Ask HN: How can my 62 year old father get a job?

> most of the time the recruiters say that the age is a problem

This sounds illegal, sorry to hear that your dad is going through that.

No but he'd be applying to an employer that expects future employees to be old. That's a huge plus in a market where age-discrimination is a big issue.

Instead of competing with the fresh grads, he should use his age to his advantage. Learn COBOL, and he'll be in-demand by US big banks/financial/insurance companies for the next 100 years.

I generally agree with this sentiment, though COBOL may be overkill. Anything stable and not latest/greatest probably helps a lot - Java, C#, and of course C/C++. Big boring companies seem to have older people - my company's average age is probably in the mid 40s.

I took a 5-year break and it was 5 months of brutal futility to get back into the workforce at 60, but once I hit my stride I received multiple simultaneous 6-figure offers in month 5. Positive attitude very essential due to many, many, many rejections. Constantly solicited feedback and tuned my approach to meet goals of targeting industry hiring cycles, getting interviews, technical screens, 2nd through Nth interviews, offers, quantifying offer value, negotiating offers. Very annoying because I really just wanted to do technical work. Non-technical people of course put a premium on other things, I crave getting into the “Flow” state.

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.