What Happens to Older Developers?

I don&#x27;t get it. This guy&#x27;s resume says he&#x27;s a double major of math&#x2F;CS from Berkeley with high honors -- and apparently he&#x27;s worked on pretty hardcore engineering projects.<p><pre><code> I&#x27;ve created a Linux distro of my own. Original and not a fork. See articles on website. Geared towards CLI engineers. Patched and built about 1,800 packages myself. Supported and customized standard distros as well. Double Bachelors in Math and Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley. High Honors and Honors. Worked with Open Source since the 1980s. Led small teams in startup and similar environments. Considered to be good at writing and analysis of problems. Experience includes: Agile, Assembly, Back-End, BSD, C, CSS, Debian, FOSS, GIMP, HTTP, Java, Linux, Mathematics, Mint, MySQL, Octave (similar to Matlab), Open Source, Parser, Perl, PHP5, Python, Recruiting, Regex, Shell, SQLite3, Support, TCP&#x2F;IP, Ubuntu, UNIX, Tcl&#x2F;Tk, Teaching, Training, Transcoding, VPS, Writing, XML, XSLT </code></pre> What is wrong with Silicon Valley today that a person like him can&#x27;t get a reliable job, and therefore is unable to live with medical healthcare, a reasonable place of residence, etc.?<p>edit: on the bright side, now that this post is on HN frontpage, I hope someone seeks this guy out and gives him a job. From what I can grasp, the quality of his code is pretty damn good.

His problem isn&#x27;t his age, it&#x27;s his resume.<p>Here are the reasons I would circular file this resume<p>1) Fix your website. Leading (or including at all) the story about your family squabble makes me think you&#x27;re a nutter.<p>2) Overview section is useless. I don&#x27;t care about your Linux distro: I care about how your skills help my company. In the modern world, that means you should talk about the server code you&#x27;ve built, or the clients (web or native) you&#x27;ve developed. If you&#x27;re truly a generalist, you&#x27;ve done these things.<p>3) Pare down experience&#x2F;key points. I don&#x27;t care if you used DOS or AIX. Only list things that matter now, and only list things you know well. When I see lists this long, I assume you&#x27;ve just written every keyword you can think of. Also, get rid of nontechnical crap. I know you can write, I&#x27;m reading something you wrote.<p>4) No one measures code in pages, which makes me think you have no idea what you&#x27;re talking about.<p>5) Give me more information about what you did at more jobs. I don&#x27;t care about what the product did, I care about what you contributed. For example, the Grumman job has a lot of fluff. I hate fluff. Distill it down to what you really did: &quot;wrote a Perl simulator of the CRM-114 for automated testing&quot; would be much more interesting then the paragraph you&#x27;ve written.<p>Fix up your resume, and cleanup or hide your web presence, and you&#x27;ll have a better chance.

You seem to say two contradictory things -- first, that you&#x27;re getting a lot of &quot;algorithms&quot; interviews, and second, that being a &quot;generalist&quot; is hurting you. It seems to me that you&#x27;re getting a lot of generalist interviews, but they&#x27;re asking questions you&#x27;re not prepared for.<p>As a female coder in her late 40&#x27;s working at &lt;Big Famous Software Company&gt;, my advice to you is -- please, please pick up your algorithms book, and just study! I just helped a guy aged <i>60</i> ace the famously difficult interview at my company -- he&#x27;s now working as a dev there. Basically, my role was to relentlessly tell him to study algorithms, and write code on a white board. Algorithms do NOT discriminate by age.<p>It seems to me that your biggest problem is that you want these guys to take all your experience into account, and they just want to know if you can code and do algorithms. There is <i>no reason</i> older coders can&#x27;t do algorithms -- just study!<p>When I got the job at &lt;my big company&gt;, in my early 40&#x27;s, I took three months off and pounded CLRS, even read a bit of Knuth on hash tables, and wrote code on white boards. These interviewers don&#x27;t <i>want</i> to discriminate -- they&#x27;re going to be old, too! You just need to give them what they are looking for. And you can do it!

This was after I was reading on HN last week about 12 year olds freelancing.<p>Bottom line, you have to learn how to hustle. You find a way, or you don&#x27;t.<p>If you can&#x27;t get employment as developer, then create your own job. Or don&#x27;t.<p>As a freelancer, nobody knows my age. They don&#x27;t ask. I work from the Philippines, but as long as I&#x27;m reasonably available, people don&#x27;t care. I have friends doing the same thing who aren&#x27;t nearly as technical or knowledgeable as I am making a good living in the most expensive cities in the world.<p>Reid Hoffman is co-author of a book called &quot;The Start-up of You.&quot; I haven&#x27;t read the book, but the title says it all. You have to treat yourself as a start-up and put in the same sorts of blood, sweat and tears that you read about other people doing here. Maybe you have a job that you can coast in and have work-life balance. Maybe you are nearly on the street and one notch above being completely fu<i></i>ed. If you are the latter, then you probably need to be doing some serious disaster mode action. Really, what else do you have to do? Being a transient gives you a lot of time to think, but that gets old.<p>But it&#x27;s all about people, really. A developer who is just okay at dealing with computers but great at selling to people is probably in a better position than someone who is the opposite.

I have spent half of my career around developers in their 50&#x27;s. It&#x27;s true that in a lot of cases the work becomes less exciting. Of those who don&#x27;t exit into management, many become &quot;solutions architects&quot; (i.e. the technical guy who tags along with the sales guy, and makes bad promises that some other developers have to deliver on later). Others tie their career to particular vendor products... and spend their older years tweaking Oracle Financials, SAP, WebSphere Commerce, etc.<p>However, there are also plenty who have kept their skills current along the way, and wind up coding on cool projects well into their 60&#x27;s. They generally work for large companies rather than start-ups, and that entire world is a blind spot for most people on HN.<p>I&#x27;m going to go way out on a limb and assume that the original poster&#x27;s REAL problems are:<p>* His resume looks terrible. It&#x27;s a one-page bucket of random meaningless buzzwords (e.g. skills include &quot;open source&quot;, &quot;parser&quot;, &quot;VPS&quot;... wtf?!?). He puts more energy into highlighting his age than he does his relevant skills. If he wasn&#x27;t constantly reminding me that he&#x27;s near-60, I would assume at first glance that this was a junior-level recent grad&#x27;s resume.<p>* His email, website, GitHub account, etc are build around his &quot;brand name&quot; of &quot;OldCoder&quot;. That&#x27;s a pretty horrible brand.<p>* He&#x27;s blogging from the domain name &quot;christfollower.me&quot;. Nothing against anyone&#x27;s religion... but politics, religion, etc do not mix with professional career-related writing. Even if it is religion or politics that match my own, it&#x27;s still a turn-off to see someone wearing it on their sleeve during the recruiting&#x2F;interviewing process.<p>Nationwide, the United States has a NEGATIVE unemployment rate for computer programmers. Almost every large company is filled with middle-age and older developers. I&#x27;m not saying that ageism doesn&#x27;t exist, but if you are a &quot;near homeless&quot; computer programmer then you are doing something very wrong. You might have a bad resume, or be a bad interviewee. You might live in a small market, and be unwilling to move to where the jobs actually are. Your salary expectations may be out of whack with your current market value, and you&#x27;re not willing to hear that. Etc.

So the author of this post had a restraining order filed against him by his parents. He hired a lawyer. He later accuses the lawyer of colluding with his parent&#x27;s lawyers, but he hopes that his former lawyer won&#x27;t take that accusation of professional misconduct too hard, since the author is only making the accusation to further his goal of writing some kind of book, which his former lawyer approved of. <a href="http://christfollower.me/topics/legal/130430_declaration.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;christfollower.me&#x2F;topics&#x2F;legal&#x2F;130430_declaration.htm...</a><p>To sum up, if the author is having a lot of trouble finding work, I think he may want to look at the copious amount of documentation he has posted online, much of it explicitly claiming that he is suffering from profound mental illness.<p>Quote:<p><pre><code> It seemed possible that my attorney John Perrott was colluding with Opposing Counsel Michael Bonetto. It was clear regardless that John wasn&#x27;t focused on my interests. He&#x27;d missed deadlines for filing paperwork and had told me things that weren&#x27;t true. Note: No offense towards John is intended here despite the implications. It&#x27;s my hope John remembers I&#x27;m working towards goals that he approves of. I&#x27;ve tried to do what&#x27;s right from the start. This isn&#x27;t a claim that most of the people involved in this situation can make.</code></pre>

&gt;&gt;5.If you lose your job and your assets, you&#x27;ll lose medical care too and the issues may become serious.<p>I hate every system which allows that to happen to people. It&#x27;s disgusting that there are societies which allow it and can&#x27;t see how this is the first thing that should be changed, pronto.

You say hiring is weighted against older generalists, but in your resume you call yourself a generalist on the second line and call yourself OldCoder everywhere. Maybe you aren&#x27;t doing yourself any favors?<p>The best job hunting advice I ever read was from Nick Corcodilos&#x27; book Ask the Headhunter: Reinventing the Interview to Win the Job. The takeaway is that companies are trying to make money, and if you can demonstrate how you&#x27;ll contribute to the bottom line, they&#x27;ll have no choice to hire you. If the interview or recruiting process isn&#x27;t giving you a chance to demonstrate that, then you need to restructure the interaction.<p>(Oldish coder.)

Oh boy, I&#x27;m often reminded of how lucky I am, being born in a Scandinavian country. I&#x27;m basically set for life; there&#x27;s simply a comfortable lower bound on how bad things can get. I am just so completely unfairly privileged that I sometimes feel guilty about it.

A few of &quot;Silicon Valley stories&quot; that showed up lately (this one, the one about jobless Satoshi Nakamoto, the one about sexism and harassment in GitHub, or about Google&#x2F;Apple wages conspiracy, or falling FX studios in Hollywood) got me wondering: why developers put so much faith into libertarianism, free market, and a good will of corporations and their HR departments; and&#x2F;or are so strongly against state social protection, labor unions, etc. - basically all that uncool &quot;heavy industry&quot; stuff that could help in these and many other cases?<p>Are there any labor unions in Silicon Valley? I know about one in Apple, but it is (was?) formed mainly by the folks working at Apple retail stores, not the devs.

In <a href="http://christfollower.me/#D140311GUIDO" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;christfollower.me&#x2F;#D140311GUIDO</a>, OldCoder says, &quot;I&#x27;m shy about talking to new people. I&#x27;m autistic and, actually, not high functioning. I communicate decisively when it&#x27;s necessary, ...&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t know much about autism, but if it tends to affect careers, it may be a relevant difference between OldCoder&#x27;s career and that of a typical programmer.<p>Please note that I&#x27;m not making any judgements or claims here -- I&#x27;m too uneducated on these topics to do that -- I&#x27;m just pointing out a conceivably-relevant factor.

I don&#x27;t want to pass judgment here, but browsing through the christfollower.me site suggests to me that OldCoder wears his internet heart on his internet sleeve.<p>Long ago, when I was a hiring manager, we routinely searched for online presences of candidates and I would guess this ultra-common practice still today. As a result, we turned up some fairly odd material on a number of candidates and as a result we declined them.<p>Whether that is right or wrong you can&#x27;t expect people NOT to make judgements based on information that they may find about you online. Indeed the recruitment process is difficult because there are a lot of candidates and only a limited amount of information on each of them.<p>My advice would be take the site offline during the hiring process. This might concentrate the hirer on the resume rather than the ancillary information.

I&#x27;m about as old and I&#x27;ve lived in the bay area all my life. I&#x27;ve seen the popularity of things on his resume rise and fall. I&#x27;m not on any social network and my bank account has never exceeded five figures. I could be this guy. Maybe I will be in a few years.<p>But even though he probably has plenty of skills that could be useful I doubt I&#x27;d seriously consider this guy at my present employer. Why? Because his whole signal to noise ratio is way too low. He&#x27;s got a ton of red flags and &quot;resume smells&quot;:<p><pre><code> * Freelancer for 11 years * No mention of employers or marketable projects in last 5 years. * Laundry list of antiquated technologies (some listed multiple times) * Lots of irrelevent stuff (reasons for leaving, college honors from distant past) * Random WTFs thrown in for good measure (oldcoder.org? christfollower.me?) * No clear mention of goal, purpose, motivation or passion. * Comments showing pride about being a &quot;generalist&quot; </code></pre> You never get a second chance to make a first impression and unless you&#x27;re introduced by a trusted third party the impression your resume makes will be the first. Each and every word should help a potential employer want to talk with you. Your content should be informative and relevent. Writing it may not be easy but remember what is written without effort is, in general, read without pleasure.

Dump all the references to your age on your resume. Starting your resume with a first sentence as &#x27;SW developer from the 1970s&#x27; ensures regular deletion. You seem a little oblivious that you live in a world that discriminates older developers.<p>Don&#x27;t mean to be harsh but I can definitely see why your having a hard time. I think it sucks not to be able to get a job in something you obviously have a lot of ability in

I don&#x27;t get a good feeling about this. It sounds good overall, but there are some red flags as well:<p>GIMP? Why even list that? Why would I (or anyone really) care if he likes GIMP or Photoshop? Regex? XML? What does that mean? That he knows what a regex <i>is</i> (which I&#x27;d expect anyone to know) or has he written an RE parser? XML - same thing.<p>Mint, Debian, Ubuntu - just linux distros - again - shouldn&#x27;t matter. Just put &quot;Comfortable in a UNIX environment&quot;, I&#x27;d know you meant 10-12 distress plus Free&#x2F;Open&#x2F;NetBSD, no need to list them all...or if he <i>does</i> list them, put them next to each other.<p>Back-End - ? Assembly - which kind? x86, MIPS, ARM? Parser - definitely interesting &quot;Transcoding&quot; - buzz word Writing - ummm....not a <i>good</i> skill actually, don&#x27;t put it there Recruiting...?<p>CSS&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;HTTP&#x2F;TCP&#x2F;IP - list them <i>next</i> to each other maybe?<p>Here&#x27;s what I&#x27;d do if I were him.<p>1. Drop the buzz words and irrelevant info like &quot;Writing&quot; and &quot;Transcoding&quot; 2. Don&#x27;t list every single Linux distro you&#x27;ve played with - I&#x27;ve probably used over a dozen and nobody cares as long as I don&#x27;t panic at the sight of a bash prompt 3. Group things better. Web stuff, Database stuff, language stuff, etc 4. List the things that are relevant to the company you&#x27;re applying to first. Don&#x27;t just mash them up wight the rest. They&#x27;re actually not equally important.<p>He&#x27;s probably a very smart guy. But this resume sucks. To me, it reeks of typical &quot;old coder&quot; syndrome - a guy looked up the latest 20 buzzwords and dropped them in there then lectures me on how I need to write all my business logic in PL&#x2F;SQL.<p>This wouldn&#x27;t be good for a mature, conservative company, but for Silicon Valley, which is a culture that worships 20-something Rubyists who write templating engines for fun, it&#x27;s basically career suicide.

One big problem here is that his resume looks great to technical people, but is mostly incomprehensible to non-technical people. My experience is that technical managers are more biased towards younger people than non-technical managers because that&#x27;s how they, as managers, add most value and can get credit for work done. Older, more experienced engineers are more likely to threaten their authority and less likely to fit into their vision of how development ought to be done or value their advice or mentorship.<p>On the other hand, non-technical managers, have much more of a need for experienced leads they can trust that can manage the technical aspects and offer advice so that they don&#x27;t appear clueless to the rank &amp; file and management. Non-technical managers are also unlikely to be able to have the ability to sort through resumes of inexperienced college graduates and distinguish between good programmers and bad programmers.<p>Furthermore, at most non-software companies is that the further you go in your career, the less likely that you will report to a technical manager because experienced technical people are expected to able to deliver business value directly, without having to go through a chain of technical management. All of this means the older and more experienced you get, the more your resume has to make sense to non-technical people. This is doubly true if you&#x27;re not a technical specialist that can solve difficult problems other technical people encounter.<p>As it stands, the resume looks like an extrapolation of the kind of stuff that people like to see when they hire a junior programmer out of school or otherwise young programmers. This is why a lot of people here have a visceral positive reaction. It looks good, but it&#x27;s gone too far and it&#x27;s a bit out of character. We like to see hardcore technical stuff in young people&#x27;s resumes to distinguish contenders from pretenders but people who are hiring older engineers usually don&#x27;t care about that. It&#x27;s also clear that he qualifies as a specialist in some of the things he&#x27;s done, but we don&#x27;t know what they are, because they are lost in the noise of everything he&#x27;s ever done.

Everyone has their own thing that they look for with resumes.<p>With your resume -<p>- Link to your distro&#x27;s webpage. Even if it&#x27;s just a blogspot dedicated to it.<p>- Dont&#x27; do the technology wordlist. More than 6-10 technologies and I figure you&#x27;re just spamming acronyms (fair or unfair). I consider any tech listed on a resume fair game for &quot;okay, let&#x27;s grill about it&quot;.<p>- Drop the reasons for leaving. You left, I don&#x27;t care why. Particularly if it&#x27;s a freelance job, you&#x27;re just gonna be leaving places.<p>- Your typical projects page is just not detailed enough. Nor are the positions projects. Rather than just name them, throw down a link to a github or your website where you remark on them a bit more.<p>- Your nick advertises your age. That&#x27;s a marketing diminishing move. You&#x27;re not <i>old</i>, you&#x27;re <i>experienced</i>. It&#x27;s a marketing game to get the hiring manager on the phone.<p>-----<p>I would suggest StackOverflow Careers, some good leads come out of there, and use that as a &quot;resume 2.0&quot; format.<p>I&#x27;m looking for something fairly specific in my evaluations of sw devs:<p>- What you did, in some level of detail. Key projects and technologies should be called out. Soft skills shold be called out.<p>- What was the business goal accomplished?<p>This allows me to evaluate what you&#x27;ve done in a concise fashion.<p>------<p>Fundamentally, I look for resumes that demonstrate acuity in the field. All the information I look for is geared towards demonstrating that.<p>SV has a bad rep for being ageist. I&#x27;d look into getting a job elsewhere in middle America where age has less disrespect.

Resume advice in this thread is evidence that recruitment process is totally fucked.<p>Someone gets an interview because they tweak their resume? Someone gets a job offer because they jump through certain hoops at interview?<p>It&#x27;s nonsense. There&#x27;s zero evidence to support current recruitment practices and lots to show that interviews are a lousy way to select people.<p>Google and FB and Apple and MS have lots of recruitment happening and lots of smart people to analyse the results, so I&#x27;d hope to see improvements there that trickle out over the years. Sadly, it is in their interest not to disclose better methods so their competitors continue using broken methods.<p>Note: I agree that with the current broken system it is important to learn how to tailor a CV and how to jump through interview hoops. But the system is bafflingly bad.

[Deep breath] Your resume is terrible. Not in the sense of not covering off your skills and experience, but in the sense of making you seem like you care about what I need as a hiring manager.<p>First off, it gives no sense of the importance to the business of anything you&#x27;ve done. You could produce the best-engineered code in the world, but if it&#x27;s not fit for purpose or it doesn&#x27;t help us achieve definable and verifiable goals it&#x27;s junk. You need to show that you understand that. The best way to do that is to include accomplishments like &quot;Wrote a Perl simulator that improved test throughput by X% and saved Y hours of development time.&quot; Even better are ones that include &quot;made $Z million dollars&quot;. You have to relate your achievements to the goals of the business.<p>Second, it&#x27;s got things that would make me worried about even calling you for an interview. Why do you feel the need to specify reasons for leaving positions? That makes me nervous. Why do you need to tell me that your phone handles SMS? That&#x27;s weird.<p>This feedback&#x27;s based on building and leading teams over the past decade or so. I&#x27;m younger than you though not by too much. You will probably be dealing with people of my age or younger who are going to be focused on the relevance to the company if what they do, more so than its technical sweetness. You should tailor your message accordingly. I do <i>not</i> advocate dumbing down your resume. I do recommend focusing it on relevance to the business.<p>I also recently struck out again first as a contractor and then in a purely technical (no people management) full-time role. I got some time with a career consultant which helped immensely, though they were useless when it came to actual recruitment. I&#x27;d recommend you do the same, as they could help you tailor your message to the industry.<p>(I also built a Linux distro back in the day btw (early 2000s), for an PC104-board-based embedded systems project an acquaintance of mine was working on. It&#x27;s not on my resume, because that project didn&#x27;t go anywhere, and isn&#x27;t really relevant to the kind of jobs I want now.)

I&#x27;m 62 and just got a great offer from a biotech startup two miles from my home.<p>I took a different approach from what many of the comments here recommend. Instead of weeding down my resume to recent and &quot;relevant&quot; experience, I emphasized the wide variety of projects I&#x27;ve worked on, and I listed <i>everything</i> in my LinkedIn profile, all the way back to my first programming job in 1969. I got rid of my traditional resume entirely and let the LinkedIn profile be my resume.<p>Also, I made up a new title&#x2F;tagline for myself: &quot;Low Level Full Stack Developer&quot;. At the moment, I&#x27;m the only person in the world with that particular description. :-)<p>I wanted to distinguish myself from the other common definition of &quot;full stack developer&quot;, which often seems to imply somebody who is an expert on website scalability. That&#x27;s not really my thing: I&#x27;m better at going <i>down</i> the stack into hardware and device drivers and such.<p>So I included some interesting side projects that were outside the usual web developer arena, such as PdfChip where I took a PDF datasheet for an ARM chip, connected it to a development board, and made the pinout diagram in the PDF interactive so you could see the state of the pins in the PDF, and click on pins to toggle them.<p>Then I started writing back to all the recruiters who had been pinging me, including the ones that were way off like the place that was looking for a &quot;Drupal themer&quot;. Always be nice to recruiters; you never know when you&#x27;ll need one. :-) And indeed, some of them also had more relevant opportunities.<p>And these conversations helped me in my thinking about what I was really looking for: something very different from the traditional web work I&#x27;ve been doing for several years - something more hardware oriented (and I don&#x27;t mean just computing hardware).<p>I noticed that there were a couple of local biotech companies looking for full stack developers. Wrote to one and never heard a peep back from them, not even after a couple of followups. Wrote to the other and heard back from the CEO right away. Got together with the team a couple of days later for a fairly informal interview.<p>They didn&#x27;t insult me with a coding test - they had already looked at some of my code, and the questions I&#x27;ve answered on Stack Overflow. It probably also helped that I had submitted a small but good quality pull request to one of their open source projects the day before. :-)<p>Had lunch with the CEO a few days later to work out some of the details, and they made the offer a few days after that.<p>I can&#x27;t really disagree with the advice that you should focus your resume&#x2F;LinkedIn&#x2F;whatever on recent and relevant experience, and I used the introductory section of my LinkedIn profile to highlight those things.<p>But if admitting that my first programming job was in 1969 gives people a clue that I&#x27;m old, so what? They will figure that out when they meet me! I would rather work with people who see my 45 years of experience in a wide variety of projects and think it means they can learn something from me - just as I can learn some cool new things from them.

Please allow me to preface with this: I figure your intent is not to demean the tasks of other professions, and none of what I&#x27;m saying is rhetorical.<p>That said, why not take the job of caring for the elderly relatives? Use it as a way to buy yourself some time while you become a specialist?<p>(I know a couple of people who have worked as certified nursing assistants for about ten years, among other things, scooping poop. They like excrement about as much as, I presume, most other people in existence; for them, it&#x27;s a fact of life, though, and they&#x27;re able to support their family well enough.)

The only plan I have (I&#x27;m 35 now) is to be running the show by the time this becomes an issue.<p>I&#x27;ve started contracting&#x2F;freelancing already, I&#x27;m growing my expertise in a few fairly niche (though highly useful) areas, within a few years I either want to be a highly paid independent consultant (getting there) or running a small software company I own.<p>I&#x27;ve never felt that there&#x27;s room for being an employee at most places when you&#x27;re older, and to be honest I don&#x27;t want to be one either.<p>Of course the alternative is to find a quiet corner in a corporate giant and wait out retirement...

Two points:<p>My manager will not interview any candidate who states on resume or any public profile their age, religion, or any other factor that could be considered a legally-protected basis for discrimination. This even extends sometimes to graduation dates if they are in the distant past. He simply states that even interviewing such a candidate creates the potential for lawsuits (candidates claiming they were not hired due to these factors). Right or wrong, I&#x27;m sure this is even more prevalent among HR-savvy hiring managers. Your resume and&#x2F;or public profiles mention both your age and your religion.<p>Secondly, you mention that people have disagreements about the value of generalists. While this is true, it does seem there is consensus on the fact that as the field has developed over past decades, jobs have become more specialized, and failing to cater your resume to the type of position you are seeking is a huge part of the reason you are not getting interviews. I can understand not wanting to &quot;throw away&quot; all the stuff you&#x27;ve done over the years; wanting that to be acknowledged is a very human thing, very understandable. This stuff belongs on your personal website, though, not your resume. Your resume is a targeted sales pitch, and those interested in learning more about you will be able to see the rest of the (less relevant) stuff you&#x27;ve worked on in your career on your website.

This, put simply, is likely a marketing and sales problem. Someone can have all the skills in the world and suffer unemployment if they don&#x27;t know how to package and sell them. Conversely, there are some poor developers who always have a job, because they perform well in interviews, may be popular, and know how to write a résumé.<p>You have to tailor your message to your audience to some degree. To be frank, some of the problems are likely related to ageism, and there are several ways to minimize the possibility of ageism without lying. We aren&#x27;t required to list every job in our career, nor are we required to list graduation dates. If they want to confirm a degree they will do it after having met you.<p>Job search for older engineers becomes challenging on several levels. Topics like energy and effort are a non-issue for most of the industry. Mentioning on a résumé that you were able to live off investments for a period will lead people to think that you might not &quot;want&quot; or need to work, which will also raise eyebrows.<p>For these engineers, it is all about demonstrating that they can solve your problems. If you can show that, most of the other worries will go away.<p>OldCoder, I just emailed you to offer some advice on the marketing side of things. I&#x27;m a recruiter (in NY, no clients out west) and writer on job search topics. I can&#x27;t get you a job, but I think I can help improve the packaging if you&#x27;re interested.

Ageism is rampant. There&#x27;s really no doubt about this, and it&#x27;s especially true in Silicon Valley. You can&#x27;t change your age, but you can change how you present yourself.<p>Your problem is one of marketing. You&#x27;re putting your age front and center in your entire persona. This is a huge mistake. Your resume is large and hard to sift through, and many of your listed skills don&#x27;t necessarily seem relevant anymore. This only exacerbates the problem.<p>I recommend a vast simplification to the way you present yourself online and to employers. Completely eliminate the OldCoder persona. Eliminate all drama--don&#x27;t mention family problems or reasons for leaving past jobs.<p>When applying to jobs, always produce a short resume that is custom-made for that company. This might not be necessary for a fresh college graduate, but when you have 30 years of experience built up you have to learn to present the aspects of your experience that are most relevant to the employer and nothing else.<p>Don&#x27;t concern yourself so much with finding a perfect match. You&#x27;re not really in a position right now to only consider jobs that seem perfect for you.<p>Brush up on algorithms.<p>Finally, if you are in severe financial trouble, it is plain folly to limit your search to one geographic area. Scared 18 year old kids move cross country for college. You can move for a job. From experience I can say that ageism is less prevalent outside of Silicon Valley. Companies in medium-sized cities also receive fewer resumes, which means there&#x27;s less competition, which means you have a much better chance at standing out if you learn to present yourself in a compelling way.

Interesting. Some (if not most) of the problems author describes would be a non-problem should he live in some of the more prosperous EU countries, so strictly speaking they are not linked to author&#x27;s profession.<p>Few hints he gives in the description of the interview process (&quot;you&#x27;ll be asked about algorithms&quot;, &quot;you&#x27;ll be asked why aren&#x27;t you a CTO&quot;, etc) imply that he&#x27;s interviewing for &quot;Just A Programmer&quot; positions -- is this the case? It looks like most of the difficulty in finding a job came from the disconnect between the position the author was applying for and his experience. JAP positions, even if they are advertised as &quot;senior&quot; normally require just the basic coding skills (i.e. you don&#x27;t have to be really smart, mediocre is just fine) and therefore majority of applications will be much younger than the author, thus forcing the HR to ask the questions above.<p>In a broader context of discussion about older developers, what&#x27;s more interesting for me are two things:<p>1. Why there are so few roles being advertised for truly senior developers? There are plenty of complicated commercial software around. For example, Apple works on a novel mobile operating system with its own set of technical challenges, so I would expect kernel specialists to be in demand, but those openings are rarely visible (even at apple.com&#x2F;jobs).<p>2. What do truly senior engineers employed by major companies do on a daily basis? How mere mortals like us can get closer to their expertise set? I&#x27;m talking about Guido van Rossum at Dropbox, Brian Goetz at Oracle, Michael Stonebraker (though I&#x27;m not sure he hasn&#x27;t moved to academia full-time), etc.

&quot;After the dot-com shut down, 2003, I made $1M in the stock market. Lost most of it afterwards&quot;<p>TLDR: the person in question&#x27;s advice is best ignored because he is in need of serious psychological help.<p>No I am not being sarcastic.<p>What&#x27;s wrong with this guy? A complete lack of common sense and grasp of reality. After having lost $1M and failing to find a job, rather than go broke and become transient, he could have applied to something like Trader Joe&#x27;s or Costco and worked his way back up to financial stability. There&#x27;s plenty of opportunity for skilled labor, especially skilled labor willing to learn hot skills as they emerge.<p>But don&#x27;t take my word for it, read the story of his ongoing legal travails with his family. The root cause here is psychological, not financial.

There&#x27;s age bias all the time, I&#x27;m not sure why people try to say otherwise: given the choice between hiring a twenty-something and a 50-something for a given position, and a similar skillset (especially easy to do in technology since skillsets get out dated so quick), most will hire the younger person. It&#x27;s human nature to not be influenced like this.<p>Also, what most people here need to remember, too, is that not everyone&#x27;s career path is going to put them on a trajectory to becoming CTO. The number of CTO&#x2F;executive&#x2F;engineering directors, etc. is quite small compared to the rank and file programmer positions.<p>I think someone else mentioned this, but sales people have it even rougher than software engineers.

As a CS major in college, this just does wonders for my self confidence over the long term...

&quot;You know what they do with engineers when they turn forty? ... They take them out and shoot them.&quot;<p>From Primer, I always thought that was the case

This post is confusing to me and a little scary. The linked resume is far more extensive than mine, and I often turn away inquiries for reasonably well-paid freelance web app development because I don&#x27;t have the bandwidth. What happens? There must be more to it. Why are no similar opportunities available to industry veterans? Pride? Burn out? Likely others...<p>Most of the work I do is intellectually beneath someone with 30+ years of experience in C, and below their theoretical earning potential, but if the alternative is near poverty it seems like it should be workable.

You don&#x27;t curate a resume. They need to be tailored to the position you are applying for. Blanketing won&#x27;t yield happiness or wealth. Be selective, then optimize.<p>What do you really want to do? (and are demonstrably capable of doing?) Distill that, optimize the rate for your audience to absorb it. Use the F shape, font size, spacing, etc. to provide a 10-second, 1-minute, 10-minute document. Make the reviewers&#x27; jobs easy. The gate-keepers need to see the checklist of acronyms they were told to filter on. The manager will need to see &quot;plays well with others and does productive, self-directed work.&quot; The technical manager&#x2F;senior tech interviewer will want to see a little of themselves and&#x2F;or something admirable or ambitious in you.<p>Spending another 8 hours blanketing resumes and cover sheet&#x2F;emails to every potential listing is time away from engaging in work that keeps your skills sharp and involved in a community.<p>OldCoder. Stop calling yourself old. In tech, that&#x27;s not going to sell - and you are selling. You could be a CTO and call yourself old (battle-hardened general), but it has no utility if you are out of work. Age without wisdom is old. Be wise, experienced, adept, efficient, proficient... not just old. Knowing that there is a severe ageism in software dev especially, don&#x27;t self-identify as old. It hints at rigidity, staleness, apathy.<p>Generalists likely seem to have no opinion, no passion, no fire.

If this post doesn&#x27;t work, try and find a good recruiter (they are rare but they do exist). Make a direct call and try and get a meeting. They will charge a 20% fee on the employer side which can lower the salary you could otherwise negotiate up to, but compared to the current alternatives that sounds like a near non-issue. Get them to help you with tweaking the resume for the specific roles and make direct calls to sell you for a role they are trying to fill, they generally will have more inside information than anyone here and you&#x27;ll have a far better chance than through resumes. If you get a sense the recruiter you try isn&#x27;t helping, try another one. A lot of people hate the spammy push approach of recruiters, but some of them are really great when you&#x27;re the pull service. Get advice on the best way to sell why you&#x27;re experienced talent applying for positions that don&#x27;t match the resume. If I saw this resume for a general software engineer or junior engineer position my alarm bells would go off, I&#x27;d expect someone who had those skills to be applying for senior engineers or architect. When you list those skills for a junior or intermediate programming position people assume that you&#x27;ve covered them in a course in university and not much else.

I haven&#x27;t done this in a long while, but I&#x27;ll bet you a hundred bucks that the average programming generalist can go to the nearby small town (not large one) and start knocking on business&#x27;s doors, offering to help them with any computer issues they have -- and generate enough money to live on.<p>If you can make a web page, update a computer, tweak some configuration settings, show somebody how to use their phone, or configure all that new stuff they bought last week? You&#x27;ll make money.<p>Making money is simply friends helping each other out. If you&#x27;re 55 and know a lot of stuff about computers, you should be able to help other people out. Now, you probably won&#x27;t make that million you used to be worth, but you&#x27;re not in the soup line, either.<p>It gets more difficult in large cities because it&#x27;s harder to reach business decision-makers, and there&#x27;s so much competition. But there&#x27;s no doubt in my mind that there isn&#x27;t a huge and growing need for the tech equivalent of day laborers. And we don&#x27;t have to be 25 and have a strong back.<p>Be very careful that the attitudes and prejudices you pick up as you age don&#x27;t hurt you a lot worse than your skill choices or work history.

IMHO, that experience from the 70&#x27;s has a lot of value. How to optimize, how to talk to hardware; all are forgotten skills now days. Not to mention the sheer value of remembering how things were done and why. The explosion of young, inexperienced programmers that refuse to acknowledge the triumphs and failures of the past put the profession into an infinite loop of rediscovering, re-implementing, and re-learning the lessons of the past.<p>Those 1970&#x27;s skills map directly to embedded work. They map to kernel and systems level programming. Guess what ? The same problems we had on a PDP-11 we have today. The scale is a bit different, but the fundamentals are not.<p>Can you pass the fizz buzz test ?<p>You would be amazed at the number of applicants that can talk &quot;singleton observer model view controller association class&quot; all day, and can&#x27;t do fizz buzz. Or compile hello world from the command line. Or know the difference between a compiler error and a linker error.<p>Focus on what you do best. I think you will find there is a demand for those skills.

My takeaway from this is: save. Resist the temptation to match your spending to your salary, you don&#x27;t need all that crap anyway. I hope to have enough assets by the time I&#x27;m 50 that permanent unemployment at the time will be at worst the difference between uncomfortable retirement and comfortable one - not between hungry+homeless and food+shelter.

The title should be &quot;What Happens to Older Developers Who Don&#x27;t Keep Their Skills Up To Date&quot;.<p>No offense OldCoder, but that seems to be the root of the problem, leaving the workforce doesn&#x27;t help either. I know quite a few 50+ developers who are doing fine, so I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s the &quot;old&quot; so much. This can happen in any industry.

I hate to say this, but his resume sucks. Generalize, but don&#x27;t generalize your resume.<p>Listen, if you can code in Haskell, Lisp, ML, and spit out binary code by hammering it via Hex, no one cares if all they want is a PHP or Ruby programmer.<p>Specialize your resume, if they want PHP, explain what you have done with PHP. If they want C&#x2F;C++, highlight your C&#x2F;C++ experiences, if they want a sysadmin, they don&#x27;t care about your coding skills. You can show those off in the interview, and let them know you have other skills.<p>What this means is you need to have about 5-6 different resumes targeting the jobs you are going for.<p>Drop ancient and basic things out of your resume too, I saw MSDOS, HTML, CSS, GIMP, HTTP, XML, etc in his resume.<p>He has the technical skills, but not the marketing skills. He is in the business of selling himself, all those skills oversells himself and makes many companies afraid that he would want a ridiculously high salary and that they can&#x27;t afford him.

You&#x27;ve coded and done tech work for all these years and rightly earn&#x27;t your stripes. Your resume reads as if it&#x27;s like please hire me I can do much things. What it doesn&#x27;t say is what you really are seeking and who you are as a member of their team.<p>My suggestions - Include a paragraph summarising your philosophy to programming and the way your approach achieves success. - Say outright what makes your ideal client. I would be worried in hiring this guy, that he&#x27;s too advanced for what we need and too experienced for my little project. - Add more narrative at the top and tell a story. Sure you&#x27;ve done many things and are a generalist, but why hire you, boil down all this info into what it means I&#x27;ll get from you. Words like these make good headings. Who I am My approach What Im committed to<p>Boil down the essence of all this experience is my recommendation.

This all is true, but it&#x27;s actually a lot worse for non-developers. Sales, most middle management jobs, generally MBA&#x27;s are utterly worthless after 50 and no-one would hire them even if they have skills (they apparently didn&#x27;t prove them otherwise they would be big successes before). And that&#x27;s only talking about people who work with their brain; working with your hands is worse than that even.<p>I think the most important thing to do; if you have a job make sure you keep it after 50; don&#x27;t toy around or give anyone reasons to drop you. And make sure you have a <i>huge</i> network; make sure different people ask you for advise or ask you to work for them at least a few times per year.<p>Besides that there is not much you can do if you are not outwardly hugely successful at what you do; if you are a dev, that means specialize, write books and get them published about what you specialized in, create workshops and seminars, even next to your job but especially at your job.<p>I must say that it became slightly easier though for people who are willing to reinvent themselves a bit; besides making sure that you have medical private insurance just <i>always</i> (and yes, you can afford that when you are young; make sure you keep it going even if your job provides insurance as well; and when you are young you feel invincible until you get something which could&#x27;ve disabled&#x2F;kill you; after that, if you didn&#x27;t have insurance before it, no-one will ever take you so it&#x27;s important not to think you are invincible ;), you can work remotely and then age doesn&#x27;t really count at all. I have many &#x27;older&#x27; friends who work online as coder for people they have never seen or met and they are doing fine. No they won&#x27;t get the insane amounts they were once used to, but maybe you shouldn&#x27;t get used to that wastefulness anyway; they can do what they like (which happens to be coding) until they die basically and make enough money to pay for health insurance etc. Most of them are 60-somethings who make enough that way to lead a really good life.

Lately, there have been intersting HN posts on the roles for non technical folks - what about mentoring coders at startups? Is there space for this? Would it be generally unwelcome?<p>Sorry for the US football reference here but one of my favorite players from the Giants - Justin Tuck was recruited by the Raiders. He still has plenty of skill to play the position but is probably not going to be as dominant a player as he was. (All the younger defensive tackles are using Ruby, node.js and Clojure ). But he has been to a few Superbowls and knows how it is done so can mentor younger players and contribute on the field at the same time...<p>Thus his services are more valuable to the Oakland Raiders (with a younger developing team) as compared to the Giants which is a veteran team...

Just a thought to the author of the OP (OldCoder): perhaps tone down the very public ordeal that is happening with your family<p>I mean no disrespect or to suggest that victims should hide their past or not confront their offenders.<p>But some of the top results that come up when I search your name is your various websites. On these, on the top of all the pages I have seen, is a large disclaimer box discussing your lawsuits&#x2F;situation. Your intense feelings about your family shows through quite clearly. Anyone doing even the slightly due diligence on a prospective employee would find this.<p>As a human being I feel for you. As a potential employer, I would take one look at that and say &quot;I&#x27;m not going to bring that level of drama into my company.&quot;

It&#x27;s basically fear of this that finally drove me to management, and improving the skills that being a good manager requires. They&#x27;re actually many of the same skills as being a good programmer -- communication and organization being two that immediately come to mind -- but they&#x27;re applied differently, and there are other things around leadership and change management that I&#x27;ve had to learn from scratch, more or less. Not that management is the panacea and everything will be all right from here on out -- I&#x27;ll still have to hustle my ass off -- but I think I have a longer runway than I would otherwise.

The resume is good (experience is amazing). It is LaTeX, no?<p>With older coders I recommend familiarity with github and LinkedIN - check and check.<p>I might separate out blogs. Create a landing spot just for the resume. The related blog entries are personal and don&#x27;t tell a story about work and coding.<p>I think some greater detail on &quot;teaching coding on IRC&quot; would help. Also - things like Hackerrank to get some visibility. Mentoring younger coders adds value...<p>This guy looks very employable -

Saying you haven&#x27;t looked at algorithms for 30 years is an excuse. Like it or not interviewers will down time on the classic CS algorithms and data structures. The things they ask have not changed that much since the 70s. For anyone interviewing I highly recommend taking a refresher course such as Princeton&#x27;s algorithms on Coursera. At least if you are applying at the larger tech companies.

One thing to understand is that developers today must actively invest in order to retire. Saving money isn&#x27;t enough.<p>Yes, investing comes with risk (as the author&#x27;s experience illustrates), but over time a diversified portfolio far exceeds money sitting in the bank.

They never die. They just byte the dust. (Heard this from another older developer long ago)

They&#x27;re going to lie to you and claim the job is all about (insert list of acronyms) and they need an experienced rock star.<p>You need to lie right back, that you&#x27;re an experienced rock star in the field of (insert list of acronyms).<p>There are laws about filtering applicants based on IQ tests and reading comprehension tests and the like. This whole system is a stealth end-around to give applicants an IQ test along with a reading comprehension and writing test. Can you tune your resume to match our advertisement? No, then bye bye. If yes, well, lets talk.<p>Then later in the process when at the interview, they provide another stealth intelligence test when its assumed you&#x27;ll know the list of requirements is made up and out of date and you should at the interview express deep knowledge of &quot;scripting language of the month&quot; and the like. To prove you&#x27;re in touch with the actual job requirements.<p>There are other stealth intelligence tests, like crud app developers and web graphics artist types being dragged thru the wringer about the intimate details of b-tree data structures and sorting algos. Its an intelligence test that has nothing (usually) to do with the job unless they have a horrific NIH mismanagement problem.<p>There&#x27;s nothing immoral or unethical about stretching the truth because they only care about the intelligence test aspect anyway, and the &quot;list of acronyms&quot; changes constantly including the time interval between publishing the advertisement and when they talk to you, and of course on the job you&#x27;ll be expected to learn anything new instantly.<p>Just make sure to add an excuse to your list of skills like &quot;also other job related skills&quot; (BTW this is in itself part of the intelligence test). Or at least have a great interview response along the lines of why that wasn&#x27;t included on the resume and maybe you&#x27;re leaving things off your resume like felony convictions or something.<p>Also know that once you get past the first couple gatekeepers, your competition is people with skills who only have to lie a little, and really excellent skilled liars. So your honesty level should increase over time thru the process. Again this is yet another intelligence test aspect of the process. If you said &quot;duh&quot; WRT the above, you&#x27;re a good candidate, if not, well, maybe not a &quot;good fit&quot; or whatever.<p>You do need an actual list of your skills for private use only. That&#x27;s probably what the OP posted. Never give that full list to a HR rep or a computerized keyword scanner.

Jobs are for those cheaters who practices interview questions everyday while sending out resumes everywhere at work. If you are actually making worthy stuff at work, you might as well try to create yourself a job.

Late fourties , started off as Unix C developer&#x2F;sysadmin for a big retailer until they replaced most of their systems with SAP or outsourcing.<p>Still coding at same company but in ABAP (SAP dev lang).

At what stage do you fail? Do you have issues getting interviews?

How can someone go from $1M net worth to transient in a decade? Seems like it would be difficult to do that without some level of financial mismanagement.

This guy has to learn how to sell himself a little better. &quot;Old Coder&quot; and &quot;70s&quot; should not be the first two things on a resume.

Agree with the comments about having a resume that doesn&#x27;t summarise your skills but instead shows why they would be useful in that role.

&quot;There are few job listings that say “a bit of everything”.&quot;<p>And yet... they all seem to require it.

They get sick of working for some douche and go start their own company. Example: me.

foreword: this is not a statement of political or moral judgment. Just musings.<p>Part of the parcel of a dynamic competition based job market is that people get as much as possible of the total that others are willing to pay for their work. At present this means rapidly improving wages for certain categories of tech jobs where employees are scarce.<p>There are lots of ways this can go right or wrong. Here is a middle of the road story:<p>A family member of mine was a programmer in the mid 80s. By the 90s he had moved into management in a big enterprise software company. By mid 00s he was managing very big clients&#x2F;projects that were billing for big software and thousands of engineering hours. The last time he had really programmed for a living, it was in COBOL and even then the tech was dated and very specialized.<p>At some point the clients he was working on went onto a different model handled by a different division of the company in a different country. He was offered a relocation, but it did not appeal. He had kids in high school, etc. About 50 years old.<p>He had made good money for years but not rockstar money. He owned a valuable house and had savings and investments so he could last a year or two unemployed. His first next job was at a startup-like thing that petered out. Then a long period trying to make his way freelancing and applying for jobs paying far less than his last. Now he runs a business. I still imagine it&#x27;s far from his peek salary, but it&#x27;s definitely not a bad income by general standards. It can just be tricky adjusting especially if you had to use savings to bridge for a few years.<p>There are all sorts of ways of looking at this. For me the lesson I got from it is that we have a strange assumption: <i>your salary will go up over time and peek near retirement</i>. Realistically one person might earn more in total by the age of 45 than his neighbor earns by 65, even in after tax earnings. I imaging you can find those neighbors in almost any street.<p>The richer neighbor could theoretically retire at 45 at the same retirement income the other would have at 65. On paper it might be easier even though the richer younger neighbor has longer to live of his retirement savings. He also had 20 year to spend out of his lifetime earnings so there would be more in the piggy bank if they lived the same lifestyle. At 45 it&#x27;s a lot easier to supplement your retirement income and medical expenses are lower. Obviously this rarely happens.<p>Wealth is in a very real way relative to standards you consider normal. Part of that normality standard is an expectation for rising income throughout your life.

Not a good idea to define yourself as Old Coder.

I would suggest rewriting your resume. It is very verbose on the Where You&#x27;ve Showed Up and very sparse on What You&#x27;ve Accomplished. After reading it closely, I am still at a loss for what you actually do.<p>You can find a starving English student easily that will pick your resume apart for you for very few dollars.<p>But that&#x27;s secondary to a more important issue: we are entering a post-resume economy. Most people in the hiring mechanism view the resume as having very marginal utility. I don&#x27;t know what will replace it, but I do know that the current tactic of doubling-down on recruiters with gigantic databases ripped off from LinkedIn profiles isn&#x27;t cutting the mustard.<p>No, it&#x27;s not very equitable, but you have probably already noticed that life isn&#x27;t fair. I keep holding out hope that some enterprising individual will recognize the absurdity of the situation and destroy all competitors when he or she realizes there is a huge, untapped market of the women, minorities, and &quot;seasoned&quot; developers that Silicon Valley just won&#x27;t touch.<p>I&#x27;d do it myself, but I don&#x27;t have the funding yet. The last 3 people I hired to do work, I never once looked at their resumes. One was a stranger on Freelancer.com, where I was essentially rolling the dice on certain prejudices of mine for a weekend chore of a project I didn&#x27;t want to do myself, and the other two were friends. And even that wasn&#x27;t perfect, the one friend I had actually worked with before did a sloppy job (I was quite happily surprised by the Freelancer.com person). Unfortunately, my budget got cut and I had to let them go. Fortunately, they weren&#x27;t full-time yet.<p>In my own career, I&#x27;ve gotten very few jobs from my own applications to the positions. The only jobs I&#x27;ve gotten where I didn&#x27;t already have some kind of acquaintance give a recommendation were setup by recruiters, and I eventually learned to hate those jobs. Perhaps there is something to be said about not being able to fulfill your hiring requirements through recommendations of your current employees being indicative of the quality of the company overall.<p>Even the one job I liked, that I thought I was going in completely blind on, turned out to have one of my college friends and project mates already working there. He had told my interviewer he knew me and I was the best coder he had ever met. I showed up 2 days later and ran into him in the hall.<p>So the it seems the only way to get a job anymore is to build a network. Go hang out at Linux User Groups and talk about your distro. Go to meetups and conferences, and hang out with people at the bars afterwards (drink ginger ale if you have to). If you look more like Steve Wozniak, change up your wardrobe to look more like Paul Graham. Those are the sorts of places to say the things you&#x27;ve said on your resume. And just keep an ear open. Get a reputation for being a helpful, friendly, delightful person, even if you&#x27;re just connecting two other people who can help each other and it doesn&#x27;t help you directly. Don&#x27;t be pushy, don&#x27;t hand out business cards unless you are clear they want to get into contact with you. Think of it a bit like dating: the desperate guy wreaks.<p>People love nothing more than talking about themselves and complaining about their problems. In very short order, you will meet someone who complains about a problem you can fix.<p>The third or tenth such person might actually even be able to pay you, too.

most programmer will stop at age 35 and become management level.kinda wastefull because experince can speed up deployment and debugging.

Yes, he&#x27;s terrible at writing resumes but the people tearing into that are clueless just-world wankers missing the forest for the trees.<p>Ageism is a real issue that a lot of us will face. For most, it&#x27;ll be milder than for him: a gradual loss of status after 40 due not to declining ability but the crassness of business culture. It&#x27;s not inexorable, and some of us will outrun the bear (or at least the other guy) but the average trend is negative.<p>As a person with cyclothymia (the mildest of the bipolar spectrum disorders) I would guess that he&#x27;s clinically depressed, and that&#x27;s probably hurting him more than his age. (Most of the middle age loss of &quot;fluid intelligence&quot; is undiagnosed depression. People of normal health don&#x27;t begin declining, cognitively, until about 70 and some never do.) He feels a need to justify things in his past (&quot;Reason for leaving&quot;) when he has reasonable job tenures. His writing is less than competent in organization. The self-pity is obvious. Some depression is completely endogenous and other varieties come from negative contexts (like mid-life un- or underemployment) and can be even harder to get out of. People can be assholes and it can really feel like they&#x27;re kicking you when you&#x27;re down, when in fact they&#x27;re just being morally lazy and weak (i.e. people) but not malevolent in any targeted or personal way.<p>It&#x27;s easy to take the haughty libertarian view and say, &quot;He should spend $350 and have his resume looked at by a professional.&quot; Okay, but he probably doesn&#x27;t have the money, because he doesn&#x27;t have a job. &quot;He needs professional help.&quot; Probably true (again, I think he&#x27;s clinically depressed, and who wouldn&#x27;t be as an unemployed 55-year-old programmer?) but see above. The truth is that he&#x27;s a capable person who&#x27;s been fucked over, and while most of us will not be as badly fucked over or as early in our careers, we should be angry.

As is often the case, I don&#x27;t think the difficulties in this case have much to do with age: If everything else was the same (within the possible, of course, meaning job history changes a bit), and the candidate was 26, I think most people would still reject the resume with little consideration.<p>There is ageism. There is sexism. There is racism. But there are also many cases for all of those where someone uses it as an easy explanation for any other difficulties they face, which is self-destructive because it avoids real self-reflection.

How could this engineer have prevented this? By starting his own company or a consultant? How could have moved up into the managerial position?