Ask HN: Should I remove work experience from resume?
I'm 40 years old and worked in programming for 20 years now. I don't want to follow the management track. Should I remove experience from my resume to avoid ageism in automated resume filters? So far I'm not getting a lot of responses to my applications (or almost instantaneous rejections).
70 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadThe lawyer, in a civil case, should already have all of the evidence they need gathered by the HRC.
States, countries, etc. will differ of course.
I do wonder what it'd be like to have something proved and to have an administrative judge tell the company to hire you anyway... Wouldn't that be super uncomfortable?
And you'd need to have much bigger sample size than 2.
I think some do, but probably most don't. Agreed a sample size of more than 2 is better but it will take enormous resources to create those resumes and matching profiles elsewhere in linkedin etc.
Can you give me an example of such evidence? Specifically evidence that would succeed in court?
Like do you think managers write down why they didn’t hire a person, and even if they did, they would type “Too old” (“too black”, “too female”) into such a system?
I have personally witnessed promotion discussion where the most senior manager thought someone should be rated the lowest (which leads to firing) because an engineer was “missing” for a large part of the year, yet was not ignorant of the fact that it was for a legally protected reason. Only after being called out by an engineer (not another manager) did the language change and the rating begrudgingly increased by one. None of the discussion was recorded in any way. I have witnessed similar discussions that boiled down to “person is female”, “person is neurodiverse” or essentially “person is not like me and my clique”.
It staggers me that large corporations are not legally required to record all such meetings - and of course it doesn’t stagger me because the USA is full of “feel good“ laws that are utterly unenforceable by design.
It was either:
A. This guy is worth twice our maximum budget
B. He's used to technical stacks that have absolutely nothing to do with ours
C. New grads perform better at leetcode than him(not saying that's a good metric, but that's not ageism)
D. Culture fit.
This is the biggest place where all kinds of biases slip in, including ageism. Culture is tied up in all of the protected classes, and any time that you hear "culture fit" used as a justification for turning someone down alarm bells should be going off.
The legitimate uses of "culture fit" as a filter should be itemized rather than lumped together: "he doesn't deal well with ambiguity", "she doesn't like frequent interruptions", whatever. Just talking about "culture fit" in the abstract is a lawsuit waiting to happen.
It often can be, as:
1. Younger folks have more recently done their degree and algorithms stuff 2. There tends to be more free time to grind leetcode at a younger age (family, responsibilities, lower energy can hamstring an older person here)
Ymmv, but I wouldn't say LC is neutral in this regard.
- overqualified based on years of experience. We don’t think they’ll be happy with the simple work we can offer.
- low growth potential. If the candidate has been a senior engineer for X years, that’s probably their plateau.
- not a “dynamic self-starter” or other euphemisms for “young and dumb enough to send on a high risk mission.”
It’d be a particularly clueless manager who can’t say what they mean without getting in trouble.
> Like do you think managers write down why they didn’t hire a person, and even if they did, they would type “Too old” (“too black”, “too female”) into such a system?
Managers are looking for someone within specific experience bands. If they downlevel a candidate (hire someone that is too skilled), then it’s unfair to the candidate, as they are underpaid. It’s unfair to the teammates, because typically managers have a limited number of promo slots. Quickly promoting someone after they joined may steal the opportunity for another teammate.
In the case that the skills match the job level, someone that is 20 years of experience and not principle yet, is less attractive than someone that is 2 years into their level and has a strong hunger for growing.
It’s so annoying when people downvote without explanation.
The essence of what you said is this: older people do not deserve a job because they are older. The bigger issue seems to be that you are overthinking, and over analyzing for what in my opinion is just ordinary jobs.
>Managers are looking for someone within specific experience bands.
Common, but very petty. Most work that most of us do is grunt work, over analysis will not give you an extraordinary candidate.
>If they downlevel a candidate (hire someone that is too skilled), then it’s unfair to the candidate, as they are underpaid.
No, it's not. The candidate has applied for a job because he could not get anything better. Ever been in a situation where you are laid off and where you had to pay the bills immediately, and did not have the luxury of finding a well-paid job?
I could go on, but I think some harsh experiences for you, like layoffs would be your greatest teacher.
No. This has nothing to do with age. If you started your career at 45 and have 0 years of experience, then you should qualify for internship roles. If you have 40 years of experience, then you should not be selected for entry level jobs.
> No, it's not. The candidate has applied for a job because he could not get anything better. Ever been in a situation where you are laid off and where you had to pay the bills immediately, and did not have the luxury of finding a well-paid job?
No, I have not. But also, you're right that having that job would help them out, but it would do a disservice to the company. They are more likely to leave early when their responsibility doesn't match their experience level. Imagine how a principle engineer would feel if they were treated like an intern, because their role is intern? Sure they might need that job for cash flow reasons, but they will leave as soon as they can.
> I could go on, but I think some harsh experiences for you, like layoffs would be your greatest teacher.
I have had "harsh" experiences. I have 14 years of industry experience. I've been laid off multiple times. I've worked at companies that completely shutdown. I have had to lay other people off.
>They are more likely to leave early when their responsibility doesn't match their experience level.
What you are saying is that it is perfectly ok for more capable people to not earn a living? ( not saying it is right or wrong, just making an observation). I'm reminded of people who were rejected for police jobs because of higher IQs
>I have 14 years of industry experience
No, that is not a lot.
For organization using biased software to make hiring decisions, there is a necessity to tailor fit your experience and abilities to 'thread the needle' into an actual human decision making level of the hiring process. If an HR department is unhappy about this process; which will yield overqualified and adept professionals, a change to those biased systems to accept truly competent staff may become the obvious remedy.
Failing that, there's always tuning your CV to precisely match the job description so you pass the first automated system. So far I've been unlucky on that front. If it's because I'm not good enough at tuning, or if it is indirect ageism, I don't know...
Best of luck to you!
Also I think that in a lot of cases it's more "we can't afford to pay a guy with 20 YoE" than ageism, maybe you're punching below your weight.
Recently I noticed that I get more answers for jobs that seems too hard for me than too easy.
You’d drop your experience because:
1/ very few roles.
2/ skills don’t match experience. If you’re not at principle level, this could be a flag.
This up-or-out worldview is not helpful, by definition there won't be enough spots in most companies for seniors to progress to staff, even less to principal, the funnel gets quite restricted there.
What gave good results for me was cutting down my resume to 1 page and highlight the important parts of my career.
Think of it like a one-pager for a startup pitch, but you are the company.
Not sure if removing experience would have helped. After all, qualifications on nearly-extinct tech was an advantage in this case.
My problem is that I almost always get hired when I can talk with the technical lead. But I get filtered out before that step, like dozens of times past year.
In general, I can't see any ethical objection to leaving off any previous jobs from your resume. The resume is not a legal document, it's a marketing document: you are presenting your best case for a half hour of somebody's time to interview you as part of the next phase. If you think that removing your earliest jobs—or your latest jobs, or some jobs in the middle—would help, then that's what you should do.
Honestly, I'm not so worried about ageism. I feel like if a company is so ingrained in keeping people out that they're gate-keeping the hiring process, it's probably not a company I want to work for anyway. A 30 year old engineering manager is more likely to be focused on ego and personal ladder climbing than what the company needs. (For the record I think one can do both ladder climb and manage people effectively, but most haven't learned how to do this.)
Nobody cares that I used MS SQL Server or Visual Basic that far back, at least for my current career goals.
No idea if that affected my job prospects though. The last 18 months have been a really challenging job market either way, and I only recently found another job.
US figures are here, https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/employment-l..., click "Information" in the graph options and you'll notice it hasn't rebounded much since the 2022/23 downturn.
If you have people you can get your direct referrals for positions, you'll better your odds of getting something right now vs cold applications.
I really doubt that any significant number of companies are using age to filter resumes as people over the age of 40 are a protected class in the US.
But you still might want to leave off older experience to avoid unintentional ageism. You don't want to avoid intentional ageism, if you are 40 years old and someone really thinks people 40 years old are too old to code, you don't want to work for them.
I'm over 50, when my previous job was off-shored, I was advised by the outplacement agency to remove experience older than a certain point and replace it with something like "additional experience available on request", I don't recall the exact wording, and they also told me to remove the date from my CS degree.
If people want to discriminate against you, this is isn't going to fool them, it's more about the people who explicitly do not want to discriminate against you, but still have an unavoidable reaction on seeing something like a graduation date that is before they were born.
All that said, the reason you are not getting many responses now may simply be that the current market for programmers is the worst since at least the Great Recession, and maybe even worse than that.
Hope you find work soon!
I pruned everything that doesn’t match what I would be looking for today.
I removed a third of my shortest and most useless experiences, and it turned out fine. When you reach 20 years of experience, recruiters don’t care anymore, but they can be suspicious if you have too many bad jobs, and you waste your time during recruitment explaining why you had to leave instead of what you did.
We need more engineers into decision-make positions, not less. And technically, if you do want to perform at the very best, interacting with other people is not avoidable.
We don't need more reluctant managers in engineering, they do enough damage as it is. Management should be a strictly personal choice, and it should be easy to bail out of if it turns out you don't like it after all.
We seem to be exiting the exponential growth stage of our industry, which means we're past the point where shoehorning people into management made any kind of sense. If we hit something approximating steady state then we'd expect 1 engineer to transition to management for every ~4 engineers who don't, which means what's actually needed now is a clear career path for the 4/5 who don't need to and don't want to be managers.
> technically, if you do want to perform at the very best, interacting with other people is not avoidable
This is a weird line to include, given that OP didn't mention anything about not liking interacting with other people. Management involves a lot more than interacting with other people—many introverts make great managers and many extroverts make terrible ones.
Most tech companies of a certain size, which unfortunately are they ones paying top of the market, are heavily top down. Middle managers don't effect change, they just hold useless meetings.
It's hard for even CTOs to effect change and give their input to the board of directors so that anything change.
Then, because they have a limited amount of things they can try before they get booted, it's unlikely they'll have results by when they're needed (new investors, someone new acquiring the company).
Being a manager is a generally a terrible idea in these companies.
I went from PE to Senior Eng with a substantial pay rise and way less hassle. I'm planning to accumulate some more money until I can't pass as an Engineer anymore then try to pivot into my own business.
We had two-sided printing back in those days and it was still not a good idea to go to two pages.
I was always told it was a rule of thumb to ensure that what mattered got seen in the initial, cursory screening. They're going to spend 30 seconds on the resume and likely won't get to a second page if you have it, so better to just fit what you need to on a single page and scrap anything that's not incredibly persuasive.
Now, today your first hurdle is an automated scanner rather than a 30-second human inspection, which may mean that you need to actually increase the amount of text in order to be able to check all the right boxes. It's the same principle (optimize for making it past the first stage), just with a new first stage.
1. applicants over 28 don't qualify for the corporate tax subsidy for youth employment programs
2. government sponsored projects/faculties must show they interviewed external candidates before getting their preferred picks
3. immigration worker-visa (+ unregistered staffing agency) companies must show several existing local candidates CV _can't_ meet the oddly specific employment criteria. Note, priority is given to upper-level degree holders for intake.
4. No one wants to take on any training costs in a high-churn position
5. Data mining by AI-startups/spammers/staffer-lead-gen-firms is still very active
6. Management doesn't want to hear "No" even when they are about to do something silly
7. racism/nepotism/nationalism is far more common than "Culture fit"
Sure it is illegal to exclude people from the candidate pool due to age/experience. However, very few HR people are ever fined for the shenanigans, and sums are negligible when firms do get caught.
We all know the appearance of youth gives people with Novelty bias a sense of progress.
Have a nice day. ;)
And also remove anything you don’t want to be contacted about
Drop the rest. It’s just noise.
There are so many ways to track down your age with automated databases linked in clues, etc
And they will eventually zoom or meet you for most jobs, and know.
Definitely curtail and curate the resume, in general the last 10 years or two jobs should be fine, keep it to two pages. But it’s not going to inoculate against ageism