<p>The fundamentals haven’t changed a lot. One you know C++, its not too hard to learn Java (which I’ve programmed in). Algorthms are algorithms. There’s been some new programming techniques and paradigms as they apply to threaded programming, and some platforms have dissappeared and some have appeared, but someone with a good grasp of programming in the 1990s could, if not for the job market and age discrimination, work in the contemporary environment with ease. </p>
<p>I’m not aware of anything in an EE or CS curricula that would have fundamentally or dramatically changed in the past decade. Actual hands-on techniques have changed especially in manufacturing and the IDE’s look a bit different for the modern environments but nothing dramatic (and the dramatic differences would typically require domain-related/proprietary training anyways).</p>
<p>Linux is still Linux, which works the same as the Unix of the 70s and 80s. The same basic NT kernel that was first rolled out in 1996 is still in use in Win7 and Win8. Obviously the machines these days are a lot bigger/faster/more powerful, but that just means that one can afford to be sloppy compared to the tight coding techniques we learned in the 90s.</p>
<p>Virtualization is hot right now, but is there really much of anything about virtualization one can learn that can’t be learned by downloading VMware and Virtualbox, playing around with them a bit, etc.? </p>
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<p>When the CS job market was good (circa the 1990s), walk-in interviews were available. It was quite common to hear of people in the Silicon Valley leaving one employer, and literally walking across the street and getting a new job, the same day, with another employer. And even EE/CS grads could go down there and get an audience with a HR rep or manager, not just a gnarly security guard, if they visited many prominent tech firms. </p>
<p>Online job application websites didn’t exist to anywhere near the same extent as they do today (go look at the Internet Archive – sgi’s careers website was simply an email address to send a resume in) and the market was truly hot.</p>
<p>I’ve worked in software for over 30 years and haven’t heard of this
sort of thing outside of special cases. I interviewed MIT students
around 1999 and the process was that I had a bunch of resumes and
went on-campus to do interviews.</p>
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<p>Did you experience this yourself? Do you personally know someone that
did this? I can imagine this sort of thing for very high-demand
positions but well-managed companies typically hire ahead of the
crunch.</p>
<p>BTW, I could see getting an audience with an HR person but this really
wouldn’t get you anywhere further than just submitting your resume unless
the HR person knew a lot about the details of hiring and they usually
don’t.</p>
<p>I think that getting a hold of a manager would be a lot harder if you
didn’t have a name or know someone on the inside. Now I know that you
could go to a firm and get a job relatively quickly if someone in that
company strongly vouched for you - that’s something that I experienced
in the 1990s.</p>
<p>Actually, I just did that last month. I left my now ex-employer and went to another company right across the street. My ex-employer could could not seem to win new business and my new employer is a prime contractor in cloud-computing.</p>
<p>I remember the bubble time of the late 1990s. But that type of story is exaggerated. You might leave or get laid off, submit your resume to other companies the next business day, and have interviews scheduled over the next few business days, with offers coming the business days following the interviews (and they were perfectly willing to have you start as soon as possible after they make the offer).</p>
<p>However, if you used those exaggerated bubble stories as reason to go into computer science in 1998, then it is no surprise that the job market in 2002 when you graduated was a huge let down.</p>
<p>Today’s job market in CS is much better than 2002, but is not bubbly like in 1998-2000.</p>