Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

#171

Post by lproven » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 3:12 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #119

lproven wrote: post #18

I lost my last permanent job in London at the end of 2008, at the beginning of the financial crisis in the UK. I applied for about two thousand roles in 2009 alone, and from 2008-2013, about 3,500 roles in total... In about 6-8 countries in multiple disciplines. I averaged 30+ applications _per day_ at first... and 1 interview per year. From 2009 to 2013 I got 2 months of paying work in total. Reason? I think it's be…

Reason? I think it's because I was 41 when I started. The implication of your post is that the hiring managers responsible for 3500 jobs are *all" discriminating on age. That seems unlikely, if only because there are people in the UK tech sector older than that who can still find roles, so evidently not all managers discriminate.

Not all, but most.

It is endemic in the Anglophone world. I also speak a little German, French, Norwegian and at a push Spanish and Swedish, and I applied to anywhere that was hiring English speakers there, too... with cover letter in the local language, naturally.

Zero interest.

So I think it's a Western problem.

Q.v.

https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/silicon-valley%E2%80%99s-d...

https://newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-brut...

I encounter virtually none here in the former Communist Bloc, where people are more interested in me because of my experience.

Re: Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

#172

Post by lproven » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 3:17 PM UTC

Kevguy wrote: post #79

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done development in two industries; Healthcare and Transportation. Most of the developers I've worked with in those industries have been older. So, my anecdotal experience is that it really depends on the industry. The awesome thing is, both of those industries are keeping up with the latest in tech, so it's not like devs are sitting back working on the same old code base for a decade.

I will add Finance and Insurance as two more industries where older developers (who keep their skills up to date!) are welcome. Yes, COBOL is still being used at many of these companies, but other departments are using up-to-date .NET or Java and don't ever look at COBOL.

An acquaintance, a decade ago, took about 5y off to go on a world tour. When he returned to London, his skills were so stale, he couldn't find anything.

After 6mth of hunting in vain, he wrote a CV focussed on his oldest skill -- Fortran -- and found a role in weeks. When he told me this, he'd been renewed 5 times and had been in a 6mth role for nearly 3 years. He suspected he'd be doing it for the rest of his working life.

I got a bunch of interviews around 2010-2011 for DEC OpenVMS sysadmin work. I do have VMS skills, but not high-level ones -- but companies were having real problems finding people to maintain their Alpha and Itanium servers. The demand was there.

Re: Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

#173

Post by lproven » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 3:21 PM UTC

akshat_h wrote: post #16

fecak wrote: post #12

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 have always wondered this. Tech and probably other fields do want you to be promoted. From what I have heard, if you are not able to get promoted in certain number of years, you are put on a PIP and possibly laid off. But there are lesser number of Senior Engineers than Engineers, and lesser number of Principal Engineers than Senior Engineers. What exactly happens? Just the fact that the numbers in the pipeline is…

This is a real issue.

In journalism, the career path is jr writer, writer, sr writer, jr editor, sr editor -- and then you go do management.

I was the IT Manager of a London stockbroker in the City by 26 years old. I didn't like it and ultimately quit.

But the expected career path for many companies is to go from being a "mere" techie to being a manager. If you don't want to do that, then age becomes a big problem.

I changed track to journalism, not knowing that the Web was going to kill the computer magazine industry within a decade. But short term, it was a good move, and I loved it.

Re: Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

#174

Post by southern_cross » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 4:58 PM UTC

lproven wrote: post #162

southern_cross wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides the other examples which have been given here there are some subtle flags, too, which apparently are often used as indicators of age on a resume. I saw a whole list of these things somewhere once but I only remember a couple of them right off the top of my head. For example, I took a typing class back in the day and I was taught to always put two spaces after the end of a sentence. But today this flags you as…

I haven't noticed any particular habits of numerical formatting or anything, but this might be US-specific. But I have done the pulling-magic-fixes-out-of-a-hat thing. It's fun. :-)

Yes, it was amazing (to those kids) the number of things that I could do for them just using basic commands like DIR and FIND and such under Windows. And when I started using Powershell for the more complex stuff, I got "Powershell? I think I'd heard of that." These were folks in their 20s and 30s, so you'd have thought maybe they would have been a little more on top of such things. But in reality if it wasn't "click, click, drag, drop" then it was generally quite alien to them.

BTW, I think I remember a couple more of those resume flags. Back in the day I was taught to list things out like this, this, and this - that last comma being known variously as the Oxford, Harvard, serial, or series comma. (See what I did there?) But the "modern" way of doing it is this, this and this - with no Oxford comma.

Another had to do with email addresses. Dare you ever list something like an aol.com email address (which my wife still has, for example) lest it flag you as "old school"?

Interesting aside here as to things like Facebook: a few years back there was a notion being promoted among hiring folks (no doubt being pushed by Zuck himself) that if you weren't on Facebook then there must be something seriously wrong with you - that you were probably socially or technologically inept, and you were likely then not a good fit for hiring purposes. Today, of course, "Delete Facebook!" is all the rage.

Re: Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

#175

Post by markbnj » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 5:45 PM UTC

lproven wrote: post #164

markbnj wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also 58 and working as an SRE at a company I love. Greybeards unite!

I have a tiny handful of friends in IT older than I whose careers are still thriving in the UK. Most are specialists of some kind. I wish them well. For the first >50% of my career, my speciality was that I wasn't a specialist. I can work anything with a keyboard and a display, fix it, tune it, make it talk to anything else, or at a push virtualise it. But that's an obsolete skill in the near-monoculture of today, wh…

Well I think it is far from boring. The growth of cloud platforms, containerization, orchestration, there's a lot going on.

Re: Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

#176

Post by ccajas » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 7:42 PM UTC

exolymph wrote: post #146

brandall10 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I think it's because I was 41 when I started." Doubftul. I was 40 when I was looking a couple years back and had a better conversion rate of application -> interview than I've had in my entire life. This is for Rails/React work. I had 15 interviews out of maybe 25 or so applications, had a few opportunities I turned down and landed perhaps the best job I ever had. I'm beginning to look again at 42 and got 5 intervie…

Maybe you're the outlier; maybe the other person is the outlier. Maybe 2009 is the outlier. Based on anecdotes, I feel like it's hard to say one way or the other.

Is there a collection of data that outlines the average time spent looking for work amongst programmers, and other different tech fields? And how it has changed over the years?

Re: Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

#177

Post by sheepmullet » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 10:28 PM UTC

quickthrower2 wrote: post #137

sheepmullet wrote: post #117

I think the problem is the older generation of tech workers are not mercenaries. I know a lot of older tech workers supporting important business systems while their skills slowly become out of date. They are frequently adding $1 million+/year in value while being paid ~$100-$120k/year. The businesses would pay $250-$350k/year if they had to. If the older workers were demanding the premium and saving the $100-$150k/y…

> The businesses would pay $250-$350k/year if they had to. Extraordinary claim

What makes you think so?

Do you think they would sooner cut off their nose to spite their face?

Re: Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

#178

Post by brandall10 » Sat, Apr 28, 2018, 12:39 AM UTC

lproven wrote: post #166

brandall10 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I think it's because I was 41 when I started." Doubftul. I was 40 when I was looking a couple years back and had a better conversion rate of application -> interview than I've had in my entire life. This is for Rails/React work. I had 15 interviews out of maybe 25 or so applications, had a few opportunities I turned down and landed perhaps the best job I ever had. I'm beginning to look again at 42 and got 5 intervie…

Good for you. Seriously. It does seem to be better for programmers. I was primarily a support guy, but also systems admin, network architect/rollouts/installation, training, even project management and security consultancy at a push. We're regarded as far more fungible than coders. Coders make more money and if you are good in a niche, something popular, or something wildly obscure where it's hard to find people, the…

This is basically it. If you're in tech it's huge having some sense of career progression - either vertically, up the management chain, or laterally moving into more current/progressive/desirable areas.

This is really where the notion of age discrimination would come into play, just this concern someone has been doing the same thing for X years and stopped growing - passion and curiosity is ageless.

That said, regardless of this timing is a big concern. I am bracing myself for a difficult market if the tech bubble deflates, and to that extent the next position I get is one I plan to be at at least 3-4 years.

Re: Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

#179

Post by guiambros » Sat, Apr 28, 2018, 3:03 AM UTC

lproven wrote: post #18

I lost my last permanent job in London at the end of 2008, at the beginning of the financial crisis in the UK. I applied for about two thousand roles in 2009 alone, and from 2008-2013, about 3,500 roles in total... In about 6-8 countries in multiple disciplines. I averaged 30+ applications _per day_ at first... and 1 interview per year. From 2009 to 2013 I got 2 months of paying work in total. Reason? I think it's be…

You should have stopped at the 50th application without response, and asked for professional help. As the saying goes, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." A career coach could have helped you figure out what was wrong.

Without knowing the details, I'd guess that the age prejudice is in your head, and instead your resume just raised a bunch flags. One common mistake is listing several disparate skills, with no coherence; recruiters need to be able to categorize you in one of their "boxes" - SRE, engineer, Unix sysadmin, Windows sysadmin, security analyst, leader CTO-type, etc. Jack-of-all-trades are usually the first ones to be dismissed.

Other common flag is lack of consistency in your trajectory. Candidates jumping between jobs too quickly may be a problem, unless you're looking for a short-term contractor.

Also, after you've been out of the market for a couple of years, it gets harder to get back in. So it's natural that now you're having to turn down offers. Again, another proof that age had nothing to do with your low success rate.

Re: Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

#180

Post by bradknowles » Sat, Apr 28, 2018, 3:11 AM UTC

danhodgins wrote: post #145

dabockster wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I was in college in the mid-80s, my mom already had many years of experience as an HR professional. I never forgot the rules-of-thumb that she taught me:

90% of all successful placements come from people who have personal contacts with the hiring manager or somewhere else at the place doing the hiring.

90% of the remainder (9% of the total) come from headhunting firms that are actively looking for candidates to fill a particular special position.

The final 1% comes from placement advertisements and job search facilities.

And this from the lady who ran the job search facility for the University of Oklahoma (at Norman), called the “Job Location Program”. It covered every single staff and faculty position that was being hired for across the entire University.

So far as I can tell, the job placement situation hasn’t really changed much in the 30 or so years since.

So, you have to ask yourself, where do you want to spend your time and money? Do you want to spend it all in the area with only 1% placement success, or do you want to spend it somewhere else that might have a higher probability of getting you something?