
> jobs (some decades ago) was converting a specialized
> FORTRAN scientific library into optimized assembly code
> (on a PDP-10), resulting in many happy users of that
> library.
>
> I also did FORTRAN on the IBM 1130, Univac 1108 (two
> zeroes!), many 360 systems, SDS Sigma 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 560,
> big CDC and Cray boxes.
>
> I'm not dead yet, and I'd love a job doing that kind of
> thing!
>
As would I, and no doubt many others with "legacy" experience.

Of course, if NASA went about hiring replacements for their
retired engineers/programmers they would probably fall into
the same pattern that I have encountered all too many times
when applying for other bit fiddler jobs as in....

"Well, you've got the languages and the experience, but it's
not specifically on the machines/os/environment we're using
and your experience isn't in our industry, so it doesn't count."

My FORTRAN days were spent doing stuff for air traffic control
simulators and trainers, weather forecasting systems, and
logistics, so I'd be filtered out of the resume pile by some
HR word-matching algorithm and never have a chance.

That or something like "yeah, you've got the languages, etc.,
but your experience in them is *recent*" and then fall through
the holes again.

I'm sure most of the rest of us old-timers with the right
languages in our back pockets would be told something similar
even if these phantom jobs did surface somewhere on the
NASA site.

BTW anyone know where these phantom jobs are supposed to be
located?

Nyssa, who has seen this play act out many times in her
professional past