I’m 53, and I doubt I’ll ever find a job in tech again. I only started getting responses when I removed the earliest 15 year’s experience from my CV, and as soon as I hit the screening stage and my age is known they lose interest. Ageism can get fucked.
How do you take that off your resume? What if they ask? I didn’t realize you could do that.
The only thing on my CV that indicates my age are my early jobs. Just take those away. When they do ask, I say that work I did at that time wasn’t relevant to today.
Either way, as soon as they figure out my ago, the screening call is typically over.
>which were FAANG (which everyone believes is a golden ticket into any company). In a past job, I saw a LOT of former FAANG candidates as a hiring manager (SRE @ hedge fund) at a past job. In my experience, FAANG folks have a somewhat barbell distribution where it's either: A. "This person is incredibly talented, well spoken and will probably find a job anywhere" B. "This person spent 5 years at a FAANG and worked on…
> I also distinctly remember learning that Google had 100K+ employees. To me, that is moving into "big bank" size territory and it's clearly impossible for EVERYONE who is former Google to be amazing. Ive worked at 3 places, sizes: I cant even imagine 100k. 100k for Toyota or Walmart, sure, that makes sense. But at tens of thousands of engineers you must have a lot of people not doing anything. Even at 20k, so maybe…
ROFL (we had well over 100K other engineers at DEC when I worked there and connected via a pre-Internet system called EasyNet and were managed in a matrix)
I'm sorry but this comment shows an immense amount of social privilege. Most of us don't have networks that can get us jobs. Those are exclusive cliques and it's foolish to assume everyone can lean on nepotism. Also, isn't it a bit scummy to keep someone in your life just in case you need a job?
It's normal to leverage your connections to find a job. Arguably it's the preferred way for both employees and employers. "It's not what you know, it's who you know" You too can acquire this "privilege" by building relationships with people.
In what way is it moral to hire someone based on network instead of merit? That practice is itself the problem.
It is a privilege because the bar you're meant to reach is lower if you know someone.
What relationships would you build? You're coworkers. Friendships require outside-work time and effort, which is already in scant supply. I truly don't know how anyone manages these relationships.
Bit of a tangent, but what has been everyone's experience so far in 2023 trying to find a new job? I got really interested in this and have been passively researching it (HN, reddit posts). My conclusion, so far, is unless you've got strong connections it's hard right now to find a job. Most job posting, as OP mentions get hundreds if not thousands of applications. Other times, I've personally also notice, candidates…
I’m 53, and I doubt I’ll ever find a job in tech again. I only started getting responses when I removed the earliest 15 year’s experience from my CV, and as soon as I hit the screening stage and my age is known they lose interest. Ageism can get fucked.
I want you to download Unity, crack open a Safari book and go heads down until you can download and integrate 3D objects and write scripts. Make some tribute to something you like and then market it along side your grey beard. Remember me when you are making $250K next year :)
>which were FAANG (which everyone believes is a golden ticket into any company). In a past job, I saw a LOT of former FAANG candidates as a hiring manager (SRE @ hedge fund) at a past job. In my experience, FAANG folks have a somewhat barbell distribution where it's either: A. "This person is incredibly talented, well spoken and will probably find a job anywhere" B. "This person spent 5 years at a FAANG and worked on…
> I also distinctly remember learning that Google had 100K+ employees. To me, that is moving into "big bank" size territory and it's clearly impossible for EVERYONE who is former Google to be amazing. Ive worked at 3 places, sizes: I cant even imagine 100k. 100k for Toyota or Walmart, sure, that makes sense. But at tens of thousands of engineers you must have a lot of people not doing anything. Even at 20k, so maybe…
100K+ employees doesn't necessarily mean they're all engineers, even at Google. Many of them are probably either engineer-adjacent (meaning they work with engineers but don't code themselves) or are scientists of another sort (not coders).
I’m 53, and I doubt I’ll ever find a job in tech again. I only started getting responses when I removed the earliest 15 year’s experience from my CV, and as soon as I hit the screening stage and my age is known they lose interest. Ageism can get fucked.
Heh, I got a tech job at 56. But ... there is a lot of ageism out there. Which I've never understood.
I was senior level but unable to shave yet when the movie War Games came out. That movie changed things socially and eventually at work. Young Bill Gates rise in celebrity also changed things. Quite a bit later, the dot-com boom started and we were hiring anything with a warm pulse to script HTML and Cold Fusion. Some of those kids were pulling $150K/yr in 1996 money! When the Crash happened, the kids moved home and laughed it off, eventually to reemerge as $7-$17/hr contractors while almost everyone over 40 was permanently retired (exceptions abound, but not enough). It happened because the older workers had more serious bills to pay and that involved changing careers and/or cracking open retirement nest eggs. The kids lacked any tenure with the grey beards and snow caps to guide them, but they had Google Search and the remotely connected Europeans (who were not as badly affected by the Crash due to socialism). Those kids of that era are fundamentally screwed because of lack of formal training and learning from those with decades of experience (and, of course, CS majors started graduating again ..about 17 years ago now.. and while initially outnumbered by the idiot kid masses, did manage to replicate to the point where things like PHP and Node are being slowly killed off and the applied science is coming back —along with renewed efforts to put training wheels on everything like was tried a generation ago with Pascal/Modula/Ada). However, one thing all those workers ALL shared was peer age group camaraderie! The older people were not seen as credible because the kids came to believe the entire industry had suddenly appeared out of thin are along with the advent of the WWW. Jeff Bezos took care of their heavy lifting for them (as long as they worked somewhere with a credit card lol) and is now the richest man in the world. Of course, I’m speaking very general here, but, for example, I doubt FB could have ever taken on Google because of this issue. I realized I was in trouble one day when I interviewed at Qualcomm wearing a suit and the kid who showed up late in casual attire accused me of being a fraud —not to my face, but to the recruiter. I notified their Legal and the response was like “Do we have a problem here?” Things are a bit better now, some of those kids look older than they are. Still, it’s not wise to let the young know what decade you were born in now, just as it once was with the old, before the War Games movie and Billy Gates.
It's normal to leverage your connections to find a job. Arguably it's the preferred way for both employees and employers. "It's not what you know, it's who you know" You too can acquire this "privilege" by building relationships with people.
In what way is it moral to hire someone based on network instead of merit? That practice is itself the problem. It is a privilege because the bar you're meant to reach is lower if you know someone. What relationships would you build? You're coworkers. Friendships require outside-work time and effort, which is already in scant supply. I truly don't know how anyone manages these relationships.
You're assuming a hire based on networking is somehow unqualified. In reality people hire based at least partly on networking because there is an assumption (whether true or not) that you can trust that person to some degree: I know them, they seem to have their act together, they can communicate reasonably well. In other words, they are more of a known quantity than a stranger with nothing more than a decent looking resume. One's network may not be perfect, but it tends to provide more qualified candidates than the Internet at large, so people tend to look to their network first.
If you live near even one person, you can get together with them and talk. That's how networking starts. If you don't live near anyone, there is no shortage of online forums where you can network.
In what way is it moral to hire someone based on network instead of merit? That practice is itself the problem. It is a privilege because the bar you're meant to reach is lower if you know someone. What relationships would you build? You're coworkers. Friendships require outside-work time and effort, which is already in scant supply. I truly don't know how anyone manages these relationships.
You're assuming a hire based on networking is somehow unqualified. In reality people hire based at least partly on networking because there is an assumption (whether true or not) that you can trust that person to some degree: I know them, they seem to have their act together, they can communicate reasonably well. In other words, they are more of a known quantity than a stranger with nothing more than a decent looking…
That assumption may not be correct, though maybe it is statistically better than a random Internet resume.
Where would you begin? Just talking doesn't do anything for me. I'm not into small talk or chit-chat. I think part of it for me is suspected neurodivergence, since I have great difficulty following what other people are coasting on instinctively. I'm drained within an hour or two and get incredibly irritable.
I went to a networking event once, on frontend dev and responsive design. This was back in 2012. I attended the talks and had some brief chatting, but the vibe there seemed like it was meant for people already well-networked or in the industry. I don't feel like I belong in these places, despite sharing an interest in computing.
I’m 53, and I doubt I’ll ever find a job in tech again. I only started getting responses when I removed the earliest 15 year’s experience from my CV, and as soon as I hit the screening stage and my age is known they lose interest. Ageism can get fucked.
I want you to download Unity, crack open a Safari book and go heads down until you can download and integrate 3D objects and write scripts. Make some tribute to something you like and then market it along side your grey beard. Remember me when you are making $250K next year :)
Whilst i genuinely appreciate your suggestion, you are essentially saying “yes, the career and experience you have built up over the years are gone, beet find something else to do”
Step one: Give all your bank passwords, employment and payroll information to some VC-infused startup run by foreign nationals who think of you like a farm animal and let them begin maintaining a record of your income, account and work history activity.
Step two: Give complete strangers at various companies you are interested in working at your permission to subscribe to that record.
Step three: Wait to be living in the street pushing a shopping cart and having the not yet fully matured descendants of very wealthy people bear false witness against you to try and get you to move along as you find new levels of dying.