Ask HN: Over 60 = no engineering jobs?
I'm curious - what are engineering managers seeing on my resume that makes them apparently routinely reject my resume? My summary: 35 years in Silicon Valley; 3 STEM undergrad degrees, MS in AI from Stanford, PhD in AI from a top-10 program; ICPC champion; always considered to be an elite programmer; very current knowledge; constant employment; wide variety of skills; management experience with small teams; very stable life; no vices; very healthy and energetic; I get along with everyone and like working in teams.
I've been applying for everything from senior engineer to VP of engineering. Ever since I turned 60 last year, I'm getting no hits on my resume. And yes, I still code (the first and most common question I get) and I still love it. If you were hiring, can you tell me why you might not even do a phone interview? I need to know what (mis)perceptions I apparently need to overcome.
Thanks!
300 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadMaybe the education section reveals your age and pre-biases hiring managers. Put it nearer to the end so they see most recent work first.
Do you have many short stints or other classic red flags?
Also not a hiring manager.
Or demand too much pay.
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.
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...
Welcome to the "culture" wars.
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".
If you had been hired in those companies, you wouldn't have lasted long. Unless you have a supernatural talent on filtering out bullshit.
Perhaps focus on rapport at the start of your interviews?
I don't think that is the issue. I was looking for an entry level position at the time, it's a CROWED field, and the handful of places where I and another much younger classmate both interviewed where I could compare included at least one, often more phone interviews. If I wasn't getting along well with them I don't expect they would have brought me in. Most of the phone calls and interpersonal in person interviews went great IMO.
To be clear I have no idea what their idea of "culture fit" actually was.
I've since started asking, nobody has been able to answer without first looking confused and humming and hawing a while. Most of the answers were usually surprisingly generic and such about "openness", "fun" and such, I suspect a few were made up on the spot. Amusing ;)
I don't bat an eye when I interview someone older than me. I expect that I'll probably learn a thing or two.
Message me. If you've got that kind of experience, I can get you an interview.
Also, if you're open to contract gig or right to hire, that might be a good way.
Put yourself in our shoes, and see how similar the frustration is: Why are you rejecting us? We hire people older than you, we have interesting work, the finances probably work out better... but you reject us.
If at some point you decide to evacuate California, we'll still be around: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17912861
The former is just following a script and wants your information in a specific format because that's what the automation demands.
The latter is a person who you will either work with or under, they don't care.
The latter is the preferable path in my opinion, and personally use the "send me your resume in a specific format" request as a reason to cease contact because of all it implies.
Makes no sense to maintain manually written resume when you are already maintaining your employment and experience history on LinkedIn.
All the relevant data is in their database, just click the export to pdf button, if somebody insists on PDF, and attach that to the email.
If I had been in industry for >10 years and was still looking for junior roles I sure as heck wouldn't be trying to hire me!
Several companies I’ve worked for have had a checkbox on the HR paperwork for interviews, have all gaps in the candidates CV been explained Y/N?
Edit: also want to point out that if you only have worked in greenfield projects where you could grow with the particular tools and practices of that project, you don't know anything about writing maintainable code
While a "35 year career in Silicon Valley" might sound impressive to some people (and perhaps rightly so), as a hiring manager I probably don't care about any projects/technologies you worked on in 1983... I want to know whether you can do the project I need delivered now. Tell me what you worked on last year and in the last 5 years - skim over or leave out the rest.
(If you're dealing through recruiters instead of directly with hiring managers, you've got a different set of problems - the solution to which is probably ignore the recruiters and don't play that game - surely a 35 year career has left you with a network that can bypass those rent-seeking gatekeepers?)
I’ve noticed some anxious double-takes in interviews after passing hiring filters with my shorter resume.
I’ve met people who have changed careers and decided to leave off their prior career work. Resumes are used in the background check for some companies but no one looks beyond 7 years. And if they really have a problem, do you really want to work for them?
The recruiters I've dealt with usually want to slap on a bunch of crap like "Web scala Java OOP web-scale MEAN STACK" onto the resume before they submit it, but the solution to that is to do it all in LaTeX so that they don't know how to work with it :)
I found this to be true a lot of the time. Great idea to tailor your resume to the type of position you're applying for.
I agree wholeheartedly with that approach. You're more likely to be successful if you tailor your story and experience to each opportunity, particularly if you have 20+ years of experience.
Specifically, OP mention about applying to a "Senior engineer" and "VP of engineering". Depending on the size of the company, these are very different roles. A killer profile for one could be terrible fit for the other, and vice-versa.
This is before you customize your submission for each job.
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 years of experience and seniority of positions applied to.
Cold interviews should probably only happen for your first job.
Finding good candidates is expensive and time-consuming. If someone is serving up qualified leads to you on a silver platter, you take them.
Referrals from existing employees are the single highest quality source of candidates for most companies. Many companies even incentivize employees to refer candidates by giving them bonuses if they refer someone who ends up being hired.
Edit - I get it the issue will come up at some stage. But explaining why you changed the dates later in the process is better than not getting an interview.
What modern technologies have you recently worked with? What does your resume show, 20 years at the same company, or do you have experience at well-known, "prestigous" companies like FANG? Are you pigeon-holed into a specific area, or are you a generic, back-end or front-end expert that has worked in relevant and useful technologies for 2018?
Also, with 35 years of experience in Silicon Valley, don't you have a network of former coworkers that you can contact for references or jobs?
I'm 50 years old, and I've had no problems getting jobs and recruiters from FANG won't stop contacting me even now. Sure, things might change over the next few years, but I also have a rolodex (old man's terminology) of former coworkers that I routinely have lunch with still and can ask for jobs, etc. I'm sure things will change, but I'm also doing my best to ensure that I can retire in the next 10 years as well.
Yeah this is an important thing everyone should be doing. I used to be shy about this but everyone is in the same boat and most do appreciate a quick drink or meal every few years to network, even if you're not friends.
Anyone hiring people for specific things they learned in University is doing absolutely the wrong thing.
Many high end schools don't even have very rigorous applied computing standards, meaning, they might have some hardcore CS stuff, but they don't necessarily encourage good programming habits, patterns, culture etc..
So the education I think always counts for a lot, it's the work experience from 30 years ago that actually may be less relevant.
One opportunity might be to find something 'related' - for example, writing documentation, doing sales support, technical product management - basically anything but front-line engineering. There are a lot of such jobs.
Do you reach out for weekend lunch dates just to chat? Are people open to that (given work, hobbies, kids, etc.)? I'm having a hard time coming with "excuses" and serendipity to stay in touch with people I'm no longer working with.
This is not necessarily about ex-coworkers.
In general, weekend time is more guarded and precious so try to meet for a coffee/drink after work. Or you can both go to an event that is related to mutual interest (tech is possible but would not recommend it). Trying to meet more than one person at the same time also leads to scheduling difficulties.
If you want to meet up with more than one person, consider hosting a Tuesday night dinner party. Nothing fancy, do take out if you can't cook that well. Tuesday night is usually an "off" night for most people.
Ideally, you meet with people you would like to stay in touch about every 3 months. A person is not really in your direct network unless they know who you are and can recognize you in person and know what you are currently working on and have seen you in about the last 3 months. But here's the catch, you don't necessarily have to be directly in contact with everyone. A simple "How is Jane doing? Have you heard from her" can keep you updated enough.
There are some people from work that you might think you'll remain friends with after leaving with whom you do not meetup with again. That is ok. People drift off. Maybe it was just the recurring coincidence of time, location, and possibly purpose (going to the office for years) that made you "friends".
Like the saying goes:
Friends for a lifetime
Friends for a reason
Friends for a season.
The most naturally extroverted individuals that I know have many social circles. One friend I know always buys two tickets to a performance and never lets the other person pay for it.
Finally true friends whom are hard to find are those who you can open up and be vulnerable with.
Facebook has bastardized the term friend. Not everyone is going to be your friend, as it requires reciprocity and shared caring.
That and we're always bouncing news, advice, and helping one another in said Slack instance. Safety in numbers.
Edit: the other thing I do is pass along interesting looking recruiting emails to people who I know are more on the market than I am. I figure they'll do the same for me next time I'm ready to move on.
Literally, that's what I will send to one of my ex-coworkers, or vice versa. It's not anything more than that. Either through gChat or Facebook Messenger, I don't find it that hard, and I don't feel like I need excuses.
I recently went to a going-away/layoff party for one of the first engineers I worked under in Silicon Valley, 20+ years ago. I hadn't personally talked to him in 10+ years, but he was delighted to see me. We shared war stories about our old company, dot com bust, etc. It was great, and doesn't have to be anything more than that.
Two of those degrees (MS and PhD) are graduate degrees, not undergrad.
In the specific case of AI, the field has changed massively over the last 10-15 years, so the field-specific knowledge conveyed by degrees further back than that may indeed have depreciated quite a bit.
However, field specific knowledge is not necessarily what makes graduate degrees valuable. It's knowing that you're getting a candidate who knows how to branch out into unknown territory, who knows how to research the relevant literature, who didn't quit when the going got tough, and who can express themselves in comprehensible prose. These qualities don't become irrelevant, even if Isaac Newton was your PhD advisor.
Not saying it should be that way but I bet some people will think a >60 year old may just look to hang around/coast for a few years waiting for retirement.
How does your Linkedin profile look, in terms of libraries? Many recruiters / managers look at libs / tech FIRST, which is kinda backwards. Do you have the latest tensorflow or [insert cool new thing] on the resume?
If your resume is really what you posted - any outside recruiter can help you getting interviews. They may give you lackluster opportunities at first, but that's part of the process (think of it like dating, but for jobs).
Anymore people like hiring young inexperienced devs they can abuse and pay poorly. And then they wonder why we have to take months and months to pay off technical debt...
Hiring managers and inexperienced management think anybody can learn to code so they just hire who they think is cool. It's a bad trend. So tired of working with people who are fresh out of code bootcamp and are basically useless.
I've posted about this before so I'll repeat myself:
> More than anything have learned that education and training are hugely important and hiring to train leads to mediocre staff who think their two years of development work stack up to your 4 years of college and 6 years of professional experience.
> They take forever to start writing productive code, if they ever bother leaning at all.
> I will never hire someone without a degree or equivalent experience again. Even for Jr. roles
I've gone through the interview process at Google twice and was "close but rejected".
If you are personally having difficulties interacting with people <30 years old a good first step would be not to patronize them.
https://www.reuters.com/article/employment-ibm/ibm-laid-off-...
When I interview you I don’t really care about the hundreds of things you can do or have done, I only care about the one thing I’m interviewing you for. The oldest person in my team is close to 60 years old and works as a developer next to 20-30 something year olds (doesn’t do any management or VP-ing or whatever on the side). You need to be OK with that and the fact that your boss may be 20-30 years younger than you.
All I remember from his interview is that he had more than 10 years of specific development experience for the job he was applying for. That’s impressive and not something that a younger developer can easily beat you too.
Over one hackathon a year sounds like overkill to me, and I've never heard of a company with over two of them (not saying they don't exist of course)
Our home room would regularly scold us gently for working late / weekends. The problem was, the home room wasn't really in charge.
However, on a day-to-day basis I was reporting to a project lead (IT Director for an OpCo) for all practical purposes for the duration of the project I was on. "Bad cop".
In theory, this structure is good for the employee if your homeroom is willing to call BS on the guy running the project. You end up with 2-3 managers evaluating you (depending on scale/# of projects) rather than 1 which can help even things out to "fair".
However, if you are in my situation (direct report to CTO) vs. (home room, who is far down on the ladder relatively speaking)...the home room manager ends up protecting himself/career and doesn't push back. So you end up (for all practical purposes) being a direct report to the project lead until the project is done.
On the whole, its a better management structure than most places and as long as you don't end up on a bad project it greatly reduces problems.
If you end up on a bad project with a bad manager well...it really depends if your home room will defend you or not. 50/50 shot at protection is better than the 0% you get at most places.
We're also hiring pretty aggressively right now (grove.co/careers), for what it's worth.
I think I've put in maybe two 40+ hour weeks in the past 5 years. I manage several devs and I hate dashing the younger (or ambitious) ones' dreams of resume driven development. My team handles a legacy system that neither crashes frequently nor needs extensive refactoring. "Sorry, cutting up and containerizing the system and using Kubernetes to deploy isn't worth the headache."
I know I'll keep getting promoted (and so will my reports) if I make sure my manager doesn't get calls from his manager asking why there are service outages.
Things move very slowly on purpose. It's better to miss delivery dates than to get bad press or run afoul of laws (which begets bad press).
I'm curious because I work at a big company but not in a maintenance or operational role so I'm not sure what an "ideal" resume or career track looks like for such people.
I'm in Chicago at an agency, and our company is more or less just like this. Moreover, the average age on the team I direct is ~43--not by intention or design; it just happened over the course of inheriting the team and hiring since then. We have safe, risk-mitigated times for deployments, solid production systems, and unless something unexpectedly tanked or you're on flex time, we're all out at 5:00pm.
They're out there, but they're not always easy to find.
My summary: 35 years in Silicon Valley; 3 STEM undergrad degrees, MS in AI from Stanford, PhD in AI from a top-10 program; ICPC champion; always considered to be an elite programmer; very current knowledge; constant employment; wide variety of skills; management experience with small teams; very stable life; no vices; very healthy and energetic; I get along with everyone and like working in teams.