After taking a break and working on a non-technology passion project for several months I am now starting to get back into software development. I have read a bit here and there about alleged age discrimination and wonder if a) that's a real thing and b) if it is a real thing what can I do to minimize the adverse effect on my job search.
So, assuming the truth, more or less, of (b) I am trying to figure out how to present myself during the initial contact with potential employers. One one hand (hand one!) I'm tempted to try to avoid clues in my resume as to my age, but on the other hand I think that the right employer will see my age and experience as an asset.
Hand One might have the advantage of getting me in to a face-to-face interview where I believe I can show that I have desirable traits. But on the other hand I'm not sure I would want to work at a company where ageism is an issue.
Comments?
ps. I had more than one recruiter ask me for my birthdate: "Just Month and Day". I suppose they don't know that I know that it's obvious that my age could be easily determined (+- a bit) if armed with my Birthdate Month and Day, Name, and Location.
I wish I could be so lucky to attract senior candidates at my current gig; they're hard to come by at a trendy downtown-SF mobile commerce pre-series-A startup. Instead, I'm inundated with fresh code-bootcamp graduates. I'd be much more comfortable hiring those junior developers if I knew they would be able to sit next to a reliable senior teammate...
That said, if you're worried about being hired, start by building something on your own! You'll make yourself much more marketable if you show that you can pick up new technologies and actually release something.
One suggestion: don't worry about dating yourself by talking about old tech you once worked on. For some reason the older developers I've worked with take a while to getting around to telling you about the time they wrote LISP in Genera on a Symbolics 3640 for cutting edge CAD/CAM/simulation tools at Boeing in the mid 80s or whatever (such cred!).
Senior engineers with experience are hard as hell to come by. They offer perspective and focus: something that is often needed but hard to find.
Agreed, it seems outside the cultural bubble of the Bay Area the entire technical workforce seems to be aging. I see fewer and fewer of the younger generations entering tech outside of a few markets like the Bay Area and Austin.
I have a theory, that it is due to the work force being more mobile, as well as the younger work force having less to tie them down. There was also, consolidation of the start-up markets and a lot of other markets lost ground while the Bay Area gained. I think this creates a natural draw for the younger portions of our workforce.
Most of the individuals I run across outside of a few specific markets are mid-30's to mid 50's and age seems to be a less relevant factor.
[1] http://www.quora.com/Is-Silicon-Valley-a-good-place-to-raise...
I'm already starting to be concerned about age discrimination, and I'm only 40 years old! It's very disturbing when you go on an interview and you're the oldest person there by 10+ years.
The only way out is to start your own business. Do you have enough savings? If you do, consider trying to bootstrap your own thing instead of going back to being an employee.
I do face this as well. Age does slow down a person. But age also helps us make haste slowly. I've seen younger engineers scattering their energy around, and then coming to realize that the common sense option was the best. And older programmers (like me) might be too set in our ways.
Can an old dog be taught new tricks? I'd say to test that, make sure you learn a new programming language every year. Show it with non-trivial projects on your github or other profile. Thats proof that you're still sharp.
Edit : Also adopt a new editor every year. That shows you can step out of your comfort zone. (I need to kick that emacs habit).
So rather than learn a new language every year I aim to learn something about the languages I already spend most of my time in. Functional techniques in Python, the new features in C++14... things like that.
Nor do I see any value in learning a new editor. Really, editing is a solved problem and if you're familiar with vi, teco, emacs, VisualStudio, Eclipse and that other one whose name I don't remember that Microchip based MPLABX on you've covered enough ground that anything you encounter is going to look basically familiar.
I've met programmers young and old who won't leave their comfort zone that I acknowledge it's a real problem, but I don't think you need to spend too much time very far afield of your core expertise to keep current.
Also, outside of SF, the ageism is much much milder. I've had people who had the up/down control on me getting hired not know my age to within 15 years at the time they make that choice (and they consistently guessed _older_ than I am). But interviews in SF seem to bring this topic to the table almost immediately. YMMV.
In terms of being uniquely identifiable (and therefore having few secrets) in the job application process, this is essentially unavoidable. I wouldn't worry about it.
Today is the first time I've seen C++ mentioned alongside COBOL. Today is a dark day...
With 40 years of programming (not sure how many were hobby vs paid), you are likely to raise questions as to how many more years you would need to work. You can trim the appearance of some years off to get in the door and avoid the possibility of discrimination.
In the startup world (nationwide/worldwide maybe), ageism might be equated with "likely to have a family and commitments to prevent he/she from working longer hours than are typically expected". If that person writes "single, no kids, open to 60 hours per week" (and I'm not suggesting they should) on a cover letter, being 50 years old might not be an issue.
I usually recommend trimming jobs when they become irrelevant. Working on systems in the 1970's and 80's will show you have a foundation of knowledge that dates back through computing history, but I'd usually recommend trimming those types of things off (or at least limiting to them as "previous experience" entries with little content).
There is usually no reason to trim experience before you turn 40 these days, though as technology changes quicker that could become lower. The things most people did 15 years ago likely still have some relevance. 25 years might be another story.
I appreciate the value of what you have said but I wonder whether the deception by omission would count against me in the case that I get as far as the face-to-face interviews.
Thanks!
ps. The 40 years includes only the years I was paid. Prior to that I spent about a year learning how to program.
Graduation dates are usually the biggest issue, as older workers tend to drop their first jobs off the resume just to save space. So if your first listed job was in 1995, people will assume you are about 42 (we assume first job around 22 years old). But if you include a graduation date of 1985, we now know you are 52. So a graduation date makes a major difference there.
You can probably overcome any personal ethical issues by calling your experience section "relevant experience" if necessary. I personally don't find that necessary, as I don't think anyone has the right to assume a resume must contain every professional activity. Resumes from foreign countries often include photos, birthdates, and marital status, which is not recommended in the US (by employers or candidates).
Don't trim off too much - you want them to value your experience. But trim just enough where you are keeping most of the relevant work without sharing unnecessary and potentially unhelpful content.
Unfortunately many ATSs like Taleo insist on having your educational history. You can leave it out at peril of being eliminated as a candidate by a single ill-conceived filter.
I don't necessarily feel that appearances matter more than reality, depending on what appearance you are referring to. We're talking about resumes here (or at least I am), and we're in an industry where some (often the young) have opinions about the older members of the industry. This isn't new, and it's not even specific to the industry.
The reason I'd suggest trimming the resume is so you can actually be invited in to have that conversation where you can then convince someone who might be ageist that their bias is incorrect. By including information that makes it obvious you are of a certain age (for some it could be 30+, 40+, 50+, 60+), you are giving someone the ability to discriminate.
It goes the other way as well. Workers in their early 20's might want to appear (on paper) as old as reasonably possible.
The reality is that lots of older workers know their stuff, and will only be able to change the minds of those who discriminate by getting in front of them. I'm not suggesting "by any means necessary", but I have on issue with the tactics I suggest.
1 - http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2013/01/31/ageism/ (Overcoming ageism) http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2014/03/25/older/ (Why Hire Older Engineers)
The fact that you are on HN and able to have this kind of insight proves you are capable of hanging with the youngins.
On the other hand, as others have stated, you better avoid making your age obvious.
In the end, you know what? In this life your time is limited and I think it's wise to avoid worrying about things you can't control. Don't make your age obvious but have confidence in your skills and experience!
Some younger engineers will worry if older engineers lost their hunger for learning new technologies. In their position, they are well aware of what is fashionable, or even just current best practice. This is mostly because as new people they go straight to the new stuff. For example, new programmers don't learn SVN, they go straight to git, and github is a way of life.
So, right or wrong, it is a red flag to them if they see or hear about people advocating what they consider as outdated approaches.
But, importantly, they also read books by the folks who are 20-30 years older, but never lost that drive. They go to talks by these people and take notes, buy their screencasts, and brag about what they learned. They want luminaries to guide them. So, maybe, establishing expertise over what they consider important is a way around this misconception the youth has.
I imagine you could send positive signals by fixing or improving some popular open source project. Maybe write some interesting toy code, a game, or something that solves a development problem, and add that to a personal site or your github account. Any way to demonstrate what someone with 40 years experience can do, in a context they can see and interact with should do the trick.
We have found that one of the biggest factors in getting employment offers is how you position yourself. For instance right now if you are an enterprise engineer with extensive perl or .Net experience this will hurt you if you want to get into a young web company. On the other hand if you are an iOS or Node engineer in SF or can position yourself as an engineering manager then you're likely to find it easier to get job offers.
In general, the data that I've seen suggests that new companies are basically not interested in older technologies. I believe that the problem a lot of older engineers have is that they try to enter the current market by relying on their old skills and that mis-match is interpreted as ageism.
In my experience having experience (and age) is very valuable IF you're a strong engineer and you can apply that experience to the existing technology landscape. Make sure that you're presenting yourself to the right companies with skills in the right technologies and toolsets though or they will not even look at you.
Maybe it's just better to not work at these kind of. Dry low technical skill SF "young web" startups. I dunno.
I think it makes sense in a way. If your technology is built on Node then hiring a guy who'd rather work in php or java is not going to be a good fit. He won't go home at night and play with Node to really understand it's strengths and weaknesses and he won't have excitement for the technology -- totally justifiable since at some point all these new frameworks start to feel like re-inventions of the same wheel over and over again.
In my experience there are nice things about working for SF startups --
You're surrounded by people passionate about technology. You're generally working on problems that are small enough where you can have big impact on them yourself. If you want to know how to build a company then it's really good experience.
That said, it's sort of a question of what scale you'd like to work at.
In my experience --
Contracting is fun because you build lots of small stuff and experiment with lots of different technologies and ideas
Startups are fun because you get to actually build and run a product but you have to build everything so sometimes you don't get to venture into those really interesting areas like massive scale or search quality
Enterprise (I haven't done a ton of enterprise work) seems fun because if you're part of the right enterprise then you get to work on problems that are much larger than a startup can work on and work with more resources and more exotic larger problems (wouldn't it be fun to work on self-driving cars?)
Well, in a month or two, what do you get? Who knows. Evaluating anyone from a resume is very difficult. They might be terrible, but you had to give them two months to find out.
If they claim to know the stack, a bad hire has nowhere to hide. They'll be found out much quicker, so you've lost much less.
I tried to answer this, but it boils down to this. No one is going to say "I'm looking for node and boot campers because I don't have a lot of money."
My parents, born in the mid-1950s are currently in the job market looking for work, and they claim they feel the ageism/discrimination but it completely baffles me as a younger person.
As a person who celebrated Y2K in public school, now in the workforce blazing my own trail: I personally wouldnt have any issue with your age whatsoever. I gauge people based on results and performance, and so if you're an old dog I dont need to teach you any new tricks, you're probably a pro already!
I would be a little intimidated by your age, and it would be humbling and awkward for me to feel like you were my subordinate, but I would cherish your insight and experience (and hopefully mature reasoning skills) and I believe you may have a lot to offer!
I still prepare resumes and cover letters for my parents as they hunt for jobs, and I wish I could encourage you as well.
Age != youth
Age != ability
Age == how many pages have been turned in the 'Book of You'
Best of luck as you put yourself out there!
I agree with your comment and I think the thought of ageism is what is intimidating. There is nothing that cannot be accomplished when a person sets their mind to it, regardless of age, but there is a time and energy cost. Young people have more energy, so more effort is required on the part of an older person to appear energetic and desirable. I am 46 and have worked in five different careers. Experience can be demonstrated and comes across as impressive if it is concise and on point, regardless of age. Being both energetic and concise is an art form. But I highly recommend it as a strategy when seeking employment.
It probably depends on the job description, but sometimes more experienced candidates get rejected for this exact reason.
I'd love to hear how other people handle this type of situation.
I have a really good friend who's a Javascript pro. Like mad scientist Douglas Crockford good. He's also in his early 50's. He's been hired at some of the largest corporations and has done some absolutely amazing work.
But he never sticks around longer than 6-8 months for the very reason you cite.
Just like in his current gig with a huge financial institute where he completely rewrote all their tools in Angular and Node in four months, and then basically said he was bored and the company was moving too slow for him!
He's currently looking at starting his own app development company and doing his own thing finally, which he really needs. He just has so much talent and experience, he had a hard time finding anything challenging anymore. And since Javascript developers are in such high demand, he can come and go when he wants to - something his experience and talents allow him to do. Something someone in their 20's or 30's just can't compete with.
We both currently work in the midwest, and the tech scene here is really vibrant.
To follow your line, you could reject with the same success persons who have mentioned "Haskell" or "Compilers" (or "Game dev") in their CV, regardless of their age...
(Assuming you're interviewing for "yet another CRUD job")
Okay, I'm lucky to be at a point where I squeezed enough blood from the software development rock to carry on even if I never wrote another line of code again.
But I can hardly express how much happier I've been in a (relative to "rock star" and/or "ninja" mindsets) silly, part time "data specialist" position for a local non-profit that really needs someone who can spin useful utilities and disparate systems connectivity from any available silk (or dirty kite string) than I've ever been slaving away in the usual "headless chickens" environments managed by the usual clowns whose management training consisted of little more than proving themselves useless at software development itself - which training, of course, tends to result in the aforementioned hiring prowess to boot.
Good bleeping riddance!
Secondly, my advice is to do nothing special. Yes, filter your resume for things you think the company would be interested in -- you would do that regardless of your age. In general a one-pager resume is greatly appreciated by everyone. If it comes up that you've been around the block more than most, fine. You don't want to work for companies that would discriminate against you based on age anyway -- they are probably going to fail due to stupidity like not appreciating expertise learned from experience.
I'm proud of the skills I've acquired over the years and the projects I've worked on. And I never think my skills are enough, lately I've worked with meteor, zero-copy packet architectures, iPhone apps, and some security-related issues.
I'm not going to try to hide my age and I'm not going to try to make it a desirable trait. I will hope that bit of ambiguity gets me in for a face-to-face interview which I am very confident will turn out well.
Companies which are so rigid as to wonder whether I'm "young enough" are probably not places I'd like to work anyway.
I admit that if I was faced with the opportunity of hiring someone a lot older and experienced than me I'd have two immediate thoughts: "This guy would be a great asset, we need him" and "I think I'd be way too intimidated and nervous being his boss, can't do it".
Doing consulting work solves the second question since it changes the boss-employee dynamic to a more business-to-business like one.
Now, I am not in a position to hire anyone so take my introspection with a grain of salt.
2. Don't be paranoid but don't play it up.
3. There's no way to hide your age, realistically. You have to answer questions like the year you graduated from college, the year of your first job.
4. There are a bunch of people that age I would kill to work with (35 year programmer), we have half a dozen people in our office with that much experience. We're a C shop and we write very, very high performance code. WORK YOUR FRIENDS, you must have friends, those friends have jobs.
Why would you want to work somewhere that allows or encourages discrimination on age or anything else?
Let assholes filter themselves out of your life.
I usually phrase it "No, I don't want to do that, life is too long to write C++," or whatever thing I'm declining to do.
Instead of being 59 you will be 49? I don't think it will help. Instead, put a spin on it and sell yourself as experienced in technical matters.
