I have a feeling you have not applied "everywhere" in the United States, but please correct me if I'm wrong. I've never left my home state, and the deluge of recruiter spam on LinkedIn hasn't slowed down yet.
And no I'm not an architect or team lead or business analyst. I'm just a developer. Almost entirely individual contributor roles. But once hired, I learn what is needed and I execute the hell out of it and usually write myself out of a job (or at least make it so boring I am receptive to the next engagement.) This is listed in my résumé as the accomplishments or value I brought to a project. When I interview, I often say "I don't really know enough about that yet, but I'm interested in learning." This is usually met well.
One last thing - my expectations are not great. I'm not ambitious enough to seek out Big Five positions or compensation. But I make really good money for this area and for what I consider reasonably easy jobs. Perhaps you are expecting your career to feel the same way it did twenty years ago? It won't. That's OK. Make peace with it. Find a way to use and improve your skills in a way that brings value to a company, and they compensate you for it.
Recruiters spamming you is not a correlative metric for companies hiring you.
SV is worse than other locations, but even the midwest company I work for (I'm also over 40) much prefers to hire people straight out of college. They're cheaper, willing to work longer hours, and easily molded into an image the company wants.
EDIT: To provide a small anecdote about recruiters - I regularly get Google and Facebook recruiters hitting me up on LinkedIn, even though I know I would never be hired by them. I don't live in a state where they have an office, have no plans to move, and don't meet some of their publicly announced filters. I'm up front about this to the recruiters, yet I still get spam from them.
Edit:
There is a huge difference between random spam from recruiters who throw a big net and working with local boutique recruiters who have relationships with local firms. I ignore the former.
My initial interviews were disastrous; it had been many years since my last job search and I didn't know I wasn't prepared for the "leetcode era". Drilling on "leetcode medium" problems with a time limit got me to the point where I was at least in the game that's being played nowadays.
It wasn't pretty, but eventually I got around to progressing and getting an offer instead of getting "nope'd" at the early stages. The job-interview repertoire has definitely changed in the last 15 years though, and it takes some work to get conversant with it.
If you really want the position, you will put a lot of effort into researching what the interview will entail.
If you're a hard worker, you will intensively study for the interview.
If you're smart, you'll be able to apply the material you studied to the problem, and you'll probably realize the game you're playing.
None of these things is about 'engineering skill', which is much more difficult to discover, and only really valuable if the person is a smart, hard worker, who sticks around.
*edit: I am not saying that I like this style of interview, and when I interview job candidates, I never engage in this type of 'test'
A sensible knowledge and performance evaluation would involve pair coding on limited scope, immediate, real problems, not BS trivia.
Interviewing is a two-way street.. the signals given-off in the interview process should be taken in as a totality by the interviewee as well. If they see bad signs, they should run in the opposite direction rather than get sucked into a bad environment.
Full disclosure; I have never done an interview like this, or tried to land a job at a major 'tech' company, though I do have a degree in engineering.
If I didn’t have any other option besides the standard r/cscareerquestions “Learn leetCode and work for a FAANG” , I would.
Are those interview processes really optimising for candidates who are willing and able to spend silly amounts of time creating an illusion of being super-keen?
Not even five years ago this style of interviewing was looked down upon by most.
It is true that I use a hard algorithm maybe 8 times a year. But I need my coworkers to be able to understand them when we do. So that's one part of it.
Another major part is having you go into detail about complexity and tradeoffs. Believe it or not most of my co-workers can derrive these things on the fly, not memorized. Others require a little think.
The third is algorithms boil down to simple interviews where only a few things can go meta wrong. There are other types of question but they have a lot more failure modes and are even harder to train people to give.
I understand that for a big company they need something standardized to process a large number of candidates.
Thankfully, at the same time (this was in 2011), I was also in the process of interviewing for a startup that treated me like a real person with individual skills and experiences of value. That interview process went a lot better, and did result in me getting hired.
(And Amazon recruiters still pester me to this day, despite me having little interest in working for them.)
SV is an outlier among outliers in almost every respect, even among other large metro areas with big tech industries like NYC, Chicago, or Austin. To the point where advice should always clarify whether it pertains to SV or non-SV, because it's usually one or the other.
Edit: typo
I think I should have tried the local recruiter approach back when I was in Dallas and getting bupkis for hits. Unfortunately, I bought too heavily into the "lol recruiters r trash" meme and didn't consider the type of recruiter before dismissing them wholesale.
Also, I left the workforce because I don't find working for Darwinian corporations or without equity to be a valuable or fair use of my time or meritocratic compensation.
So now we've hit the real root of the problem. If you expect significantly more money than competitors in your role- than ageism may not be why it's getting harder to find jobs.
It isn't 'ageist' to disagree on the value of prior experience.
If someone aged 42 is only as productive as someone aged 22, it's perfectly reasonable to offer them only the same salary for the same job.
Of course, unless the person aged 42 has wasted 20 years of their careers (which, I concede, some have) it is highly unlikely that their productivity is really still the same.
A 42-year-old developer who has 5x the productivity of a 22-year-old developer and much more general business experience as well but only wants 3x the salary is a steal, unless you're only looking at the $$$.
As they say, compound interest is king - companies are just not willing to swallow the fact that the compound interest is in this case working against them. And yes, it’s working against employees as well: after all, no amount of technical experience can fight against 20+ years of compounded interest.
EDIT:
A $60k starting salary, compounded annually at 4% for 20 years, will be $131k. At the age of 50, they’re knocking on the door of $200k. 60 brings them to around $290k. Just by doing their job.
If anyone is to blame for the “unnaturally high” salaries of those over 40, it’s the companies themselves, plus a bit of math.
The only part that’s tied to your perceived value and leverage are bonuses or new job salaries (and most of the time those are tied to your previous salary). I’m not counting bonuses, and getting over a 20% increase when switching jobs is a startlingly rare event reserved for CEOs and the Guidos of this world.
Also, if you have concrete examples to the opposite, I’d like to hear them. Simply claiming repeatedly that they are merit based does nothing to sway me to your position.
In fact- at Amazon I've heard the opposite of what you're claiming (I've heard this sort of culture referred to as 'up or out')- after a few years you've exhausted your signing incentives (primarily stock options that vest over those few years) and if you stay in the same role for a long time, your total comp will actually decrease
Out of curiosity - don't companies take a pass on older candidates because they expect them to ask for a higher salary than the younger ones?
Also, even my current employer has historically preferred young hires. But as they've grown as a company, and their clients' needs have expanded, they've found value in experienced developers as well.
(To be sure, I get your point. But I think this anecdote might be a little bit your own barriers to that route as well as recruiters just spamming people that match keywords.)
If not, I'm going to ask the next one to flag me in their system, if that's possible.
And I really have no desire to work for that type of company. Love it as a customer, but not my cup of office.
There's no intrinsic reason why older workers are more expensive than younger workers. If you think your experience warrants a compensation premium, then it's up to you to persuade your prospective employer of that; you can't just unilaterally insist that you deserve more pay. If you demand extra pay because of your age and no one is willing to give you that, then your compensation expectations are just out of line with the market. The employers who won't pay you more money aren't discriminating on the basis of age (illegal and unethical), they're discriminating on the basis of salary expectations (legal and perfectly reasonable).
And certainly. A lot of projects were small enough where I did everything from set up the hosting environment and domain names, build the database, write the application and maybe even do front-end development. But I don't usually have the confidence to be the final point person on larger projects. I suspect I'm getting there. You can only stand to do things that you know won't turn out well at someone else's direction, only to soon watch them turn out poorly... so many times before you start to believe in yourself a little.
I know that feeling!
1. Sounding desperate. Do not cast a very wide net at one company -- you can apply to mid level and principal level positions at different companies, but do not blanket all job postings at one company. Choose one that fits you best and apply there.
2. Attitude. People with lots of experience often come in with "let me tell you how you should be doing this instead" approach which in most cases is a fatal wound. Learn what problems the company is solving and help them within their constraints, including using their tools and languages even if they look suboptimal.
Just as an anecdote, a friend (close to 50) working in software changed positions in Feb-March and had offers within 2 weeks. He chose to sit out at the dying unit to collect retention money; retention $ required not searching for jobs before he was officially let go, so he started his search from the "unemployed" state as well. It is certainly possible, good luck!
within reason and 'on day one', yes, agreed. However, if you're hired in because of your skills/accomplishments, but you don't measure up, and it's because their tools/process/code is demonstrably bad, those are constraints that should be on the table for discussion/improvement. In most cases I've seen, those sorts of changes have a net positive for almost everyone on the project (fewer bugs, faster turnaround, whatever), at the expense of being a negative for a handful of territorial people threatened by change.
Not coming in on day one saying "you have to change everything to my approach!" - agreed. Toiling away in suboptimal situations when you know the poor results are improvable for fear of not wanting to look pushy... unacceptable (over a longer term).
- Your stack is bad.
- You should use X.
- Your process is wrong.
A sure way to sound like an experienced senior developer:
- Your stack has this flaw; we can live with it by doing X but that is at the expense of Y1. A migration to Z will cost Y2, that is much cheaper on the long run.
But you'll probably conclude that Y2 isn't much cheaper on the long run anyway. If it's that case that it is cheaper, and even then people above you do not want the change, then you do have a real problem.
> If it's that case that it is cheaper, and even then people above you do not want the change, then you do have a real problem.
Not necessarily so. This assumes the long run is ever reached. I've seen a lot of developers that do this analysis still hop from tech to tech as the best in "the long run", and if you ever listened to them you would never actually reach that long run benefit.
Regardless, a lot probably depends upon the current state of your company.
You can actually take advantage of your age / experience and hire someone out of college for cheap to do some of the day to day and you deliver the consulting "solution" - can be very lucrative. You may be more likely to get the deal talking to the top as a 40 year old then as a 21 year old.
Why is that a negative signal? The company has the opportunity to get top talent temporarily down on his/her luck for a reduced rate.
Standard: not saying it's fair or endorsing this, explaining how people think and feel about it.
Disclaimer: I'm saying this for your own benefit, but your comment comes across as incredibly naive, and I would never endorse you as an interviewer with this attitude.
There are life circumstances which one can literally not plan for, and which can derail even the most well-conceived of plans. Chronic illness, war, natural disasters, etc., all come to mind. Give all the examples you want regarding how one might conceivably prepare for one of those things, but it's pretty clear from your opinion that you've never experienced one of these yourself.
On the other hand I'd hire a humble person based on this single trait alone and wouldn't regret most of the time. Humility is an exceptional marker for a good coworker. The best people I interviewed knew their limits and were eager to point them out.
[1] not overconfident, i.e. claiming to know more than they obviously do
People who know what they're doing will over time become more confident.
People who don't know what they're doing will over time become more desperate as they run out of places to fail at.
You could do a lot of work to figure out the difference between someone who knows what they're doing and someone who doesn't. But it's a lot easier to just notice if they look confident or desperate.
Unfortunately, being confident is actually super easy if you're willing to practice it. Much easier than actually being good at anything.
Also unfortunately, being confident is really hard if you don't know how to practice it. And the skill is orthogonal to most other skills. So if you're good at something, it might actually be harder to control how confident you appear to others.
What's your biggest weakness is all about your ability to tell a good story about a failure that you're responsible for. Because if you have a good story then the person responsible for you can retell the story to the people that they answer to.
Yeah, Joe messed up big time and then left the company and I was responsible for him, but listen to this great story that he told me about why everything was going to work. Clearly this failure was from external forces that shouldn't be held against me. Anyone else would have failed; it was inevitable.
Desperation isn't a good story for anyone. Yeah, I left Joe in charge. And he told me that he knew what he was doing. But he also seemed really desperate (and everyone could tell), like he would say whatever he had to in order to get the job. Yeah, this is clearly all my fault and I should probably be fired too.
is it though? CA is at-will employment, so there's literally nothing stopping a company from firing someone that isn't working out (besides timidity on the part of the person who would have to do the firing).
"when hiring, you want to play it safe"
personally, i'd rather tell some people it's not working out than miss out on incredible talent because i'm too scared to fire someone.
i prefer to lean into strengths, not try to shore up weaknesses.
"top talent usually don't get desperate" there are many reasons why people look for jobs, on their own timing, and with their own reasons. reading 'desperation' into someone's application is projecting your own fears and experiences onto theirs without actually taking the time to learn more. it's lazy.
Last I checked, I was 9700 kilometers away from California. Not everybody on HN is from Silicon Valley.
> personally, i'd rather tell some people it's not working out than miss out on incredible talent because i'm too scared to fire someone.
Then you've never seen one bad hire destroy whole teams.
> reading 'desperation' into someone's application is projecting your own fears and experiences onto theirs without actually taking the time to learn more.
This thesis has no null hypothesis. The same arguments could be applied to about anyone who's perceving any emotions from other people, in any context, aside from listening to a person narrate his emotions out loud. See, none of us have any emptathy or eye for emotion, we're all just projecting something of our own. And if you, or anyone, has any counter-argument against this clearly absurd statement, the same counter-argument could equally rebute yours as well.
So... you have strong labor where you live? Where do you live? Employment is not at will? Everyone gets a contract with a specified time? Saying you live far away doesn't address whether employment is at-will where you live.
> Then you've never seen one bad hire destroy whole teams.
Nope, never have. Ever. My anecdotes are as good as yours.
> This thesis has no null hypothesis...
Lots of word salad there, let me break it down for you: without speaking to someone to learn more, your interpretation of "desperation" based on their resume or what jobs they apply for alone is a projection of your own insecurities. Maybe they like several of the jobs at your company and could do them equally well. Just because you would feel "desperate" if you did that doesn't mean everyone does. All your gymnastics about hypothesis and arguments don't actually address any of the real issues that the post is about. Pretty self-congratulatory about knowing words.
Spoiler: because you assumend he can find a job bevause he's desperate.
Your problems are not other people's.
I am 48 years old and having a blast. I am team lead working in the companies CTO office. I play around with build systems, making everything cloud native (kubernetes) and I get to work on a good amount of upstream open source projects. My company does not see my age at all, they just see me keeping busy and constantly pushing to learn new tech. I would say overall in our team, the under 25's are the minority.
I think you're attitude helps. I still feel like I am a kid in my head and I get massively excited about tech , even more as time passes. There is always something new to learn.
Shouldn’t minimize the reality of getting old.
Shouldn't minimize the reality of getting old.
Edit: Just in case this sounds snarky, it is a bit. But that first paragraph sells well. I am sure if I was making crud apps in Node I would be a much harder sell. A younger, recent grad can definitely out price me and do a wonderful job.
https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2019/19/average-age-of-first-t...
and
https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/figures/detail/37744eng
the latter has underlying data for which you can extract %ile parent age. To save you the time, by parent age 40 it's under 10%ile.
What did you work on during those years? Did you keep up with the industry?
I am asking out of interest for both you and me. For you, I want to help you regain confidence that is rightfully yours, because someone with your experience should not need to feel desperate. For me, I want to know if there are objectively speaking potential career missteps one should avoid.
Based on their experiences I think the best advice is to stay current in your skills, find ways to apply those skills at work so you can get those lines on your resume, and choose to be a generalist rather than specializing. Don’t be loyal to your language or framework, demand for skills in software is more a function of whats fashionable than anything else. Look at where Perl is, many Perl coders were loyal to Perl instead of learning Python.
Most importantly, take a look at the ages of your coworkers. Is it really smart to be loyal to a company where there’s few people over 40 working your job? My Dad stayed at a company for 10 years and only got a raise once. Be smart, at some places you’re just a line item.
There's a whole subset of folks looking at 'tech' as 'startup', and the goal of those companies is often to get acquired, so, the company won't necessarily be around in 8 years, let alone 20.
I've resigned myself to the notion that I'll never get a '20 year anniversary' at a company at this stage of my life. I don't mind, but it was one of those things when you're younger that does seem achievable. Most of the companies I've worked at in the past 25+ years aren't even in business any longer, except for 1, which was already 15+ years old when I started, and that was 15 years ago - had I stayed, that might have been the one chance to hit a '20 year' mark someplace (and I have one colleague who started with me and stayed there, so he might make it).
I won't either. But I was at one company about 13 years, another about 8, and just over 10 at my current one.
> What did you work on during those years?
Line-of-business apps. VB.NET maybe? Or Java/J2EE type stuff. Probably jobs involving mainframes as core legacy systems? Things where "design" was more a function of where your WYSIWYG editor placed controls than conscious decisions.
> Did you keep up with the industry?
Enough to read HN, but not enough to keep learning new technologies and not languish at the same company for a decade writing the applications mentioned above.
Please don't, you have no relevant information so your speculation isn't helpful.
And let's not ignore the fact that if you removed speculative comments with no relevant information from HN we'd lose about 2/3 of the userbase.
Turns out that it really is hard to get a job when you don't already have one.
My personal definition of it is just a developer that doesn't get hung up on issues. Majority of developers I've worked with can get stuck on the same problem for a week that a 10xer can solve in a couple of hours.
The difference is the 10xer understands the system and tools enough that they don't get lost in the weeds. And the other developers do get lost in the weeds. Which of course means a 10xer in one environment won't be it in another environment if they are dropped into it without adequate time for training.
For me the real 10x skill is knowing when to write code and when not to. Too many programmers code their way out of a problem, instead of reconsidering the problem in a way that they can repurpose something that already exists.
I must have had 50 interviews in that time. Some I knew I failed and others I thought I nailed. There's a lot of luck in interviews, good and bad, but I think it usually comes down to personal biases and 'fit.' Sometimes I'm not technical enough, like when I interviewed at Facebook and Amazon. In that case Leetcoding would help, but you still have the whole 'fit' issue to deal with.
In April of 2019 I landed a dev job. I only got it because a friend referred me and the interviewer had worked at the same company as me and my friend Luck strikes again...
Good luck!
I will say that I interview devs at my current position. I have noticed that a lot of the older people who come in and have years and years of experience at one place don't seem to have the breadth of knowledge we are looking for.
For example, recently before the lockdown I interviewed a guy with over 20 years experience, most mainly at one company for a .net role. He didn't know any of the latest features of the language, including Linq and async/await, never used .net core, no NoSQL experience at all.
We didn't hire him and it's not because of his age. We have several "older" new hires in my engineering department, but it seems like a lot of the "older" people have lots of experience, but at the same company where they fall into complacency and don't keep up with what is happening in the industry.
Not saying this is the case here, but when interviewing this guy I mentioned, this site popped into my head because this is not the first time I've heard people complain about age discrimination in tech here. I have to say from my personal experience, I haven't seen it. Not once has anyone on our interview team said anything about an interviewees age, only the amount of experience someone has. And even that is treated as a positive as we just assume they know their stuff if they've been around for 20+ years.
I have also interviewed a handful of people that had 20, 30 years of experience building software. In some cases, they had resumes pages long dating back into the late 80s. One tip I would stress to anyone who has been doing software engineering that long? Don't list all of the history you've ever had. Go back maybe 10 years. If you're worried someone might miss something you built from 15 years ago, just put "more job experience history available upon request" or something like that. The simple truth is having built something in Delphi in the 90s just isn't going to 'help' you working with today's frameworks, even though the underlying core software engineering skills will almost certainly be relevant regardless of language, toolset, or framework du jour.
10 years is enough to understand software, process, and the rest at a deep level. You may have expertise in a particular area. You know pretty much all the things that are available to know.
After 10 years, the previous experience becomes irrelevant and "drops off". The languages you learned? Gone. The APIs and weird hardware limitations? Irrelevant. Nothing beyond 10 years matters.
One career mode is to shift to management. Or move to a technical leadership role where durable interpersonal relationships matter. The other career mode is to keep learning. Learn the new stack, the new language, the new whatever. Keep learning.
I think that some developers hit trouble around 40 because they spent their first 10 years learning, then realized that they knew everything and coasted for 5-7 more, and then show up at 40 years old completely out of touch. Imagine a hiring manager considering someone with only 2 years of relevant experience (and a demonstrated unwillingness to learn), who is nevertheless convinced that he is super-senior and demanding compensation to match. That's the reality.
I think that much of what we call ageism is just the natural consequences of a fixed mindset. Make every 10 years shine. "What have you done for me lately?"
> The languages you learned? Gone.
I'm not sure if I'll ever get to write Modula-2 again. But every few years, knowing some PostScript can come in handy. FORTH has a tendency to pop up on every resource constrained platform for a while. Tcl has preserved some niches.
And C++ is both old and new technology. Some details have stuck around for 35 years, but if you don't reinvent your style every 10 years or so, you risk becoming obsolete.
> The APIs and weird hardware limitations? Irrelevant.
Hardware limitations tend to come in cycles. Just when resource constraints on macOS seemed irrelevant, along came iOS with its murderous daemons baying for the blood of resource hungry processes. Just when resource constraints in iOS seemed irrelevant, along came watches.
And a Commodore PET with its 7167 bytes of available RAM and fairly accessible hardware ports has some similarity with an Arduino Uno.
So while I think it's unwise to bank on some knowledge never ceasing to be useful, or that no new technology is ever worth learning, knowing old stuff in itself is not a drawback.
The experience you're really paying for with an older developer goes way beyond that. It's having a "deep" memory of a number of projects that have failed. It's having a true understanding of the value of quality and reliability. And being able to set the right level for each situation. It's about taking the time to get the requirements right, rather than just implementing what it sounds like the customer wants, only to find out months in that they don't even know. It's about showing up to the job every day. It's about knowing better than to just jump to the next job after a few months.
If you want to experience youth, ask a young team how they're planning to deal with disasters, and watch the blank looks.
Even for the tech aspects, it's very useful to have experienced the history to know why things are the way they are now.
One of the reasons I'm so valuable now is because of what I was doing 25 years ago. As you're implicitly noting, it's hard to sell that, but that doesn't mean it's not so.
1. Experience without knowing the latest stack is useless for a pure developer role.
2. Leaning into the deep memory of past failures is more consistent with a technical lead, which is one of the "other" growth paths.
C - first released 48 years ago.
Python - first released 30 years ago.
C++ - first released 35 years ago.
C# - first released 20 years ago.
VB - first released 29 years ago.
Javascript - first released 24 years ago.
PHP - first released 25 years ago.
SQL - first released 46 years ago.
R - first released 26 years ago.
Those are currently the top 10 most popular languages according the TIOBE Index. The idea that everything turns over immediately is maybe true in the valley, but it isn't close to being true industrywide.
The guy to the right of me was in his mid 60's, the guy behind me was 50, and my boss was 52. I think the only other engineer not over 50 was this one guy who was in his late 30's.
It seems like in the defense industry, it's almost the opposite.
I can't say much personally, other than at 36 my career is still on an upward trajectory. I've worked 50-60 hours a week my whole career though, not for the company usually, but putting in time on side projects, learning new skills. I think part of the problem is once you have a family, priorities change and you don't have that kind of time to stay on top of the game anymore. That doesn't mean you can't compete, you have other advantages on the youngsters - you just need to play to your advantages.
I'm almost 40 and are constantly getting harassed by recruiters.
My mate in his 60s not long ago got hired for a software developer role, and easily at that. Two interviews and he got an offer.
Another mate near 40 stepped back from manager type role into a developer role, and his age is not an issue.
SV start-ups need bright shiny twenty-somethings for their "About us" pages and their IG lifestyle feed, with a few wise old thirty-somethings to ride herd on them.
It leaves room for the forty-something and fifty-something VCs to do what they enjoy, which is pretending to be the team coach.
Put in some wrinkly old guys - or worse, some old women - and there goes your brand identity.
Only result of this is to repeat mistakes over and over again...
I am 48 and having a blast in my career now, I am getting my hands on all sorts of interesting things to learn.
The only people who I have seen struggle with this are those who just go stale. I have friend who is a C++ programmer, and for 30 years all he has worked on is some logic controller software used in trains and energy systems. He is getting close to retirement, but if things go tits up due to COVIDs impact, he will very likely be unemployable. Me on the other hand. I get daily connect requests and job interests put my way on linked in.
And I really like working remotely. If I lose this job for whatever reason that's Plan A, not the backup.
I am almost certain there is something else going on here other than your age. In fact, I've never once been asked my age in an interview, and I'm a couple of years into my second career doing this after I retired from my first.
Not true, in German speaking countries having your photo, birthday and work/graduation dates in your resume is basically mandatory, especially when applying at big established companies.
Omitting them could have your resume disqualified as HR might think you're trying to hide something or that you haven't bothered to do it right.
1.) Most people can do math. Unless you're also going to be evasive more or less throughout your resume about how long you were in roles and the like, people are going to figure out your rough age/general seniority pretty easily. And at some point it looks evasive. Maybe you're trying to hide some big gap that exists for some reason.
2.) But let's say you do scrub your resume and no one calls you on it. You're presumably going to have an in-person interview at some point and they'll, again, figure out your approximate age pretty quickly unless maybe you're exceptionally young looking.
3.) All this assumes that no one actually knows you when, in my personal experience, every job I've taken since grad school was through someone I knew.
I rarely apply for a job cold. I've nearly always had some point of networking somewhere.
Even for the job I have now, for which I did just send in a resumé and an application cold, I have some very specific key words on my resumé that the hiring manager recognized and then started asking if I knew person x and person y and so on and we discovered that we have a bunch of prior colleagues in common, which also made me extremely useful to the organization in ways they don't advertise (I already knew this going into the interview, as I did my research).
Finding a job is very much about market segment, branding, and networking. If you're "just another web dev" and have no other meaningful skills and no friends, then maybe finding work after 40 is hard -- I wouldn't really know. If you're a C++ guru with an MS, an embedded dev, a specwar comms tech, etc, you get really valuable to some people because you've got such a broad set of experiences, and they don't give a rat's ass how old you are as long as you can still hobble in to work some days.
And sometimes they'll hire you for your network as well, which isn't all bad either.
2) Getting an interview is all a resume is good for in the first place. Now they've invested their time in you and you have a chance to sell yourself.
3) Same here, but even people who "know" me professionally don't necessarily know my age. I certainly don't know all of their ages! Plus if they know you, they already have an incentive to care less about your age.
But my point was that there are market segments where age literally doesn't matter one bit.
I'm retired from my first career and writing code every day for a second career, well over 40. I've interviewed for five jobs in that time frame and been offered every single one -- and I don't interview for management roles because I hate managing (it's what I did for 20+ years in the Navy).
In my experience it's not about age. There are jobs, one just has to find what fits them.
This guy blows those "workhorses" out of the water. He's a Clydesdale. He literally makes everyone else on the team (including me) look bad in comparison. He's THAT good.
He acknowledges that due to his age, he has to work harder to prove himself. On our current team, he no longer has anything to prove, yet puts in rock star performances day after day after day. I could go on but you get the point. Don't give up!
I found my dream job again, after getting stuck somewhere after the former company I worked for was acquired by big NY finance.
I was fairly lucky, because I was still pretty relevant, on my game, studied all that college alg stuff again, and I even was flown out to FAANG companies for interviews, etc.,
But I still interviewed at 40 places to get a single offer.
Tech also changes so much, that someone with 10 years of the wrong experience (legacy tech), is less important than 2 years of the vNext tech-stack.
You need to really a) lock in what people are doing for technical coding tests these days, sure it's gate-keeping, but it is what it is b) make sure you've gotten some coaching on how to answer a lot of the soft-skill questions (you know, the fluffy stuff that devs typically think don't matter, but that are used to build an impression of you speaking....lots of websites out there.). And you'll need to change your mindset a bit, likely, into thinking like your younger-self, and not like hey, I'm 20+ years experience, etc. Pretend like you have 5 years experience, and go for it.
I have never in my life had anything approaching a hard algorithm coding interview and I didn’t know such a thing existed until three years ago after being on HN and reading r/cscareerquestions.
I’m a standard enterprise dev living in Atlanta. Pre-Covid, the job market has usually been good for me since 2000 when I got my second job after leaving my first job I got based on an internship.
There were even jobs/contracts available between 2008-2011
I think I am above average soft skill interviewer FWIW.
That said, if you're an older dev that hasn't kept up with the times, I'm prob not going to hire you.
I even work in SV :)
You are just justifying being ageist. You mental gymnastics to do so are in your second to last line.
Exp in older stacks, that are 'obsolete' in your eyes, has helped me so many times with newer stacks. They usually make the same mistakes/patterns and have the same bits connecting it together at the OS level. A more experienced dev from another stack may say 'hey if this stack had XYZ from this other stack this would be so much easier' They then will get that thing done.
If you are skipping people because they do not know your particular stack you are missing out on a lot of people. The fresh young grad is not going to know any stack and will have no exp to draw upon when it goes sideways. That is why you pair them with someone who does have that exp to draw upon. Sometimes you want that crusty old ways too. Linux is a hodge podge of tech smashed together drawing from well over 40 years of tech stacks. Each with its own quirks.
Truer words rarely spoken. Tech is Logan's Run, No Country For Old Men.
Yes, positions aren't competitive, etc., but they mostly get really rough applicants and are happy that anybody who knows what they're doing applies, and are probably better than no work.
And you can end up with an amazing amount of freedom on technical choices, etc.
We have several engineers on our team that are 40+ that are either senior or principal developers. Age never really came up in the discussion. Just their experience and how they did in the interview when talking about that experience and when encountering new problems.
You are saying that age isn't a factor while also saying that a person can be too experienced for a role. Age and experience are highly correlated. So while you aren't specifically saying it, you are certainly implying that someone can be too old for a specific role.
The only painful thing to get over is the realization that you aren’t viewed anymore as the hotshot you thought you were in your twenties.
I'm saving as much as I can. The end is nigh.
I don't really understand why this would be the case. From a purely practical standpoint, people loaded up with a family are more likely to stay and perform in a job for income stability.
I guess if a company is looking for people to burn through like firewood this might not be the case, but I think those are the places you want to avoid anyway!
- What are your hobbies?
- What drives you?
- Where do you see yourself in five years?
- Would you be willing to work long hours often?
- Can you work in the USA?
And so on.
There's so many questions that are legal to ask but for which an honest answer would reveal private information.
Can't you just lie about this? It's none of their business.
Or tell white lies -- kids, but "pretty old" or "at college" or whatever.
My last round of interviews was at age 46. Went from being (voluntarily) unemployed to a FAANG job. I had to do the same stuff the 20-somethings do: practiced hackerrank, answered stupid whiteboard dynamic programming questions that have nothing to do with the job, etc. But at no time did I talk about my personal life with anyone involved in hiring.
The other questions only lead to answers that involve your personal life if you choose to talk about your personal life. Job interviews are professional negotiation, not chats with friends. Where do you see yourself professionally in 5 years? Why would you mention your family?
Asking if you're willing to put in lots of overtime should be a red flag for a job at any age, and answering it shouldn't involve mentioning your kids.
Can you work in the US? Maybe there's issues where the answer varies based on marital status...
I would mention my family for any professional prediction because it is a guiding factor; in five years, I see myself continuing to be a product lead and hopefully working with my daughters on an independent project of their own.
I work in entertainment software, in British Columbia; overtime is normal, working 40h a week or less is not. The BC NDP stripped tech workers of their basic employment rights, around two decades ago; among those rights removed was any right to overtime compensation.
I can't work in the USA _easily_ and I would _prefer_ not to; I have no interest in raising my kids there. But I've worked from home for five years and so I don't see why I should have to relocate. :P
When I was younger and working in game development, I probably got asked about hobbies. Nowadays I'm generally pretty good at directing conversations like that politely back on track.
As for mentioning something you want to do with your kids in 5 years? In a job interview? I don't understand it but I suppose some people want to talk about their home lives during job interviews.
And thanks for reminding me one of the reasons I left game development. I don't miss having just work/work balance. :-)
I'm 50+ and that is how I easily get jobs.
Now, (and I'm not saying this applies to you) if no one you worked with before wants to work with you again, that is a real bad sign.
Now, even in embedded, not every employer sees the value in 30 years of experience. Those that do, though, understand that such a person is more valuable than someone with 5 years, and will pay accordingly.
I notice over the years a few star players in their 50s and even 60s are either unmarried, or married without kids.
I have kids and I'm in my 40s, I plan to work until 65 for coding. If nobody hires me, I will try to get something done(SaaS?) or consultation from home. I probably don't need that income to survive(by then the kids will be out so the finance burden will be more tolerable). Working is the meaning of life for me, it has nothing to do with my age or if anyone hires me. I will keep studying and working no matter what.
Then I managed to get a new project and used it to learn new technologies: modern java, scala, modern js, hadoop, spark, and so on. In the same period I also gave a bunch of tech talks at local meetups. By 38 I had a resume good enough that I basically picked my employer and job of choice, applied and was hired immediately. Recruiters contact me all the time.
I don’t want to say your resume is your problem having not seen it, but for me it definitely was.
I have defined my advantage should be experience, wisdom and maturity. I try to deliver something to my managers that they just can't get from a developer that is very bright but has just couple of years of experience. I try to spend more and more of my time learning and deliver with less time expenditure.
Also, don't get discouraged when you don't get a job somewhere because you are an older guy. You should be thankful that you did not get the job, probably it would be a dead end anyway.
You don't need every place to accept your age. You just need one -- one where you will feel at home and be happy offering your services.
That scares the hell out of me. I started working in IT at 22 and now I'm 30.
I'm SRE and I think of myself as a useless lamer compared to the real 10x guys around. It gets heavier every year.
I got bagdes CCNP/OSCP/RHCE/CKA/AWS DevOps Pro/etc only to confirm that I know at least something. (I don't tell anyone about them so I don't become known as a paper tiger.) On my way to CCIE.
I study things and write code for ~2-4 hours every day after work and ~8 hours on non-working days.
Maybe by the time I'm 35 and finally became a decent SRE, I hope that I can do a real work in big company like FAANG. And no one will hire me because I'm too old.
The difference is that SRE -- unlike much of AppDev -- gives you leveraged impact. The building blocks and guardrails that an SRE team gives to application development teams can create productivity impact for hundreds or thousands of engineers across dozens of teams. It may not feel like 10x from a banging-out-code perspective, but it sure is from an economic perspective - don't lose sight of that when you're talking about your value with your employer.
Could this be why? Desperation has a way of putting people off?
Maybe you just need to tune which companies you look at and/or lower you salary expectations. I'm not sure honestly. Just thought I'd try and give you my experience.
You gotta see your work as an investment and not as an exchange of time for money as seems to be the governing consensus
I'm so sick of the tropes and stereotypes if one is serious about wisdom and knowledge one knows how to start at first principles
It sounds like you're playing to lose whereas if you've learned anything in all these years it's that if you don't like what's being said...
PS if you just need a job try the huge government contractors
Sure, most of the jobs advertised are worse than my current position, but I get the feeling that if I looked around a bit, I wouldn't have any problem getting offers.
Then again, it did take 4 years of applying for jobs in the industry before I finally found a company willing to take the risk of employing me.
I don't know what my x-ranking is. I know I'm not a rockstar: my sister-in-law gets to tour the world playing bass in a band and my life is nothing like hers.
I can't speak for you of course, but I've known people who at one point couldn't keep the recruiters away who 15 years later can't get a call back, based on not keeping up with the industry.
The 10x developer talk is just hype by unscrupulous employers to entice young engineers to have an unhealthy work life balance. Of course they don't tell that to older developers because they would call you on their bullshit.
I know a lot of professional developers that are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. What keeps these engineers employed is not how great they are technically, but that they are humble, flexible, willing to share their experience, and are social inside and outside of work (large networks).
>Make a backup plan now. Agreed you should always have a plan B.
Here are a few ideas:
1) Ageism is real no denial of that, but so is racism, sexism, ableism. We all have to work through that nonsense. Don't give up.
2) There are a shit-ton more well paying technical jobs that need coders than just software developer roles, expand your horizons.
3) There are public/private sector employers that need software developers badly who are willing to be flexible. (see NJ needs COBOL developers)
4) Remote developer work is taking off. I think they care less about where you live, what you look like, or how old you are.
For sure, I was a "GeoData Manager" at an oil company for a year. The job didn't have programming as a requirement, but I used Python to do my job, and I became super, super productive. After learning a lot about geometry and mapping, I could do a day's work in under an hour. It paid alright for the area, and I didn't have any other experience. I think there's a lot of analyst roles out there that someone with some programming experience could knock out of the park if they don't mind writing a lot of code to read/write Excel spreadsheets, or scrape data from the web, or do any number tasks like that.
NJ wants UNPAID cobol developers. I’ve been researching the cobol market in the last few weeks to see if it was worthwhile and people in the know pretty much agreed that it’s absolutely not worth it. Doesn’t pay well, codebases that run it are hell to work on, and it’s all outsourced to sweatshops in Asia anyway.
Not contesting your more general point per se, but cobol is not a good example of that.
Discrimination is real, and many people in the Valley pretend it doesn't exist when it conveniently benefits, or doesn't affect, them right now.
Is there something you aren't telling us?
I've been trying to move out of an individual contributor role for a while, but it's always the same story: 1) We need you to build this super-important thing; you're too valuable as a developer right now 2) We're growing fast, we need experienced managers right now (or 2A: Your team is performing at a high level, we don’t need managers) 3) We're cutting back, we don't have a position for you right now. And in my most recent case 4) We're shutting the company down, good luck.
I find most places only want experienced managers, yet the industry as a whole is terrible at providing any sort of career development path for developers.
OP is right - make a backup plan now. If you want to move into management, start laying that groundwork BEFORE you're ready to move on.
Get good at your job. Get good at the company. Learn the domain and drink the koolaid. And, when the team grows, and they're looking for managers, nominate yourself to begin transitioning. You'll do both jobs and straddle the line for a while but eventually you'll have job experience managing a team.
Then I hit 30. That type of talk stopped.
Then I hit 40. Now I will not be considered for any entry level, mid level, or senior level software dev job anywhere in the United States, despite being very desperate and willing to relocate for anything. Doesn't matter. Too old. I'm supposed to be doing something else by now.
Make a backup plan now.