7 ms·

I'm a programmer in my late 50s. While age discrimination is real, and I certainly have my share of "not a culture fit" and "overqualified" rejections over th

• afpx 8y ago
  No way. Sorry to be blunt. Sure, my speed has decreased a little. But, I make better decisions which saves orders more time. And, my skills are still solidly top 15-20%. I know most modern databases, Java, Scala, Python, JavaScript, Angular, React ... the list goes on. I only claim to be an expert in things I’m actually an expert in. To be fair, I do try to interview at interesting companies. So, that could be the problem. Maybe, it’s easier in IT or government contractors. But, I’d be pretty depressed.
  • tyrust 8y ago
    Resistance to constructive criticism is a potential no-hire signal.
    • zepto 8y ago
      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.
    • raarts 8y ago
      > resistance to constructive criticism Very curious where you detect that in GP?
      • tyrust 8y ago
        They completely discount the feedback without any concessions.
        • raarts 8y ago
          > speed has decreased a little Sounds like a concession to me The rest of the post is a rebuttal, not 'discounting'
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • s73v3r_ 8y ago
      Blaming the victim just for the sake of being contrarian is an even stronger one.
      • tyrust 8y ago
        A victim of being told to consider their weaknesses?
        • s73v3r_ 8y ago
          That's not at all what the post said.
      • seattle_spring 8y ago
        Just because someone says, "I'm a victim!" it doesn't actually make them a victim.
        • s73v3r_ 8y ago
          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.
          • seattle_spring 8y ago
            A great way to become a victim is to believe every person that tells you they are a victim.
  • yosito 8y ago
    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.
    • chucksmash 8y ago
      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)
      • yosito 8y ago
        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.
  • xamuel 8y ago
    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.
    • ams6110 8y ago
      > 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.
      • resource0x 8y ago
        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 :)
        • raarts 8y ago
          I've been an employer for a long time and would prefer a critical thinker over a fad-of-the-day lemming any day.
        • pc86 8y ago
          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.
      • xamuel 8y ago
        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.
  • resource0x 8y ago
    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 )
  • virusduck 8y ago
    Yeah, but how's your perl? :P
  • seattle_spring 8y ago
    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?
• dvtrn 8y ago
  "Overqualified" has got to be the softest insult you can throw at a job seeker. It ostensibly says "we aren't secure in ourselves as employers to challenge our workers to produce great work, nor do we value original thought, so we'd rather hire drones that don't rattle the cage".
  • reaperducer 8y ago
    In some industries it means, "You've got a ton of experience, and know this stuff inside and out. But we don't want to pay for someone who knows what they're doing." As you stated, they're looking for inexperienced drones.
    • scarface74 8y ago
      Sometimes all you need are inexperienced drones. If you just need a developer to help write the next software as a service CRUD web app and you have experienced developers already, a drone with three years of experience may be good enough.
      • pc86 8y ago
        You must be new, three years is senior, practically architect-level!
  • CPLX 8y ago
    As someone that's hired a lot of people being overqualified is an actual reason not to want to hire an applicant. The reason is because they are not likely to last in the position. Not every company is some high growth engineering phenomenon. Sometimes you need someone to fill a specific role and you'd like them to be stable in that role.
    • tremendo 8y ago
      In which case the applicant's employment history would be a lot more relevant. As in, have they been job-hopping, historically "not-lasting" at a job? or do they commit to their work and see it through. If you're offering a decent job and pay fairly, there's no reason to assume an applicant will simply "not last" only because of them being "over-qualified", whatever that means.
• logfromblammo 8y ago
  "Skills out of date" is suspect, at best. We have been putting all new languages and libraries on top of the same old computer science concepts for decades now. It wouldn't be that hard to age-discriminate by looking specifically for Clojure experience, while saying anyone trying to substitute ANSI Common Lisp experience has their "skills out of date". To put this into analogy form, it would be as though mathematicians could be perceived as out of date because they still used "x + y" for addition, rather than "add( x, y )", or "push(x) push(y) add", or whatever the latest fad in mathematical notation happened to be at the time. The concept of addition (over real numbers) hasn't changed for centuries. Some skills just can't go out of date. And yet some people are viewing those skills through a lens that makes older candidates look worse on paper, and are blaming the skill set, rather than the lens. There are some skills that make otherwise inexperienced people more productive when they all share those skills, but at some level it all comes back to screening based on experience rather than aptitude. I don't have time to learn every new skill that comes down the pipe, from mere speculation that a future job opportunity might require it. I'm more likely to pick up only those that would be useful in my current day job, or for my latest side-project. All some employer has to do is pick a lot of "new" skills, that aren't appreciably different from new names for old skills, and magically, my skills are no longer up to date. I hypothesize that the age discrimination in the industry isn't based on age, directly, but rather on perceived costs of employment, which tend to rise as people progress through their careers. Old people are more expensive. They want higher salaries. A lot of them have families, and mortgages, and their health insurance costs are higher. They worry about their 401(k) accounts. One would think that it's easy to screen by age, based on the length of the resume, and simple math on any of the dates on it, but the people screening the resumes, and the ones rejecting candidates post-interview are not necessarily the same people. The HR folks know that age-related discrimination is illegal, so may be structuring sham interviews so that audits after the fact don't leave the company liable for enforcement actions. I have been through a few interviews where it just seemed like everyone was going through the motions. Maybe they already picked someone and were using me to cover their ass? Maybe there was something about me in particular that prompted an immediate rejection? Maybe I didn't fulfill some secret requirement? Did my breath stink? Did I whiteboard that wrong? Nope--they found someone to do the job more cheaply, and they were shopping around to make sure they got the best price. It just so happens that youth correlates positively with cheap. It's difficult to say, when no one ever gives any interview feedback whatsoever, positive or negative. When you're in it, you start to get paranoid.
• arethuza 8y ago
  You are assuming that interviewers read CVs/resumes before the interview.... A colleague recently had an experience at a second interview where the hiring manager proudly proclaimed that they hadn't read her CV and the interviewer was the one who had done the first interview!
  • toephu2 8y ago
    Good interviewers try not to read the CV before the interview to help reduce bias.
• gknoy 8y ago
  > It's much more likely that your skills are out of date or you've gained some bad interviewing habits that you should examine. Do you have any suggestions on how one could find out if we have bad interviewing habits? I'm sure I have them, though I don't know what they are.