My father used to code in the 80's, assembly, machine language, banking services. He stopped coding in the early 90's and now for some years has been studying and deploying some flutter applications for fun.
He decided last year to return to the market, learned git, dart, state management even how to use figma to try some junior jobs, but he's always failing in the last interview part, where the company has to choose between him and some fresh grads (most of the time the recruiters say that the age is a problem)
See, he is not really trying to get a senior job, he is just hoping to get a job in the area again.
Do you guys have some advice for an older dev starting now or returning after decades?
That’s because most of the people in this industry are young and old people scare them. They don’t want to work with old people. Which means your father will just have to work extra hard to sell himself. He will have to be appreciably better at something hard to do than the other candidates, so much better that he will be irresistible. It’s not fair, but it’s what minorities and women had to do for decades.
It’s important to clearly internalize and relate objectives about why you want to return to the workforce. Discover how people in the target position(s) actually work. Talking to people who want to stay current is helpful. Make a list of things to be familiar with so you don’t blank out in interviews. My kids wanted me to do LeetCode for 90 days and apply at a FAANG. This is how people at the beginning of their careers conceptualize capturing the opportunities. However most of those companies have a substantial strata of management influenced by bias against older technical people. If you’re able to successfully pillage LeetCode and say Project Euler at a handy pace at 62, you’re probably founder-class talent and shouldn’t waste time laboring under artificial constraints imposed by lesser minds, heheh. Join a startup crew or go into consulting instead.
It helps to stay current and be able to demonstrate same. I just made a list of what people were asking for and related it to the content in my resume, sometimes doing tutorials or making up little projects to clarify my understanding.
Addressing Age Discrimination: If you have ever been forced to take management training WRT discrimination and harassment it covered hiring. Often an insecure hiring manager (or their boss) might feel threatened by the idea that a person who previously held a senior principal role could desire to return as a non-manager technical worker. Perhaps most people click through the age discrimination awareness training without paying attention. I ran into enough of it that I was tempted to partner up with an attorney to be become a professional victim of age discrimination...
In my experience only about 1 job out of 500 has superlatives over all. Most others have some degree of suckage. So I try not to sweat the small stuff and rely on karma to round over the rough edges.
If programming random things to create a sample site is not very attractive then copy apps that are useful and hope that one of them hits while he finds paying work. It can't hurt and it will help him get into the cycle of regular work.
FYI, here's a press release by Upwork on the highest paying languages on their site.
https://www.upwork.com/press/releases/upwork-releases-top-pa...
Edit: Added Upwork press release
IME no company you will ever interview at will care about this.
People don't read emails, so they sure as hell don't grok portfolios.
I put time into preparing an interview for a candidate, but I doubt it matters. My recommendation is always "proceed" unless they're a total wreck.
What is even a job? It is just financial security. At your dad's age, is he really looking for that financial security of a job? On the flip side of things nobody would be comfortable hiring him as they might think, he might not fit in with the team or he has a higher possibility of quitting because young people could barely survive the grind.
Recruiters/employers are biased and they make binary decisions on first impressions. It would be brutal for him to be in a job first mindset.
Ask him to look into freelance work and cotract jobs. He might even be able to get some advantage because many people subsitute experience with age.
Or ask him to build something. The software industry is obsessed with the under 40 demography so he has insights to a niche that is untapped.
He should try to learn at least one mainstream full-scale programming language (Python would probably be the best bet). My guess is that he would be better off doing data or workflow oriented stuff than webby stuff (given how insane and trendy and for want of a better term, "skinny-pants" frontend technology has become these days. In any case ever churning and always chasing the latest shiny).
He should also try to "ping" as many modern tools as he can (docker, npm, CI/CD, etc) even if they aren't part of his preferred toolchain. And be sure he knows how to put together a simple hand-coded website + REST API together from scratch, or something close to it. ust to show he's flexible and unafraid and to destroy the idea that he's trapped in some kind of 1982 mindset.
There are a lot of places (particularly in government, social services, etc) that just need someone to do their CRUD stuff and not complain that they aren't pulling down a FAANG salary or a getting fancy title to brag about or the enjoying the luxury of being able to use latest shiny every day.
He just need to keep looking, and be persistent.
For real? What country is this in?
Unless there is a ongoing relationship, in which case you wouldn't be asking.
Maybe he could try monitoring and keeping up some important system, remotely. A night job, but a different timezone could work to his advantage. Assuming he knows english, of course.
Another area would be a test engineer, and try to break things.
If he is returning to the job market, being able to point to recent gigs could be helpful and perhaps given him some insight into current needs various organizations have.
He basically is part of a minority group and being discriminated against. Search for companies that already hire from minority groups and are vocal about that. I think it would improve his chances.
Things like Oracle, SAP etc.
I agree with the suggestion to work on bank systems, or any place with old legacy systems that need updating. (he seems to have experience in that area?)
Any place where there might be a hidden bias for 'experience', even if your dad doesn't have knowledge of the specific language.
The other fields i'm thinking of is automation, or a mentor / teaching role?
Are former colleagues / peers of him still working? Maybe you can get some ideas via them.
Upwork
Ask friends
Build his own app and publish it to start
This sounds illegal, sorry to hear that your dad is going through that.
