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Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

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Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#41

For me, when I've interviewed older developers, my main concern is that they have too much experience for the role we are interviewing for and may be bored and want to leave. 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 can totally validate this concern.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#42
Honestly, it's more about finding a results based org. I've worked with a lot of different companies and some are very culture fit and some are very results oriented. You will never get a shot at the culture fit crowd so go for the results based crowd. Flood your resume not with experience as much as real results and value you have created.

Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats 1) A bit depressing - you seem to be conveying that there is no other possibility 2) Starting a new business is not everyone's cup of tea. Even for a young person. Its loaded with risks. 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…

I think one of the advantages of being older is that it gives one the wisdom to be more selective about tools. I'm an expert in the tools I use (C, C++ and Python, mostly, although I know a dozen-odd languages well enough to crash a program in them) and not hugely keen on learning new ones. I poke around at new languages now and then but quickly learn they are either a) so much like ones I know there's nothing specia…

The editor thing can be kind of important. People who stick with emacs or vim tend to be horrible with following coding standards and being able to review and navigate code efficiently. There's nothing like an editor from Jetbrains for tooling (Eclipse works too, but seriously the Jetbrains line is the best).

I have never used emacs, but vim is horribly limited in what it can truly do in terms of handling code. You can add all the nifty little plugins you want, but it just isn't efficient. The mistake people make moving to a full IDE is installing the vim plugin to add some familiarity. I've seen coworkers take literally 5 minutes to hammer out the vim keystrokes to refactor a block of code that can be done in 15-30 seconds with 2-3 native IDE keyboard shortcuts and a mouse click or two. It's important to know how to use vim or similar for remote command-line work. When developing though, the functionality and built-in tools provided by a full-fledged IDE are priceless.

There was a time I didn't judge new developers for using vim to edit code - and a long time ago I was one of them. I used to see these people as "true developers" for mastering an editor like vim. Now, after years of encountering developers with hampered productivity and ability to work on a team with coding standards, I see a vim/emacs person as someone who is stuck in their ways, refusing to even try to modernize their workflow.

Just a random example: in PHP projects, my teams use CodeSniffer for coding standards validation. The settings for common IDEs are committed to the VCS so they are automatically in place for new developers cloning the project. In any modern IDE, notices/warnings are instantly and unobtrusively made available as you type code. You can also run the inspection against the entire codebase or files you have modified since last VCS update to catch anything you missed.

What do Vim users do? They write code for hours or days at a time without validating what they are writing. When done, they either a) commit without running their code against CodeSniffer while egotistically proclaiming that their personal coding style is clean and doesn't need to match what the rest of the team abides by; or b) they spend hours running the command-line version manually, ridiculously trying to parse the output and hunt each problem down.

This is the real problem with vim/emacs users. Nearly none of them are capable of following the same coding practices as the rest of the team who are sharing a set of project settings in modern IDEs. The worst I've seen was a team that had once had amazing code quality completely abandon all forms of coding standards when two new senior developers were hired who both used vim. They refused to follow the standards because vim simply doesn't contain the necessary tooling. The entire codebase went from being beautifully clean to a complete mess, all because the new guys used vim. That was the job I walked away from so fast after fighting over the ridiculousness and then learning that both new developers were basically hired for the simple reason they went to the same university as the hiring manager.

tldr; Use vim/emacs if you want; but if you're not going to be as productive as, or match the code quality of, your teammates - that's a problem.

Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#44

I've built a number of teams, and have repeatedly had the fortune of anchoring the back-end with a senior engineer over age 50. Experience matters, and it helps the entire team from a morale, design, and process perspective. You don't want to work for someone who doesn't recognize that anyway... 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…

Absolutely. I have had the pleasure of being the junior person sitting next to someone who was close to retirement. His perspective of, "Ok, what are we really trying to do here?" was invaluable. The best teams are always genuinely diverse and seek to really get to know what's special about each other.

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!).

Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#45
post #20
post #8

Recruiter here. I would absolutely recommend you not include any obvious indicators of age on your resume, at least in many parts of the country. Graduation dates are not required, and perhaps your first few jobs can be eliminated from the resume. A resume doesn't have to be a complete biography. With 40 years of programming (not sure how many were hobby vs paid), you are likely to raise questions as to how many more…

Hi Recruiter, 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.

I'm also a recruiter. Once you've interviewed well, no-one will care what your CV said. When I was 19, and a developer, I would do the opposite; I had a very enigmatic CV long on skills and part-time roles and experience, without any dates to show they were part-time. It was intriguing enough that I got face to face with people, and from then onI was able to talk myself in to roles I knew I could do.

Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#46
I have recently been involved in a project where we are analyzing employment offers from companies in different markets (SF bay area being one of them).

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.

Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#47

just gonna be straight here, there are older people that are the really smart, savvy engineer types that school all us young folks, then there are the older people that learned Pascal in 1978 and never stepped outside of their comfort zone. We have an older person working in our office that, if it wasn't for him would practically be a zoo. He constantly schools us on all things tech, and keeps everyone in line. You a…

Reminds me of someone who refused to use revision control because "merges were unreliable". Of course they are when you wait 30 days between commits.

Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#48

For me, when I've interviewed older developers, my main concern is that they have too much experience for the role we are interviewing for and may be bored and want to leave. 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.

>... may be bored and want to leave.

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")

Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#49
post #8

Recruiter here. I would absolutely recommend you not include any obvious indicators of age on your resume, at least in many parts of the country. Graduation dates are not required, and perhaps your first few jobs can be eliminated from the resume. A resume doesn't have to be a complete biography. With 40 years of programming (not sure how many were hobby vs paid), you are likely to raise questions as to how many more…

> Graduation dates are not required

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.

Re: Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

#50
post #46

I have recently been involved in a project where we are analyzing employment offers from companies in different markets (SF bay area being one of them). 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…

It's pretty silly, though. Node is not a new "technology." It is framework for using Javascript. It is debatable if it is even good. What is more important is someone's grasp of core CS and programming concepts. If a code bootcamper with 6 months of using some fad framework is more valuable than someone with 30 years of experience, why is that? If the code bootcamper can use Nodr, presumably the person with 30 years experience could very easily, as well.

Maybe it's just better to not work at these kind of. Dry low technical skill SF "young web" startups. I dunno.

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