151–160 of 199 posts
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It's almost impossible to sue for age discrimination and win. All they have to do is lay off 1 person in their 20s at the time they laid off their older workers and they claim innocence and it works.
It isn't even that, they just need to eliminate the position and not rehire anyone for it (or a similar one) for 18 months.
I'd hate to think that readers over 50 feel the need to consider leaving the tech workforce, and I know perhaps hundreds of successful engineers over 50. Those that have a hard time getting back in are often a victim of discrimination not truly based on age, but on stagnation. A 50 year old who has worked on five interesting diverse projects in the last 10 years will find work. A 50 year old who spent the last 20 yea…
I believe the "old == stagnant" meme is largely a myth. It sounds right somehow, so it sticks with us. Over the course of a long career, though, I've seen this kind of stagnation distributed pretty evenly across people of different ages. The difference is that when we someone who's young and stagnant, we just chalk them up as green, or a business type, etc. But not "stagnant". We can't see their future, so we can't s…
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I believe the "old == stagnant" meme is largely a myth. It sounds right somehow, so it sticks with us. Over the course of a long career, though, I've seen this kind of stagnation distributed pretty evenly across people of different ages. The difference is that when we someone who's young and stagnant, we just chalk them up as green, or a business type, etc. But not "stagnant". We can't see their future, so we can't s…
But an older stagnant person's skills tend to be much more out of date. Younger ones have the benefit that their skills are still likely to be relevant at a larger subset of the employer pool.
Younger ones can have all the latest Javascript library experience they want but they still don’t have enough obvious experience for engineering mastery that’s vital to being a highly-productive independent contributor or tech lead.
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I never thought about this one.
Yet another reason for trimming off old jobs after some point; the primary one being nobody cares going through 3+ page long resumes.
A 15 page menu isn't better than a 1 page menu... A spa advertising every stone in its parking lot doesn't make you think nice things about their mud baths...
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I'm stuck in this rut. What can I do to break out of it?
Dabockster- I did a stint as a tech recruiter a while back (not doing that anymore), so I can offer some perspective from the other side of the table - although limited. A few questions: 1. How many events do you attend per week? (could be related to any industry at all - could be a tradeshow, a panel of speakers, tech meetups - anything really)? 2. How many hands do you shake at each event? 3. How many people from t…
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Former recruiter and current professional resume writer. As the other respondent said, the quick formula a recruiter might use to guess your birth year is "college graduation date - 22" or "date of first job - 22". You should keep this fact in mind as you write a resume and decide which jobs to include, which jobs to perhaps delete, and whether you want to include your graduation date. It isn't necessary to include a…
I am curious. If what you described is a standard technique people can use, what prevents the recruiters/talent acquisition to, by default, discard resumes/CVs without exact dates?
Ha, ha, ha, I just got laid off Monday along with most of the rest of the team with no notice. The market seems to be fairly hot here in Fairfield county CT so I'm jumping right back in and expect to pick up another job/contract in the next month. It's just a matter of rate and commute... It is tempting to just do my writing or something else but I love the work, it pays well and it's fairly expensive to live here. S…
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When applying to those roles how did they discover you were 41?
Former recruiter and current professional resume writer. As the other respondent said, the quick formula a recruiter might use to guess your birth year is "college graduation date - 22" or "date of first job - 22". You should keep this fact in mind as you write a resume and decide which jobs to include, which jobs to perhaps delete, and whether you want to include your graduation date. It isn't necessary to include a…
1. Don't include graduation dates in your resume, just the University/School name and Major(s) 2. Truncate your resume to just slightly over the required years of experience. e.g., include past 12 years experience for a job which requires 10+ years 3. Keep your resume to under 3 pages (max). Nobody has the time to wade through an 8 page resume, even if you have worked on the most awesome projects at the start of your career
Seemed to work for me
We just interviewed a series of laid off 50+ principle software engineers (all from the same company). After the interview, all reported back they had multiple offers and chose to work elsewhere. Keep in mind these were engineers with very specific domain knowledge (which we were after).