Honestly I wouldn't blame age or your skill set. It seems that the interview process for software engineers is broken and I'd be willing to bet that even then highest qualified young engineers are struggling to get offers.

I don't know how you're qualifying "even the highest qualified young engineers are struggling to get offers" but that doesn't jive with my experience these past couple of years. I'm not young any more but it still feels like a job seeker's market (spoken from the viewpoint of a fine but not outstanding engineer in his mid 30s, in a tech hub)

I said I'm willing to bet, meaning I have a hunch, not actual data. My hunch is based on personal experience, reading recent posts on HN about job searching, and seeing statistics on websites like LinkedIn and Glassdoor implying that many jobs openings have hundreds of qualified applicants. Granted, my hunch may be based on trying to get jobs at well known companies which is probably more competitive by nature, especially in a global market. Getting a job building marketing software at a mediocre agency for $45k/year is probably super easy. But most people don't want that.

Resistance to constructive criticism is a potential no-hire signal.

Blaming the victim just for the sake of being contrarian is an even stronger one.

Just because someone says, "I'm a victim!" it doesn't actually make them a victim.

No, but the burden of proof is on you to prove that they're not. And you don't have the evidence to back it up.

A great way to become a victim is to believe every person that tells you they are a victim.

A victim of being told to consider their weaknesses?

That's not at all what the post said.

Resistance to inaccurate feedback is essential to autonomous growth.

Institutional certainty in the accuracy of feedback is a red flag for cult behavior in organizations.

> resistance to constructive criticism

Very curious where you detect that in GP?

They completely discount the feedback without any concessions.

> speed has decreased a little

Sounds like a concession to me

The rest of the post is a rebuttal, not 'discounting'

You seem very focused on your skillset. Have you considered that it's your soft skills (equally important to technical skills) that may be the issue?

What exactly drives you to interesting companies? If you are a programmer, your job will be: read data from A, repackage it, send to B. How IT or government contract is different? And you can make a greater difference there IMO. (That's how I see it now, after many years of vain pursuits and disappointments )

Yeah, but how's your perl? :P

Maybe people are worried you'll rock the boat with all those technologies you list. If the group has settled on using React, the last thing they want is someone constantly trying to convert them to Angular.

Another possibility is you don't know those things as well as you think. When you say React do you mean React v.16? Does that include webpack, and if so, which version? If you're claiming to be an expert on all those things, it would make me skeptical. I bet you'd have better results if you focused on a few technologies you unambiguously ARE an expert at, and list the other things as footnotes.

> If the group has settled on using React, the last thing they want is someone constantly trying to convert them to Angular.

Older developers have seen enough technology fads come and go that they are much less likely to do this than a young, excitable one.

I'm not far from being an older dev, and I've been struggling more and more with cynicism in myself. Everything you said is 100% true, but I have to force myself to avoid phrases like "technology fad" or "young, excitable devs" when I'm mentoring younger devs. Because even though those things are true, verbalizing them would demoralize the team.

I don't argue against the latest fads. I hate the idea of Node/Electron/ various JS based cross platform mobile frameworks with a passion, but I do look to see what is paying the most and has the most openings. I'll jump on whatever fad that the market wants.

Older devs, after seeing enough technology fads, are much more sensitive to bullshit. Which makes them a bit sarcastic WRT any new fad. Not a desirable trait from the employer's perspective :)

Sarcasm in general is not a desirable trait. You can explain the pros and cons of different technology choices without being sarcastic.

A green developer who wants to rewrite everything is $LANGUAGE is just as bad as the self-important greybeard rolling his eyes and scoffing at anything that isn't $OTHER_LANGUAGE.

I've been an employer for a long time and would prefer a critical thinker over a fad-of-the-day lemming any day.