What has your experience been with this issue?
That's why I say "work smarter not harder" can fail - that only works if you make assumptions about the future, in a startup that can only take you so far.
Another is pricing yourself out of the industry. And another is the mistaken idea that all an older dev knows is older out of date technology. The usual stuff.
I’ve found that firmware and regulated industries in general do not have as rampant of an ageism issue.
If you're in the US, you might want to ask your HR about whether that can be a factor in hiring criteria.
If HR says "Don't do that", then they might prefer not to hear that it was already done (so maybe don't volunteer the info, unless they ask), in which case it's a for-future-reference.
On the other hand if you are a subject matter expert in a particular domain, then your twenty years of experience are indeed very useful, and while no one wants to replicate the risk reporting system you built in Motif/X in the 90's, they may well want build it in React.
I’m GenX and grew up with the internet but I know life before the internet. I know technology more than most and keep up with it. I play video games (finished elden ring earlier this year) and watch TikTok 2 hours a day. I’m not young but the gap between me and someone younger isn’t a vast canyon like it used to be.
My last job hunt a year ago I got over 5 job offers. I wouldn’t be too worried.
Also, tiktok is like smoking—wouldn't recommend.
This point in the article was weird to me, that you should creatively avoid saying that you were laid off. Sure, some layoffs are just an excuse to get rid of people who the company believe are low performers, so if you were laid off from a prominent company where recruiters know why the layoff happened, this could be a problem for you when looking for a new job.
But if you were caught in the string of layoffs happening this year (or at the beginning of the pandemic), I can't see how there'd be stigma attached to that. And I'd worry that being evasive about why you're no longer at your previous company could be a red flag to recruiters; just doesn't seem worth it.
But, y'know, regardless of the environment, what does it say about your abilities that your employer didn't consider you essential?
This is a very pessimistic way to view things that I don't fully believe, and of course any reasonable person knows that being part of a layoff is very rarely just the employee's fault. But to perhaps state the obvious, being laid off is never gonna look good, or even neutral. There will always be stigma.
Being able to reframe your layoff in as positive of a light as you can is important.
In the case of a startup, there's often not much you can do to be seen as valued if you're not a founding engineer.
I've been a part of 3 layoffs. 15%, 90%, and 75% reductions, all at small or medium-sized startups. At a startup, they're going to keep founding and early engineers first. There's a selection bias, but those engineers aren't probably "dead weight" if they were there since the early days. Plus, there's a cliqueness to startups that will favor them.
But... it's still set against the default backdrop of "they kept some people, but not me", so it's important to be able to tell your story well.
At my previous job, the company laid off 1000 people, but only 3% of engineering…
But, y'know, regardless of the environment, what does it say about your
abilities that your employer didn't consider you essential?
Whether or not saying you got laid off would hurt your chances is a separate question. My guess is most of the time it wont. But as a flip, would saying you got laid off improve your chances of getting the job? If the answer is no, then its not worth saying - focus instead on the things that for sure portray you positively.
The same goes for jobs with short tenures - if you stayed at some place for a few months and left just leave it off your resume. It doesn't do anything to sell you, so why waste time on it?
Just remember, an interview is a short period of time to sell the best parts of yourself that are most applicable to the job. It is not a 100% confession of all the good and bad things that happened to you.
Being laid off was not a relief -- it was terrifying. All indications were that a severe recession was coming. Frankly, it was quite surprising to me that companies were hiring at all given the uncertainty. It was not obvious at the time that broad sectors of the economy could seamlessly move to 100% WFH. It was also my first experience in fully remote interviewing.
I am a software engineer over fifty. I also have three children two of whom were in college, and my wife works in a travel related industry which was very much affected by the pandemic.
Given those things I approached my job search aggressively and with a sense of urgency, and I made it out OK. I was out of work for about two months and accepted a role at flat comp.
Being laid off is profoundly lonely. I was part of a mass layoff (approximately 2/3 of my company was laid off.) So while I was not alone in that sense, we were all very much alone together. Where you had been a team, you were now five people looking for jobs, each with their own problems and constraints. My wife could not have been more supportive, and yet the process of interviewing and landing a job is one you have to do by yourself. One of the hardest things is to maintain an upbeat outlook, and yet it is so necessary because no one is going to hire a miserable sad sack.
On the other hand, I had no stigma whatsoever attached to the fact that I had been laid off. Part of that might have been that the size of the layoff was such that anyone with any glancing familiarity with the place I was at would know that 2/3 of the company were laid off.
One thing that I would emphasize would be maintain your professional network in good times and in bad. I got a number of good leads that way.