If you are toast, how does anyone else find a job at the same stage? The vast majority of population doesn’t even have technical experience.
Others probably have golang experience when applying for golang jobs.
Ask HN: Am I dead meat already?
31–40 of 83 posts
Re: Ask HN: Am I dead meat already?
#32You're a senior in every way but one; coding Go.
Applying for a junior Go position would probably not be a good fit for you.
Applying for a mid-level Go position sounds uphill because competing candidates have 1-2 years of professional Go experience.
I would overcome that by accepting any opportunity to get real Go experience.
For example, I'm spending some extra hours every week for a money-less startup on an "I'll register the hours and you'll pay me next year" basis.
As a reward, I learn Phoenix/Elixir and Nix: The lead will spend time fast-forwarding me through the commands, and I can spend some hours that I don't bill them on qualifying. For my next interview, I can say I've spent X months doing Phoenix/Elixir and/or Nix in production. The money is secondary.
Alternatively: Use your network. What young people don't have is an abundance of acquaintances who took the management route who can vouch for your generic skill set and work ethics which don't translate into recruiter filter buzzwords.
Re: Ask HN: Am I dead meat already?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not even in European market. I'm in a clown job market of a fringe European state.
Define "clown market."
Small countries in the EU tend to have extremely niche job markets in tech, largely because the choice is either very specialised work or generic IT services (not dev). Developers usually have a bad time of it.
Re: Ask HN: Am I dead meat already?
#34Lie about your age and fabricate new skills on your resume/CV. Put “I code in C/Java/Go/Python/Javascript/whateverYouNeed”. Also you’re in the EU so could feasibly move to where needs your exact skill set. But web/frontend/backend is needed everywhere so it’s likely worth adding that to your C skills.
> Also you’re in the EU so could feasibly move
You _could_, but reaslitically speaking the frictions with language, culture, and distance from family and friends probably makes this harder than maoving US -> Canada or vice-versa. The EU tried hard to overcome this, but they're fighting national differences and cultural borders older than Christianity.
Re: Ask HN: Am I dead meat already?
#35there are always teaching positions. "nutty greybeards teaching nutty kids". connect with the nerd and maker culture and ask around, in case you decide to go with and for progress.
Teaching jobs increasingly require some sort of teaching career that is hard to bootstrap at the age OP mentioned, and pay a pittance--sometimes less than PA/clerical work.
Re: Ask HN: Am I dead meat already?
#36You could spend some working hours brushing up your knowledge about whatever tech stack companies nowadays ask for. You don’t need to become an expert in X, Y and Z, a bit of exposure and understanding of the fundamentals is enough to put it on your CV. I have done this many times. For example, I didn’t know k8s, and I wanted to switch jobs: I spent around 1-2 months learning k8s at work and at home, I learnt the fun…
As a Founder , I believe it is not fair for someone to look for job applications on company time and sharpening your skills for next job - in time and resources that your company had paid for. Since you have problems with upper management - tough it up , talk about it face to face in a polite manner and highlight their toxic behavior . Tell them you don't like the way you are being treated and you can't continue this…
> sharpening your skills for next job
How do I even work for you without "sharpening my skills"?
Re: Ask HN: Am I dead meat already?
#37Lie about your age and fabricate new skills on your resume/CV. Put “I code in C/Java/Go/Python/Javascript/whateverYouNeed”. Also you’re in the EU so could feasibly move to where needs your exact skill set. But web/frontend/backend is needed everywhere so it’s likely worth adding that to your C skills.
This is a horrible advice.
Don't lie about anything in your resume/CV. If you get called out, your whole reputation and your whole CV then is in Question.
Re: Ask HN: Am I dead meat already?
#38Lie about your age and fabricate new skills on your resume/CV. Put “I code in C/Java/Go/Python/Javascript/whateverYouNeed”. Also you’re in the EU so could feasibly move to where needs your exact skill set. But web/frontend/backend is needed everywhere so it’s likely worth adding that to your C skills.
I wouldn't recommend lying about age. That's going to backfire.
Padding the resume isn't a bad idea. If you've worked in C, and taught yourself Go, you're senior in my book. I mean, you may not know the gnarly corners of the language and eco system, but that's easy enough to pick up.
Re: Ask HN: Am I dead meat already?
#39Target EU govt and mil complex jobs. They have older stacks, favor experience and have more funds these days thanks to the war. Plus much less stress than in private sector.
You must not be very familiar with the way those are clustered in a few specific countries and the extraordinarily long and bureaucratic recruiting times.
Re: Ask HN: Am I dead meat already?
#40I remember in 1999 thinking "Damn! The world's moved on to Java and I'm still writing in C! I won't last much longer..." Then I got a job writing C code for those wireless credit card doohickies (a nasty mess of Z80s with crazy paging schemes to access 2mb of memory, but I digress). A few years later I actually started working in Java and Python, and then iPhone came along and I was right back in C land again! Then i…
Perhaps a biased view but fter teaching students from colleges I feel that most who are "born in the high level" world float comfortably without needing to understand fundamentals (memory, OS interfaces, arch, drivers, crashes, ..).
As soon as something basic goes down or when you have unexpected dives into low level stuff, the fair weather pilots are suddenly out of their depth.
I started with C, eventually moved into business roles and honestly wasn't even that good a dev. But looking at the uncertainty ahead in the world from a climate point of view, I sometimes worry about the future of tech talent.
We are losing tech veterans at a high rate and gaining a lot of chatgpt devs. I once remember a stackoverflow outage from my dev days and a large part of team went on vacation in the second half as we were so used to asking and copying.
Any fragility to modern infra will make us fall so hard on our faces I fear and hope I am wrong.