Ask HN: How does an old timer find contract work

Freelancer at 62 here, 40+ years programming and system admin experience. My opinions&#x2F;advice:<p>Word of mouth and professional connections work best. With your long career you must know a lot of people who run companies, or still work in the field. And they know people. Word of mouth and referrals remain the best way to get leads.<p>Freelancers should focus on <i>solving problems</i>. Employees get hired to <i>fill roles</i>. Freelancers don&#x27;t need a resume. They need demonstrated expertise that they can apply immediately to solving business problems. My approach comes down to getting the (potential) customer to list and describe their top five or ten pain points or needs, in priority order, then knocking those out for them. If you can deliver no one cares about your age or what you did before or where you went to school 50 years ago. Working remotely also helps, because you won&#x27;t get the &quot;not a good fit with our culture&quot; excuse (i.e. &quot;too old&quot;).<p>If you mean contracting like a temp employee that usually works more like an employee arrangement -- resume, interviews, etc.<p>You can work through an agency (disclaimer: 10X Management represents me). A good agency does the marketing, contracts, legal, invoicing, payment for you (for a cut). They can expose you to opportunities you would not otherwise know about.<p>Focus on your strongest skills, don&#x27;t try to do everything. For example I concentrate on relational databases&#x2F;SQL (core ideas and techniques almost unchanged since the 1980s), Linux system admin and cloud infrastructure (old hat to anyone who grew up with Unix), and web application development. I started freelancing by finding customers who had abandoned or broken projects (plenty of those, like 60% - 90% of all software projects) and offering to fix the problems. Debugging and maintenance pay just as well or more as green-fields development.<p>I have several articles about freelancing on my web site typicalprogrammer.com. No ads, sign-ups, pop-ups, or affiliate links. Good luck.

The best method I&#x27;ve found for contractors to find work is to mine linkedin.<p>Although it&#x27;s against the linkedin terms of service (and I do not currently use it), octopus crm is a good place to look for thr framework, octopus automates it, but you can just do what octopus does, follow the same playback, manually.<p>Every day like a few people&#x27;s posts, write a glowing reference&#x2F;reccomendation for someone you&#x27;ve worked with or for on their page, endorse a few people for skills, and send out 10 personal messages to people in your field. To find those people search . Like if your into semiconductor robotics just search for that with those keywords, then filter it by people in management, then further by anything else you want to filter by (location, etc) and then connect with those people (send a friend request) and in the note just say hi, I&#x27;m X, I do X, I noticed you do to, just wanted to connect.<p>Do that for a few weeks and someone will reply back asking for your help.<p>I hope this helps, if it doesn&#x27;t ignore it and do something better.

Any old timers here in the thread, please email me at strep_makers.0p@icloud.com — I’m building a new company doing both consulting and internal product development and have always loved working with older, more experienced folks. We’re looking for tech leads, technical project managers, and anyone who has the ability to take strong ownership.<p>(FYI, that’s a burner email— I’ll reply from a different one)

&gt; I would like to find more opportunities to continue doing what I love the most.<p>Lean on face to face networking? Programming Conventions? I got my last couple jobs based on who I know, not from applying in a big &#x27;o cattle call.<p>&gt; briefly fit my 45 years experience into a resume format<p>Chop it to just the last 10 years? That&#x27;s what I did (as a green 45 yo with 20+ years experience). Then, during the interview I talked a bit more about my full experience.<p>Best of luck!

Write and speak.<p>Have an online presence in some area. Open source something related to what you want to work on.<p>Help them find you.

Others have already hit the major points about finding opportunities (networking, word of mouth basically).<p>As far compressing your resume, my suggestion would be to pick and choose the few past experiences &#x2F; accomplishments that you are most proud of or are most relevant to the kind of opportunities you&#x27;re seeking. In other words, what would you actually want an interviewer to ask you about. Don&#x27;t include dates. This approach is better than trying to write a detailed accounting of your entire career, even condensing each role down to a single bullet point. I&#x27;m coming from the perspective of someone who has screened resumes of and interviewed more experienced candidates in the past. It is definitely a bit of a turnoff when you receive an 18 page resume containing an essay about every project the candidate has ever worked on.<p>Same for listing keywords &#x2F; technologies you&#x27;ve worked with -- no need to list every language you&#x27;ve worked with since 1975 (unless you&#x27;re looking for roles as a COBOL or PL&#x2F;I maintenance programmer). Focus on relevance.

You ought to check out UpWork (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.upwork.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.upwork.com&#x2F;</a>) and Fiverr (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fiverr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fiverr.com&#x2F;</a>). Treat it as a &quot;buffet&quot; of interesting work, projects, and skills. Likewise, you can hire other workers to help you with tasks, and then form your own virtual team. For example, If you&#x27;d like to build a mobile app, you could use those apps to find a graphic designer (someone skilled at Figma, in order to do design &amp; prototyping), a back-end engineer (in order to build APIs), and a product manager (manage requirements, backlog, development cadence), and a skilled mobile app developer to build it. Depending on where your interest and skill level is, you can always pair-collaborate with these people - you&#x27;ll learn a ton, feel the team vibe, and feel less &quot;behind the times&quot;, since you have now augmented yourself with experts. Most importantly, treat the team well, prioritize quality, and have fun.

There is freelance thread on HN. You could also apply to regular jobs, but make a note you are looking to work as a freelancer. Smaller companies, where engineers are the first screeners not HR&#x2F;recruiter might receptive. A &quot;burstable&quot; resource who does 20h but might do 40h occasionally when needed might be an attractive concept to many companies.

It&#x27;s hard starting out.<p>Let&#x27;s look at the opposite end of the spectrum. People that have more requests for work than they have time. This is common, especially in your field (programming).<p>So - a hack I like to suggest. Befriend one of these people! They exist on reddit, twitter, etc. Find them, they love humble bragging &quot;ah I turn down jobs all the time nbd&quot;.<p>These people are like magnets for jobs, and because of that, they are also extremely credible sources of referrals. Hey xyz! I heard you are turning down a lot of jobs because you&#x27;re too busy. Do you mind sending those my way?<p>Hope that helps.

&gt; Also, I’m unclear about how to briefly fit my 45 years experience into a resume format<p>You don&#x27;t. I have a way less experience and I still only show my last 10 years. As I said somewhere, if someone is interested in my experience in managing a (now) 15 years old specific software then <i>I is not interested</i> in them.<p>Also I&#x27;m in favour of &#x27;CV should fit on a single page&#x27;. If someone looks for talent then this is more than enough to interest them and nobody looks at the second page anyway.

I think it&#x27;s similar to what works for a lot of people regardless of age. Focus on a particular niche, learn how it works to the degree that you would be able to participate in that business, build tooling that would help you do that, let the people in that community know. The people who use you tools will ask you to make more tools.<p>To avoid ageism, focus on online communities on Twitter and Discord. They don&#x27;t even need to see your face. 99% of the time they are happy to do a text or voice chat.

Create a LinkedIn account and contact recruiters. Many of them specialize in placing contract jobs. I also notice that they have been getting really aggressive these days.

i&#x27;m currently running <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hourly.fyi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hourly.fyi</a> and aggregating some jobs here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hourly.fyi&#x2F;jobs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hourly.fyi&#x2F;jobs</a>

Talk to all the people you worked beside, below and above.<p>If they won’t turn you on to work, there’s probably a reasonable reason.<p>Working with peeps who know you and your work doesn’t require a resume.<p>And the first step for finding work is always seeking rejection - because that’s the typical outcome of a phone call - on the phone not writing a resume.<p>A resume is only needed when someone asks for one.<p>Good luck.

I don&#x27;t see a downside from signing up for sites catering to folks with lots of experience. I&#x27;m biased, but Tribe.ai is great if you&#x27;re interested in AI&#x2F;Data related projects, but there are other platforms from Braintrust to Toptal which will help match you with projects.

This is one of the several problems we’re trying to solve at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;polyfill.work" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;polyfill.work</a>

I&#x27;d like to thank everyone for the input received thus far and the future feeback to be received. It is very much appreciated and will be given very careful consideration!

I might try approaching companies &amp; services that target senior citizens. Having a developer who understands the target audience is a huge bonus.

Wow, I&#x27;m in my 30s and feel I&#x27;m too old to keep up already. Good for you.

what&#x27;s your email? you can put it in your profile. i&#x27;ll ping you about a potential part-time contract. thanks. psmithsf@gmail.com

Know that the odds are stacked against you - but be persistent and press on anyway.<p>The minority who are willing to look past your age (who will also be the better ones to work for) will pick up on your persistence and see it as a positive trait and hire signal.<p>As to the resume - there&#x27;s lots of advice out there on resume advice for older workers. Truncating &#x2F; condensing lists of older gigs is one of the standard techniques.<p>The rest of what you do is a variation of the same advice as applies to younger candidates - just that in your case it will have even more protective benefit,<p>For example - even though it may bore you a bit, be sure to both read (or carefully skim) as many modern books as you can that are relative to your field, as well as to stay up on the &quot;shiny&quot; stuff (cloud, containers, CI&#x2F;CD) even though your gut instinct will (rightly) tell you they may be overhyped or less important than knowing the core principles.<p>That is - at least know what they are, what problems they attempt to solve and what they are basically made of. This will make is substantially less easy to dismiss you as a dinosaur (inflexible &#x2F; crusty &#x2F; less nimble than younger candidates).<p>Finally: wear your age with pride. You&#x27;ve lived through times, and have seen things these people can only read about (for those who even read these days). You have a rare perspective to offer, and the better folks out there will see that and dig that aspect of you. And will be proud to have you in their corner and on their team.