Alumni Experiences

Tom Dillard - B.S. (Computer Science) 1989

For the last 9 years I've been working at DSC Communications, now part of Alcatel Corporation, on telecommunications software; 5 years spent in SS7 protocol development. The last 4 years have been in a variety of positions. Most recently this involved writing a C++ library on top of inet sockets that allows apps to communicate with apps on other processors. We tried to divorce apps from having to know about hostnames and explicit interfaces on the various cards, instead hiding that information and presenting naming in a more generic fashion. Also, since most telecom stuff is fully redundant, we provided a way for apps to address messages to the "active" or "standby" processor.

There is a lot of demand in the area here (Dallas/Richardson/Plano, TX) for C++. My experience has been that a lot of C++ programmers simply know the syntax; I am not impressed at their OO knowledge. They still write in a structured fashion, but now sustitute // for /* */ and class for struct :)