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Ask HN: Over 60 = no engineering jobs?

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Re: Ask HN: Over 60 = no engineering jobs?

#61

Post by joewee »

RangerScience wrote: post #36
poulsbohemian wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you've been in and out of management and technical roles (like myself), how do you make those gaps between two resumes not look like gaps? Or, do you simply address it in interviews when asked?

He said not to put dates on degrees, but could you also not put dates on jobs, just durations?

You need dates on jobs because they want to identify gaps in employment. The only exception would be if you are a contractor and all of the engagements were under your company. You would list the start and end of your consulting practice in that case.

Re: Ask HN: Over 60 = no engineering jobs?

#62

Post by mojomark »

Your resume sounds interesting to me. If you're willing to relocate to DC (although there could be some west coast or consultant type roles), we are looking for folks with your type of background to enhance our AI capabilities. At the level you describe, we're looking for active/direct leadership.

I'm an engineer myself, not a recruiter, but if you want to post an email, I'll take your resume and share it with the right people.

Re: Ask HN: Over 60 = no engineering jobs?

#63

Post by austincheney »

Abandon the Bay Area.

It seems to me that ethnocentricity is rampant in the bay as a sub cultural norm. For example the Bay Area is big on tolerance, but if you choose to voice political concerns that challenges the area’s popularity you will be silently shunned and ignored which counter-intuitively is intolerance. As a solid example review the firing of Brendan Eich from Mozilla. This kind of self-satisfying inward-facing deceptiveness allows any manner of isolating justification, such as ageism. In other areas wisdom and experience are rewarded commodities.

The Bay Area is also stupid expensive. You will make less money elsewhere but be instantly more wealthy. I would need to multiply my salary x3 to live the same in the Bay Area with a House half the size.

Re: Ask HN: Over 60 = no engineering jobs?

#64

Post by mmmBacon »

I’d say the biggest obstacle is that a requisition for someone at your level is just really hard to get. It’s hard to convince people that we need an expensive gray beard. Without a requisition at your level some companies have a policy that they won’t talk to you because they don’t want to leave you with a bad experience (sounds like bs but this is true).

The view isn’t entirely just financial. People at your level challenge things and in particular challenge leaders. That’s because you should be a leader at this point, either by title or by influence. Someone like you can come in and disrupt the power dynamic, particularly if the leadership is weak (often true), and the leadership wants nothing more than to preserve itself and make its life easy.

Another piece is the more senior you are, the more the soft skills come into it and how well you’ll fit into the team. I’m not talking about skinny jeans here but rather whether your values align.

If you are trying to get VP of Engineering jobs, I’d say that few would believe that you’ll be satisfied just coming in and grinding out walls code to a spec that someone else wrote.

Re: Ask HN: Over 60 = no engineering jobs?

#65

Post by mattlondon »

Personally if I were in your situation I'd remove all "old" dates and just put the last say 4-6 years of experience on the resume and leave the rest off so you've just got a few years of experience just like someone with 4-6 years experience would have (it is probably also the most relevant). If you've been at the same company all that time, break it down by major projects. Also hopefully this is obvious but dont put your birthday, gender, photo, "married with 3 kids and 2 dogs" etc etc on their.

My thinking is, if there is no indication of your age ("35 years of experience", graduation dates in the 70s/80s etc), then there is less scope for unconscious bias (or just overt ageism) to creep in since there are less clues. Same with adding potentially "irrelevant" experience from older jobs - less clues for people to jump to assumptions about (both tech/industry, as well as just the age thing again)

Once you've got your resume through the bias-blockers you can then wow them with your energy and enthusiasm when you get a chance to talk to them on the phone, then wow them again when you bounce into their office and blow them away with the interview. If you do really well in the interviews, you've given them some really solid evidence of your awesomeness that they've seen with their own eyes that will be hard to ignore, even if they think (consciously or otherwise) that you are old.

Resumes are so easy to pass on when you've got a stack of them to work through (so impersonal and instantly forgettable), but interviews are "real" events with real memories and real personal interactions that - I find - helps override assumptions and unconscious biases.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: Over 60 = no engineering jobs?

#66

Post by gambler »

>If you were hiring, can you tell me why you might not even do a phone interview?

Ph.D. in AI will probably scare off anyone who has a typical business app development or integration job. It's just hard to imagine someone with this level of education grinding out bugs in garbage legacy code, or calling vendors to ask why their SOAP web service doesn't work according to documentation.

Now, whether you would even care for such a job is another question. Some of them are quite challenging and require excellent system thinking skills, but there is zero glory in delivering the final product.

I'm not familiar with the specific of Bay Area job market, though.

Re: Ask HN: Over 60 = no engineering jobs?

#67

Post by 88e282102ae2e5b »

grmarcil wrote: post #19

With 35 years experience, I expect that you have a pretty wide professional network - consider whether you're using those connections to get warm introductions and pointed to good-fit jobs to the greatest degree possible. My apologies if this is stating the obvious, but if your applications are starting with just a resume, you're already at a disadvantage at any age. And I suppose that effect only increases with year…

Also, consider this from the manager's perspective. They have to ask themselves: if this person has 35 years of experience, they must have a substantial network, so why aren't they just tapping that resource? Not a single person from this applicant's past wants to give them an interview?

Re: Ask HN: Over 60 = no engineering jobs?

#68

Post by AnimalMuppet »

cadow wrote: post #7

Or they might be thinking that you will retire soon or not fluid enough in thinking. Or demand too much pay.

I suspect that it's pay more than ageism.

As you get older, it gets harder to get jobs - not impossible, just harder. It takes longer.

Why does it take longer? We're outside the knowledge of most hiring managers. They're thinking of "junior" as 0-2 years experience, and "senior" as 5-7. Where does 35 years fit on their spectrum? They don't even have a category for it. (You may be looking for jobs with the title "Principal software engineer" rather than "senior software engineer"). Those jobs are ones where your experience gets recognized as worth more money.

But most jobs see you as just an older, more expensive senior engineer. And if they can get a senior engineer for half your money, why would they want you? (Yes, I know. You're worth more. You can deliver actual results faster than those people. You can avoid mistakes those people will make. I know that. Your average hiring manager who's looking for a senior software engineer doesn't know that.)

For the record, I'm 56.

Re: Ask HN: Over 60 = no engineering jobs?

#69

Post by antisthenes »

austincheney wrote: post #63

Abandon the Bay Area. It seems to me that ethnocentricity is rampant in the bay as a sub cultural norm. For example the Bay Area is big on tolerance, but if you choose to voice political concerns that challenges the area’s popularity you will be silently shunned and ignored which counter-intuitively is intolerance. As a solid example review the firing of Brendan Eich from Mozilla. This kind of self-satisfying inward-…

From everything I've seen, heard, and read on HN, the Bay Area isn't really big on tolerance.

It's big on virtue signaling specific kinds of tolerance towards certain groups, but that's about where it ends. Apparently people past middle age aren't one of those groups.

Sorry if that sounds harsh, but those are my observations as a 3rd party - I have no skin in the game.

Re: Ask HN: Over 60 = no engineering jobs?

#70

Post by duxup »

nnash wrote: post #41
duxup wrote: post #8

Heck I'm only over 40. I did a handful of interviews at places where folks who I went to school with also interviewed. I got a lot of "culture" questions. My younger classmates, did not hear the world "culture" in their interviews, ever. It's hard not to be pessimistic and assume "culture" was about age...

Try being a minority, and consistently get rejected because you aren't a good "culture fit" on an all white team. edit: I didn't mean to sound like I was trivializing your experience. The "culture fit" is really nasty and sucks for everyone who isn't "the norm".

Naw it's all good. I hear ya. It's similar in the sense that if that thing age, race, whatever is the thing... I can't do anything about that and it seems to preempt anything else.
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