It began with a friend who was in the job market as a 50+. More on the hardware side. This guy has some cool experience. He gets lots of interviews, they go well, but no offers.

As his frustration grows, he grows desperate to try something different. He dyes some color back into his hair, gets some tinted glasses, and lets his daughter take him shopping for some more hip interview clothes.

A month later and he's in bidding wars for who to hire him. He said the difference was night and day. He was now pointing out his age in interviews "are you sure I'm not too old?" and the interviewers were like "no way man."

I wondered how one off this was. A year or so later, knew another guy who was having this same struggle. We shared the story with him. He raised his eyebrows, hesitated for a week or two, the colored his hair, got his niece to take him shopping. And pretty much same thing.

Obviously, this is a small sample set. But the lesson I took from this (and haven't had a chance to prove for myself yet) is that it's not your age that will limit you, but your apparent age. If you are old, but look like a younger/fresher version of yourself, you do well. If you appear "old", you struggle.

Best of luck.

Note: this also applies to personality - if you give off a "grumpy old person" vibe, or are far off the mark culture-wise, you're gonna have a rough time.

It's very, very easy to get into a "grumpy old fart" mindset, where anything new or changing is dismissed out of hand. I've had to fight hard to stop this from happening, and it's still my first response to anything new.

Having said that, there are sometimes good reasons for dismissing something new. But only after taking the time to understand it and why everything else thinks this is cool.

If I'm interviewing a 50+ for a job, I want to see evidence that they haven't fallen into Grumpy Old Fart syndrome.

The converse is also true - if I'm interviewing someone younger, I want to see evidence that they're not caught up in tech fads. Too many times I've seen good tech thrown away because it's not in the hip-and-happening language/framework/platform/etc. And there's a lot to learn from the mistakes of the past ;) And having some idiot kid explain to me why Mongo is soo awesome and SQL is obsolete gets tiring fast [0].

But to be honest, I'd be worried if I had to interview for a role. It'd be a sign that my network wasn't where I'd like it to be. Keeping that up to date is as valuable as keeping the tech skills sharp.

[0] example at random cough

Just an observation. This statement might fail the "Grumpy Old Fart syndrome" test.

The kid's _probably_ not an idiot and it might be a good time to educate the lad with real life experience and references to data to support your experience.

It's the "SQL is obsolete" part, coming from someone who never bothered to learn it, that gets me every time.

SQL isn't obsolete, but it's awfully tiring to deal with folks who treat it as the end-all be-all of data tech. The project I'm working on right now has a few dozen stored procedures stapled on to a Hadoop cluster because none of the industry veterans trust this new-fangled "Spark" technology. When the quarterly schema changes come around, the entire environment has to be redone so as to accommodate the hard-coded SSIS ingestion pipeline.

Yes, there's a fine line between applying experience to understand and explain why something has been tried 10 times before in the industry and the 11th time is not going to be a charm--and, as you say, routinely dismissing anything that even peripherally echoes something that didn't work last time even though a lot of things are different now.

The two times I was called a fad-chaser (literally) was adopting Scala in 2012 and React.js in 2013. AFAICT, that's the label boomers use to dismiss the people who are making progress. Getting the company to use Reactjs in particular drove a huge increase in quality, velocity, and recruiting.

I'm a younger guy, but I know I try to pick my outfit carefully when going for an interview. I don't have a totally different interview wardrobe or anything, but I pay a little more attention to matching colors and generally looking more put-together.

You may not even need to get your kids to dress you - just find a friend your age who cares about fashion some to help. Even if you think you dress well, having someone else check you over or make small suggestions can help.

It's not so much about what you are wearing as it is about "fitting in with our culture". At least this is a bias that you can usually mitigate (if you want to)

(That's for in-person interviews. Remember those?)

Absolutely. Fairly or not, if you show up at a shorts and T-shirts company dressed in a suit, there will definitely be people who will dismiss you for that reason--especially if your experience or age might make them a bit suspicious in the first place. Personally, I probably wouldn't dress down below business casual unless someone specifically told me to. (And that would be a bit of a red flag if that were seen as such a big deal.)

I really don't see the point of suit and tie. Wear a nice button-down shirt. Then you're always good.

Some people will benefit from rising to the middle.

That said, one of the most influential people I know at a FAANG dresses like a mechanic. But he already has the juice.

a grey beard will protect you from accepting positions where looks might be more important than skills.

No slight against your friends, if they needed the money they did what they had to do. But if one doesn't, there is nothing wrong with letting your beard guide you: somewhere out there is a lisp codebase just waiting for your love and attention.

OTOH if someone thinks you're a wizard because you have a grey beard, that's also looks above skills.

The compressed interview process means that after the usual preambles, you get <30 minutes to convince a zoom conference of 2-3 engineers that they want to work with you. It leaves no time for you to overcome prejudice and preconceptions.

There's a niche there for someone with the right skills....

The book recommends what your friend did – go shopping for younger clothes (the book author recommends hiring a stylist every five years) and making sure you don't have grey hair.

0 - http://www.librarything.com/work/354311

And NO, I do not have plans to pay for products or scams to "get my hair back". Oddly, since flat out shaving my head I've gotten much more respect and positive looks from women compared to when I was still "in denial". The world is indeed a weird place.

I don't get this reference. Can you explain it or show an example?

There was a time where a popped collar was a sign that you were a problematic person. Probably still is in a certain context. I think people are going to do some pattern matching with your clothing and people they've met/seen in the past. It's just a bit of human nature.

Maybe everyone should dress like Mr. Rogers or something.

And I mostly shop at j crew factory and tend to go for floral prints. But, it’s crazy to me that this stuff matters, even though it clearly does

Did she proudly admit her terrible judgement to her peers in hiring review and meeting, or confide in your later that she tried to sabotage you? Did she still interview?

Good luck to you

Maybe twenty years ago they introduced a new product line that I thought was clever. The idea is you dye your hair with an inefficient dye, so after one dye job you still have a lot of grey left. You keep applying it over and over until the grey is gone, so you don’t just show up full silver one day and jet black the next. You just age backward for weeks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grecian_Formula

Seriously, thanks for the anecdotes. I could imagine companies are a bit afraid of a grumpy old geezer having a bad influence on the company's work atmosphere. This may be less of a concern if they feel the person is trying to keep up with the younger people also for non-work related stuff.

Supplementing Biotin worked well for me, and I've talked to others with similar experiences.

I think part of the problem is that with experience comes integrity, and integrity is the last thing most employers want to deal with.

you're right of course, just depresing that we've essentially not made much progress in the past 50 years... especially since the people who kicked off this whole thing were some of the least presentable first-impression guys you could ever find (see early photos and descriptions of jobs, gates, etc.)

1. Be attractive.

2. Don't be unattractive.

After the initial preamble with HR and the hiring manager, and a technical test, most interviews I have had recently involved an extremely brief zoom meeting with several engineers at once, where they each have ~15-20 minutes to interview you and make a decision. So, they don't have much alternative to snap judgements and ultimately hiring people more like their social peers.

It's weird that employers are so superficial. But maybe they're looking for someone flexible and energetic, and if you look too old, and give off "old man" vibes, they fear you may lack that energy.

During the first interview, I brought this up. The average age in the company was 28, so why would they want me? The answer surprised me: they wanted me because of my age, experiences (generalist), and wisdom. Lots of youthful, intelligent people are an asset - but so are a few veterans to provide perspective and keep a check on reality.

You are just as likely to get rejected for a reason other than age, so you might as well just approach with enthusiasm any opportunity that interest you. If you don't show up to an interview angry about age discrimination, you're more likely to be accepted irrespective of your age.

Lastly, remember that companies are made up of people, and people come with all sorts of mentalities. A few will indeed have a bias against people their parents' age, but I bet it's not as many people with that attitude as you might expect.

The only place we really cannot compete with is on salary (unless you're willing to work at entry/medior rates). Experienced people generally cost a good bit more, and the value proposition may not be there for some candidates/situations.

Last summer I interviewed at a ton of companies and truly I rejected them way before they rejected me but what I learned essentially is that if you fall for the typical recruitment razzmataz as a more experienced dev then they'll assume you're stupid and if you don't fall for it they'll assume you're too smart, if you catch my drift.

Where once we were meant to show enthusiasm now we're supposed to play cool. How many companies lead with "We're pretty casual around here" as if that doesn't actually mean "we'll fire you on a dime"

You have to tread a very fine line that shows you're willing to play dumb while at the same time showing you have the chops -- it's more about how much cognitive dissonance or doublethink you can stomach than anything to do with your vital statistics and all these technical interviews are bollocks compared to fourth year courses in a world where most devs barely speak English but I digress

I have literally seen everything in this industry from from y2k to working with distributed overseas teams to getting tattooed in San Francisco and there's nothing new under the sun except for rife imposterism and rampant entitlement.

They're sizing you up the same way you're sizing them up with respect to the developer stereotypes and management dramas and all that toxic crap while testing you to see if you're willing to play along with their dysfunction and so called "culture fit" aka groupthink mentality.

You can probably tell I have no love left for this lost generation of code monkeys, after having fathered them along with an entire generation of misfits and dreamers whereas now they're all trying to fit in and losing themselves to the machine.

Once they learn how to do adulting maybe they'll learn to have more fun. Until then they're just a bunch of lemmings at the gate.

I'd go further into this downward spiral but I'll show myself out. Think about what you'll look like as a sixty year old wearing hoodies and t shirts and ask yourself whether you've made the right life choices.

Cue the downvotes you filthy scoundrels.

An interesting note: Since I no longer have to raise kids, I actually have a lot more time and a lot less 'drama' then I used to. Makes it easier to keep up on new tech...

Where can I begin but by offering you my sincere prayers and grateful brotherly affections

By the power of the holy spirit of Alan Turing allow me to humbly devote my entire life to the pursuit of divine knowledge and wisdom through the study of information technology

In the name of the the computer, the algorithm, and the data amen

I have always preferred hoodies over hats and scarves because they are easier and more effective.

And to me t-shirts are also easier and more comfortable than dress shirts. I am from California so maybe that has something to do with it.

I feel like it doesn't serve us any more and the younger generation is getting lost in the toxic sauce and we've just become the same as the suits but with way less professionalism but that's probably a romanticized notion of what corporacy is based on my own experiences running early software from Apple when it still kind of was a shirt and tie corporacy (before the black turtleneck became the standard)

Anyway, you'll probably defend your right to wear a t-shirt to the death while claiming 'what you wear doesn't matter' so ask yourself whether what you wear actually does matter?

Now, I generally say, sales calls need 1 suit, 1 geek.

See how silly that sounds? To me 'geek', 'coder', 'programmer' are all compliments - I worked dam hard to earn those labels.

Geeks have a shared passion - Geek of Math, Geek of Law, Car Geeks, etc (look up geek code for some much better examples). A geek calling another person a geek is generally a compliment. An acknowledgement that they know what they're doing.

Coders and programmers were out in the trenches grinding code before 'software engineer' was even a thing.

Usage of the word within the in-group may mean one thing but from the out-group it means a whole different thing.

You're basically calling yourself a slave and justifying it with blissful ignorance.

You're saying 'words mean what I say they mean and I'm ignoring all shades of meaning but the ones I choose'.

and you can't see that in a professional culture if some people are "suits" and some people are "geeks" it's a drastic disadvantage situation in favour of stereotypes over reality.

And plus bro I wouldn't call you bro at the office but you'd surely call me a geek.

Just for the record, I don't feel 'disadvantaged' or 'stereotyped'. If people feel their professional standing/opportunities are based on dress code, title or hanging around hoping to be the first person the boss notices - I'd say they seem more 'disadvantaged' then me. But that's just my opinion.

Seems like we're at an impasse - Let's just call it here. You can be a 'software engineer' and I'll be a 'Geek'.

edit: swap 'bro' for 'software engineer' as I could see 'bro' be taken as condescension.

However it's also way off the mark because it doesn't treat the professional dress from a technologist standpoint but rather a socio-cultural one and doesn't go into the history of the shirt and tie (notice I didn't say suit and tie) as a communication medium

There's enough information here for a whole volume but whatever it's worth humans require signals to communicate and in the absence of something definite they'll use anything at hand

The traditional professional dress deals with social communication concerns we're no longer even aware of let alone leveraging to advantage and it's a pity to watch a whole generation of would-be professionals on a level the world has never seen in its billion year history lose the thread as it were and bring their shabby hand me downs to the arena when they could stand on the side of tradition and button up like their ancestors in the arts and sciences did for centuries before them

Not sure what to make of this really. You're not wrong, there is something to the subject of course.

Still, I can't help feeling like it's a perspective from a different planet. Different folks are into different things, and that's fine. But hoping that the majority will get serious about a niche subject/behavior is usually a recipe for disappointment.

Personally, I like to dress on the nice side of casual (vaguely similar to Steve Jobs, sans turtleneck) and wouldn't be caught dead in impractical clothing outside of a wedding.

Anyone can examine the evidence and agree as to the evidence but disagree as to what the evidence entails

I look at the modern state of corporacy and the rise of working from home and I see we ought to go back to traditional principles whereas the majority view it as an incentive to dress even further down

I'm not sure about you but I don't feel good about siding with the hoi polloi on principle and for that reason alone I'd rather wear a shirt with a collar than a dainty T

Edit: by the way do you believe that every person you see in a shirt and tie is suffering in an impractical outfit?

I don't care for anything tight around my neck. Shoes with no traction are another one of my pet peeves.

I think something like the traditional Asian suits would be the most practical.

How do you communicate that though? Isn't it considered wrong to just say it because that indicates a lack of confidence?

Say like I'm willing to start at the 25th percentile for a Cloud Computing Analyst in exchange for an upward career path over the next 3-5 years or something like that

Never worked for me

Never even thunk about working for me

I actually think salaries for people should follow the bell curve

In part to help olds like me get hired

But maybe also for practical reasons

However, starting around 2016, finding work started to become difficult. The work I did find was no longer enjoyable. It took a few years, but I finally did enough self introspection to realize: it's not them, it's me. I aged out of the industry. I didn't notice it in the moment, it just happened.

I cannot work in open-office fishbowls. I cannot stomach Agile process and how it has turned something I love into menial factory work (N.B. I get it, your [A|a]gile shop is awesome. I only had such luck once). There are many more things about modern software development shops with which I disagree.

Now, it hadn't occurred to me until later that this was showing through in my attitude. Of course, I really did not want to work on the 500th BBA in my career with six Scrumm Masters all demanding 30 minute meetings every morning. I did not want to write more JavaScript or deal with yet another hotness-of-the-week library that does the same thing as the previous 10 such beasts. I did not want to play Schedule Chicken yet again.

Is it my age? Sure, people change. I'm not bored with the programming I enjoy but I did grow bored of modern corporate software slave shops. Hey, more power to them. It's their shop; they can do what they want.

However, it does mean I have to move on. I'm not saying any of this is true for the OP. Just something to ponder if you're constantly facing rejection.

You will learn new information that will cause you to question yesterday's "best practices". So quit holding on to what you know now as the "one true way". Be willing to learn from people you consider "old and irrelevant"... they may actually know something.

> We have people falling all over themselves to sing the praises of XP, TDD, Agile/Scrum/etc, and yet, we can't show software actually getting any better.

Software is absolutely better today than it was in the 80s and 90s. I used to have to reboot my computer 2 or 3 times a day due to unrecoverable crashes and taught myself to constantly save work after every minor change. Now my computer stays up for weeks to months at a time only being rebooted to install updates occasionally. Documents are often autosaved, and I don't even need to save anything when I quit an app. The next time I launch it's all there.

I agree that we may not be able to measure that any given methodology is better than any other one, but we've made significant progress along the way. Better tooling, like static analyzers and profilers have helped, too. I do think automated testing can be shown to improve things when used appropriately. (The drive for 100% test coverage seems fanatical to me, though.)

I don't think I can make it to retirement at this rate.

Next, I had to honestly explore other aspects of myself. What else held interest for me besides electronics and software?

Further, of these other interests, which of them were reasonably "safe" from outsourcing, offshoring, and automation? I do not want to transition into new currency acquisition activities that are themselves a race to the bottom. Tangentially, I considered the perceived prestige of each of these. I could give two shits personally, but I've learned the hard way that the perceived prestige of an activity impacts how others will treat you.

Finally -- as I am a software engineer -- how can I use this skill to augment my effectiveness in performing any of these new activities?

This is an ongoing process for me. I've always had an interest in the law. Law school is out of the question, so I've looked into paralegal work and how I could provide a unique service in this space.

Additionally, there are mundane dirty jobs -- specialized trash hauling, electronic recycle brokering, etc. -- that are poorly serviced in many localities. I believe I'll end up doing something here as well.

I view this transition as open ended. It's no longer about "career" but staying in a lateral thinking mode about combinations of possibilities.

What about working in legal or medical software, since those industries will never go anywhere? Or any other industry that is boring.

- the products I wish to build will take time to do properly and I do not want to be in any kind of rush;

- based on my research, I believe these products could be good earners; however, it will take time and the majority of the revenue will be from the long tail;

- this kind of activity is high risk and I treat it as such. What this means, in practice, is that I put in my 4 hours of focused coding every morning and then go do other, less risky activities;

My experience has taught me to prefer transactional business models. Consultative business models spring from the dark side of The Force ;-).

As a vague teaser: one of the products is a SaaS modernization of a classic desktop database/application dev program complete with a recreation of its programming language; and the other is a game based on the premise of "what is an episode of sleep paralysis and waking dreams like?" I'm excited to be working on both but I have my expectations very firmly in check.

I'm picking up what you're laying down and think this could be brilliant, especially given several trends in both tech and market demand today.

I've been around long enough to recognize that older, more experienced people are incredibly valuable to learn from. They also have one thing you can't shortcut: perspective, and knowing where the bullshit is and how to avoid it. There's shit I'm just not willing to put up with anymore, that I would have been eager to do in my twenties. It wears you down.

I followed you in the mid-80s, and one thing that bugs me is the lack of 'geeks' in coding these days. What used to be a passion you could make a career, is now a 9-to-5 shuffle for a lot of people. Seems like there's as many coders that are 'just in it for the money' as there are stock brokers. I guess that's to be expected with the growth of the industry over the years, but I still find it sad.

To what, though? I came to the same conclusions a few years back, but I'm at a loss as to what to do next. So I plug along, take what work I can find, shake my head and watch the exact same cycle happen to React as happened to Flex.

You simply can't expect to remain employed as a programmer until the conventional retirement age. Especially for younger developers, FIRE (Financial Independence and Retire Early) principles are essential to learn.

This is the hardest part. I think a lot of people feel this way, but it's taking that next step. Is it sys admin (or Zeus help you Dev Ops)? Is it some kind of database work?

The hard truth is development pays pretty well or at least better than average. Finding something similar at middle age is a challenge.

So, try those two places.

I did feel like I was the target for extreme age discrimination at WikiMedia Organization. All the phone interviews went great until one was a video call and the interviewer literally started laughing when he saw me and he quickly ended the call, and their HR immediately sent me a no thank you, thanks for applying email. The same thing happened at Electronic Arts about 15 years ago. They kept calling me with invites to come up to Vancouver for an interview. Three of people, when they saw me and realized that I was in my 50s, they literally started to laugh.

So, I would say to stick with quality companies and you will have better results.

So I set a timer, and started working on it, and got a simple solution working, which ran using Docker so that I could package the dependencies... (some ruby gems, the test's stock files, etc.) I included a readme that said 'simply docker build and docker run'. At the 3 hour mark, I stopped iterating and sent the github link.

The recruiter called me the next day and said that the person who looked at the code said it didn't run, when he looked at it, it was the worst code they'd ever seen, I didn't use object-oriented design and didn't unit test it.

Wut? A 3 hour script to sort some files should be properly structured OOP with unit tests, and the examiner didn't know how to run docker?

Wow, I guess I dodged a bullet there.

Thanks

It is a small comfort that these companies are mostly long gone now. I eventually found a great position at a more mature company, and am very happy with my career there.

I treat interviews as a two way street hence the word "inter" and it definitely behooves both sides to be on best behaviour.

You'd think that an industry full of analysts and theorists would have understood the game theory of interviews by now?

Earlier this year, I had an interview with a fairly serious company which shall not be named. They'd sent a mass email on LinkedIn a couple of weeks earlier, so that was my contact with them. After a chat with their in-house recruiter, they asked me to do a couple of tests, one a simple server application, one an intermediate-complexity SQL query. I'm willing to say that my SQL is competent, but it's not a focus for me, so while I got the idea, my query didn't actually work. The recruiter told me that it would be a good idea to be ready to explain why, and how I would fix it, for the technical interview. I rustled up a couple of acquaintances with better SQL than I, we worked through it, I knew what I'd done wrong and was ready to discuss it.

Technical interview came, on Zoom, and it was a car crash. There were two interviewers, one was on time, one was late - the late one was also only on audio, and it turns out mixing one audio-only interviewer with one on video was a bad idea. They mostly asked me about my background and experience for about half an hour, then ended the interview - never asked about my tests, didn't go into anything technical at all.

I didn't hear anything back, so I pinged the recruiter a week later, only for him to tell me he wasn't working there anymore, but he'd pass on a message for me. I then pinged the one other person I'd had any actual contact with at the company, the HR/admin who'd setup the Zoom call, to be told "we will not go for further process as rejected by hiring team."

I was pretty unimpressed.

What irks me is that the real ones like the people on this forum are losing to the fake ones like the bozos on that call

I have some interview horror stories bro but seriously it really boils down to basic game theory how do we get it so wrong?

But I mean wow exactly the same scenario -- hit it off with the recruiter, their engineering team is a shitshow, recruiter leaves, HR tells you suck it

Definitely not you, it's them but the injury of being rejected is added to the insult that it's a band of fools doing it.. think of it as dodging a bullet

You know in some hiphop tunes where they say they love their haters?

Think about how many bullets you've dodged on account of your haters and be grateful to them.. It's twisted but it's true

I'm trying court controversy as you might be able to tell

I've toyed with the idea of starting a blog but I suffer in that I can't write unless it's to someone.. Whenever I try writing for writing's sake it simply dries up I can't explain it

Do you feel like having a virtual cup of coffee or tea one of these days? I'd be very interested to learn your story and compare battle scars so to speak

I'm actually trying to write a book that captures the entire human condition with respect to corporacy and software professionalism but so far all I really have is a cover page

To be completely honest, I've been brought on interviews myself for this reason... in a sea of fucking business guys, I ended up being the person from engineering they wanted on the interviews.

There are are deep sociological undercurrents to all this behaviour but people who ought to know better are too busy denying the evidence

Wow. I have a hard time imagining being an interviewer and literally laughing at the face of a candidate before he even said anything. Unless he's dressed as a clown or something...

The FAANG gang will never see your resume or application as their automated screeners will silently reject you. Startups will advise you that you cannot possibly understand the complexity of the problem space they are solving because no one in the history of the industry has ever tried building complex software, which is why they are writing their own version of make in two week sprints.

I wish I had better advice but after seven years of trying I’ve moved on and out of the industry.

I'm an interviewer at a FAANG company. I've interviewed plenty of candidates who were over 30, over 40, and never once seen anyone rejected based on age. I've worked with guys hired in their 40s, generally very solid devs.

The key thing I have seen is that if you've been in the industry for 20+ years, we expect you to be at a senior level. If decades of experience doesn't make you any better than a college grad, what have you been doing for 20 years?

I'd love to have a senior dev with 20 years experience join my team.

That pretty much confirms what the OP said.

> The law prohibits discrimination [against people over 40] in any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.

http://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination

I think a lot of hiring companies over-index on "what's the candidate's current job title/function" as an indication of potential.

TBH, I don't even know what my official title is. I'd have to look it up in the HR system. And I've been in pretty much the same boat my whole (pretty long) career.

My current job made up some external title for me when I got hired but it didn't actually really parse and was too long so I've just gone through a few iterations that I've basically made up myself for external consumption.

I met a local recruiter for lunch on Monday, he sent my resume to the company Tuesday, I had a phone screen Wednesday in person and offer Thursday.

I was no special snowflake. Just a regular 37 year old Enterprise C# developer.

True on paper I had 15 years of experience. But in reality, I had been an “expert beginner” in 2008.

That wasn’t a fluke. Everytime since then the company I usually ended up working for was one that I was introduced to during the first week of looking.

If someone has spent 20 years working at a trade, and is indistinguishable from a fresh graduate, is this 'ageism'?

It's rather that, if you spent the last 20 years building CRUD apps (some even made ppl money and were successful!) and some kid also built a CRUD app, you're fucked, because as you get older you're expected to be some kind of brilliant outlier -- afterall, what have you been doing for the last 20 years?!

This is what ageism really is, and it sucks because you can easily spend/waste a decade on some project/startup that goes nowhere, or worse still, some tech stack that's now defunct or deemed archaic.

This is why I like to joke that I'm a Senior Flash Developer with over 20 years experience, hire me please xD

If you spend 20 years doing the same work, do you have to be a 'brilliant outlier' to have insights a junior person doesn't?

edit spelling/punct.

And so, the industry is mostly populated by inexperienced people and many of its pathologies and adverse outcomes are due to this.

I'm not sure I follow your math. 5% of roles are principal jobs, but devs with 20+ years are not 100% of the talent pool. This doesn't hold up if devs with 20+ years are are 5% or less of the talent pool.

Still, given "20+ years of experience" represents all programmers of ages, say, 45-65 - or two decades worth of CS graduates - I feel that cohort far exceeds the market for principals? If you think it is smaller, maybe that's because everyone who wasn't in the top n% had to leave?

Although other commenters have pointed out that the growth of the industry counters that, that won't last forever!

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/2-out-of-3-developers-are-...

https://datausa.io/profile/soc/15113X/#about

I was on an interview loop the other day with a 30-something year old candidate. He had worked for nearly a decade in another industry, but got bored and got a CS degree in his spare time. He was applying as a new grad, and he was treated as a new grad. We hired him because he was pretty darned good- for a new grad. We hired him at a junior level, the same as any other new grad.

It's not about age it's about [growth / years of work]. It's about predicting the future of a candidate and asking if they will grow further.

Like I said, if you've spent 20 years in industry and haven't grown, what have you been doing?

Edit: A candidate who has not grown in 20 years is not equally qualified as a candidate who just graduated and can do the same things.

There's a lot of growth that can happen in 20 years that will be invisible to you in an interview loop. Things like patience, humility, perspective, compassion, ability to teach/mentor, etc. Focusing on technical ability at the junior level with leetcoding, and technical growth at the senior level, means you will filter out all but the most exceptional (or one-dimensional) senior candidates.

In your opinion, is it acceptable to have grown for the first 10 years of your career, hit a personal snag (burnout, parental healthcare, medical condition) and then reluctantly chosen to coast on your career and skills for 10 years? If this is not 'equally qualified' as a candidate who has been "only" been working for 10 years, then what are you saying about older candidates? Because this kind of stuff happens to a lot of us--and I might even be as bold to say it happens to most of us.

And as far as "predicting future growth", does this mean you wouldn't hire a 60-year-old who planned to retire in a few years? Keeping in mind that most hires leave before a few years anyway.

God I hope not- that what I've been doing, lol. But seriously though, if you've spent 10 years growing as a developer, you're probably at the level of a senior dev. Those soft skills are also interviewed for- we don't just ask technical questions.

I've been on interview loops where at the end, we've said "This person's soft skills are out of the park good, but they're technical skills lacked. Are there other roles we could consider this person for, like a project manager?" because soft skills are king. I've also been on loops where we said "This person's technical skills are out of the park, but there are too many worrying signs in our soft-skills questions to go forward".

> does this mean you wouldn't hire a 60-year-old who planned to retire in a few years

Hasn't happened to me yet. Most folks with 30+ years in the industry aren't looking for junior level dev jobs.

For that you'd have to look at their past work and their references. Neither of which were even checked during multiple interviews during my last job hunt in 2018.

Not quite - they said been in the industry for 20+ years, not 20+ years older than other candidates.

I've read that companies like Google evaluate employees in an up-or-out manner up to a certain level; before level X, if you've been a satisfactory junior engineer for Y years but have not been promoted to the next tier on schedule, your performance reviews will nonetheless begin being judged against the next tier's performance criteria and the "meets expectations" junior level work you've been doing will become unsatisfactory (even though you're still a junior engineer). You either grow according to expectations as you gain experience or you are managed out. Happy to be corrected if I've misunderstood the system.

Given that, if companies require current employees to progress in their careers to stay with the company, why should prospective new hires from outside the company with umpteen years of experience (for which they will be compensated with higher-than-new-grad pay) get a pass on that same expectation of showing growth throughout their career?

Also the old person probably has higher salary expectations.

...if you were given the opportunity.

> In a FAANG you need to be competitive.

I've worked at Google since 2006 and have done well over 250+ interviews here, competition is assureadly not a quality we select for. In fact, as an interviewer, I tend to bias against that behavior.

> If you are junior and 40+, you probably had different priorities and struggles in life, so you might not be willing to have the dedication required.

"probably" and "might not" are strong words when talking about assumptions and prejudices. What "dedication" are you talking about? The interviews FAANGs use are amongst the most gruelling in the industry -- if a candidate expresses through them that they have the skills and are interested in the job, and the corp needs it filled, it should be filled regardless of age, sex, gender, background, race, creed, or color. Full stop.

I'll also note, most of Google's upper management is 35-40 years old, if not older, and the younger managers are trending closer to 35 these days, and actually not as prevalent as they used to be.

I've managed older folks underneath me in the past -- I never had a problem with guidance or behavior. In fact, they were often the most hands off because they usually already knew what was needed next.

Actually no wait they BOTH sound like someone needs to jettison their ego.

Regardless. I refreshed all that and more. But still there always seems to be a guy somewhere in this long way that will throw the odd question (open 'the Linux programmer interface' at a random page and shoot). I mean it is very easy to find a quirky question to ask and then use my flawed or 'I don't remember this off hand (but I can damn sure find it and understand it in 5 mins if you let me) to throw me out of the window.

I've seen the same play at least 6 times (wannabe startups emulate this hiring process - if google does it then it must be correct).

OTOH dunno - perhaps I just don't cut it. Perhaps the competition has been turbocharging while I was working. Dunno.

Precisely this. That's one of the key things from our "experience" and "seniority". We've seen things, we know how to be pragmatic and learn/relearn X to finish Y and deliver value.

I'm yet to see an interview that covers this. I'm clinging to my current job because I'm not sure I can face the job market in my current age.

Other than basic filtering questions so I can see if someone is trying to fake their way through an interview, I never ask functional specifics. Even then it's usually just to make sure they at least basically know everything they claim to on their resume - if you don't claim to know JS, I'm not going to ask you about what bind() does, but if you rate yourself a 10/10 JS expert, you should probably have a good answer.

Interviews should be about your thought process and how well you can solve real world problems, not trivia about how well you've memorized an API. I don't understand why so many other interviewers (Even at companies I've worked for) ask coding "gotchas" and reject candidates because they don't remember the semantics of some obscure language feature.

Yet, if the string of interviews is too long (and it is) the probability of hitting a "reef" is really big. And it seems that either you get a unanimous "yes" or you fail.

Because they matter. Basic level complexities, algorithms, data structures, are all important for being a developer. That's why it's part of the undergraduate curriculum! You don't need to think about graphs or runtimes every day- but that one time each year or so that you do need to know it, it's critical that you do.

> open 'the Linux programmer interface' at a random page and shoot

Yeah, the heck with that interviewer. I mean, if you're interviewing for a low level systems dev job then I can see making sure the dev has some basic familiarity with important functions, but it's hard to see that making sense on a general developer interview. I hope that wasn't my company.

That one time a year when it's critical, I would want someone who is likely to engage on the rest of the team to come up with a solid solution together and spend at least a day thinking about it.

This isn't how interviews work so if you think you're selecting for that one time a year when its critical at the expense of the rest of the year, I don't think you're getting what you think you are.

For quick workarounds to deal with a critical error while allowing time to solve it properly, I think an experienced person may have an edge.

It's not about "Can the candidate solve this mission critical problem we'll spend a week on, in an hour?". It's more like "Can the candidate recognize a graph problem?". If they can't even tell that this is a graph problem, how are they going to know that today is the day we need to ask someone for help, and think about this very hard?

An example: Many times I've asked something like Word Ladder[0] to a candidate, and they can't tell that this is a shortest path problem, nor use the common tools to solve such things. Even with hinting and helping as much as I can, sometimes they just don't have those tools in their toolbox. And my job is to find out whether they do or not.

[0]https://leetcode.com/problems/word-ladder/ and no, I don't use this exact question.

The interview isn't set up that way and introduces non-natural pressures that can easily alter the way a good engineer responds to such a question.

I would think younger candidates have likely been more recently immersed in problems such as graph problems and tend to be more aware that they need to spend time training on leetcode or hackerrank in order to pass an interview but I don't know.

You could always still get lucky or be making decisions for reasons you aren't aware of.

I downvoted you because it's unreasonable to expect people to memorize something they use once a year. Learn it, understand it, then look it up again when you need it.

Interviews should reflect the experience and knowledge you expect a candidate to use on a regular basis. Asking comp sci questions they don't need to know to do their job biases your hiring process to new grads rather than experienced industry veterans.

SRE btw has come to mean "you must know everything...in order to do on-calls" but that deserves a whole post in itself.

---

I'm OK with complexities, etc. I get why they're so popular in interviews. I don't agree but I get it. They were an annoyance to review and keep in my RAM since I don't really use them in day-to-day work but I swallowed that pill.

I downvoted you because this is terrible reasoning. If you don't use knowledge on a regular basis you have no reason to remember it, and won't.

Interviews shouldn't require studying. They should test the knowledge you're expected to use on the job.

I don't spend hours every week studying comp sci in the off chance I might need it at work. If I need to do something I don't remember or never learned I look it up.

Theory matters if you're deeply involved in complex comp sci problems. If you're building simple web and mobile apps like 90% of programmers theory is irrelevant.

Again, ask interview questions directly relevant to the position.

Well, that's just like, your opinion, man.

> If you don't use knowledge on a regular basis you have no reason to remember it, and won't.

I don't expect you to remember it. I expect you to study and be ready for it in the interview.

> Interviews shouldn't require studying. They should test the knowledge you're expected to use on the job.

A significant part of a software engineer's job is studying. Take your job in the last 3 years. Could you have 100% predicted, 3 years ago, what knowledge you'd need? I sure couldn't.

> I don't spend hours every week studying comp sci in the off chance I might need it at work.

You don't need to do it every week, only before you interview.

> If I need to do something I don't remember or never learned I look it up.

Looking it up is definitely important but I'm talking about the basics. If you don't understand the basics and the way of thinking about algorithmic tradeoffs, you won't learn it in 10 seconds from a Stack Overflow answer.

> Theory matters if you're deeply involved in complex comp sci problems. If you're building simple web and mobile apps like 90% of programmers theory is irrelevant.

I disagree that 90% of programmers do that, or we disagree on what "simple" means. I can guarantee you less than 10% of programmers in FAANGs just build no-logic CRUD mobile/web apps.

> Again, ask interview questions directly relevant to the position.

Theory is directly relevant to the position. I use it every day.

1) Utilize leverage and numbers. Reputable 1st party company recruiters as well as hiring marketplaces like Hired[1], and TripleByte[2] and AngelList[3] could become trusty tools for you. It'll be hard to get in front of recruiters at BigCos there, so you'll also want to make sure your LinkedIn[4] is up to date. Get a premium account and actively get in touch with BigCo recruiters. Connect with them and see how many are willing to have an unstructured conversation with you about your location in your career, your goals, and the possibility of working at BigCo. I know recruiters get a bad rap, but the competent ones are worth their weight in gold and most importantly are paid to put you into the process. You want to get in front of as many companies as possible. There is very likely an upper limit on the amount of "nos" you'll have to hear before you get at least one yes. But, it takes a lot of time and energy to go through the ringer with more companies, even if it does work to your advantage. The most recent time I went through the process, there were a good 50 companies I had initial conversations with, maybe 20 were I got to the phone screen stage, 5 that I got to on-site and 2 offers. And, this time was easier than last time, which was even worse. The drop-off there was brutal, and I knew that for any given company, there was probably a 96% chance I was spending my time on something that ultimately wouldn't pan out. But I was also honing my interviewing technique and "was going to miss the shots I didn't take". Keep at it. Even with a 96% failure rate, after 50 shots, there's only a 12% chance that you don't get at least 1 offer.

2) BigCo FAANG recruiting processes reflect BigCo processes in general in that they're meant to minimize false positives, not false negatives. The upshot of this for you is that there can be a lot of luck involved with your interview. But another upshot if this is that your interview is so structured and well known that it is very doable to prepare directly for the interview -- even if you're preparing[5][6] in a way that is a little synthetic and doesn't really reflect your job experience. Try doing a mock interview with someone who works at a FAANG that covers an algorithm section and a system design section. See how well you genuinely do. Every time I'm back on the market interviewing, I'm surprised at how hard this stuff is and how much I need to ramp up my interviewing skills again. I don't expect that to ever change.

2) It's normal to have interviews completely tank because of bad luck. Sometimes this can happen across every BigCo you apply to. It happens. It took several years and stages of being on the market for me to finally end up at one after wanting to be there for a while. Don't give up.

3) Behavioral interview performance becomes increasingly important. One technique I used was to put all of my major projects I did on a spreadsheet, left to right over time, and then figure out the company values and add snippets top to bottom for the relevant projects about the ways that project reflected a specific company value. This sounds corny and artificial, but it made it much easier for me to give prepared, pointed, real examples of my proven ability to add value to the company.

4) Startup interviews are more freeform than big company interviews for better and worse. At worst, you'll have the worst part of BigCo interviews with none of the competence. At best, you'll have a process that feels thoroughly modernized and personalized -- you'll probably work through some kind of a problem or collaborative design exercise together with one of the few engineers at the company (or the CTO), and based on how well you gel, you get hired. You'll be as much interviewing them for whether you want to work with them as vice versa. Or, you'll be hired to consult and if that goes well they'll want to bring you on full time. These kinds of gigs can be great because you are likely to be the most quality, experienced talent that they can get access to by a long shot, and the door is open for you to take a leadership role here. From that role, the door is open for you to take on a leadership role at a BigCo if that's what you want long term. BigCos love hiring talent that has been proven by the crucible of success at startups that they otherwise would have passed on when that talent wasn't necessarily "proven" to that level yet. You can probably guess why.

5) Consulting is a great play for those who are very experienced. You can sell your experience and not your fungible labor. But it does take the development of sales and positioning skills. I've never had success here but I've seen friends who have. My take? The pattern I see with friends who are successful on this route is they don't do it alone. They take on opportunities with other folks they've worked well with in the past. Companies love this because they thoroughly cut out an organizational integration risk, which is of putting together two otherwise productive individuals that clash destructively rather than coordinate.

Let me be the first to say please don't undersell yourself. Having been a hiring manager at a seed stage startup before my current role, I absolutely would have jumped on any candidates that fit your profile. In fact, I tried to, multiple times, and saw my firm passed over for a competing offer from another firm.

[1]https://hired.com/

[2]https://triplebyte.com/

[3]https://angel.co/

[4]https://www.linkedin.com/

[5]http://www.crackingthecodinginterview.com/

[6]https://www.rooftopslushie.com/

Ref this classic: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...

After 20 years you may go in circles - most places don’t offer Alan Kay style work, so you process invoices for company A and create api integrations for company B etc. You always learn but I don’t think it’s an exponential rise for most. Can it be?

In other companies that's not always the norm. I worked in companies with senior folks in their late 20 / early 30s while a few 50+ developers were software engineers (not senior).

> No one will interview someone young to a senior position and vice versa.

Actually grad tech roles pay 200k and lots of senior people would like that. If you think that "No one will interview" someone like that you're right and that is blatant age discrimination.

For most of the developers, it's not a video game where you just level up. It involves working on projects small and large. A lot of time doing business analysis or some part of project management or documentation or various other things. Many of us work at small or medium sized businesses that don't have problems of scale, but rather problems of complexity.

Also maybe react or some other fad like Kafka or microservices won't come at the beginning, but at a later stage of interviews, even for a junior position, if you have 10+ years experience, I bet you'll be expected to know those things, otherwise "what have you been doing for 10 years?" Solving actual business problems and not inventing things to do so I can put them on my resume, thanks.

An industry mentor of mine who runs a R&D for a large, and successful software/hardware business unit once explained their approach to building teams in a really interesting manner to me. They explained that they wanted to have experienced folks on the team, so that they didn't re-learn lessons that the team should already have learnt, and instilled the culture and best practices of good developers -- but they wanted junior engineers on the team to drive a healthy disregard for what was asserted to be impossible, or written off as folly based on prior experiences. Their experience was that this balance helped grow great engineers from the junior folks, whilst keeping the senior folks on their toes -- seeing that their bias against an idea wasn't always the right thing.

Something that stuck with me from this conversation: We naturally become more conservative in terms of what we view as possible as we become more experienced -- after all, we tried X before, and it really didn't work out -- let's not waste our time doing X again...!

I interviewed 10s of candidates at a FAANG last year. A significant number of them were older than me. A non-trivial proportion of those were interviewing for positions that were more junior to me. Of those folks we hired a good number of them. If you see age-bias in the interviewing process, it's already a red-flag as to the team not clearly understanding how to make the best of the pool of engineers that they can potentially hire, and I'd avoid them for that reason.

I'd also love to hire experienced folks into my team. A great thing about the FAANG that I'm at, is that we're explicitly empowered in the hiring process - and hiring managers really _have_ to care about what interviewers think. I would encourage not writing this class of company off as being only youth-focused. :-)

My understanding is that you probably won't get the job

I doubt there is any such person. Even fairly crappy programmers with 20 years of experience have seen a lot, both technical and otherwise, and occasionally it makes a big difference.

It helps to have people on your team that can hear the faint hoofsteps of impending disaster.

Am I in the Twilight Zone?

At a certain point, I just realized that no one seemed to want me anymore. I mean, I helped take three companies, with multiple complex software systems, to acquisitions. But, you know, that just doesn’t matter. At 39, I was hammered with job offers. But, now, I just get endless interviews.

Luckily, I saved a lot. So, I’m able to do something new. But, a lot of my colleagues are on a sad and downward path. I really hope you youngsters are saving.

Some of the best "mentoring" I ever got as a young software developer was about saving and investing money. I was pretty late coming around, but at least I did.

I try to get younger developers to understand this; few care. It's probably the same percentage as when I was their age.

Firstly, congrats on that accomplishment. Curious why you arent specifically looking for companies who need this very valuable experience (or are you?) If I had a company in this stage, i'd want to specifically find experience such as yours.