I'm under the impression that the industry needs to learn to treat amateurs as amateurs regardless of their age. It feels like I'm not allowed to be an amateur professional simply because I'm over 30 years old. Instead of seeing people as "a guy with 2 years of experience" or "a woman with 4 years of experience" we see "a 40 year old guy with 2 years of experience" or "a 34 year old woman with 4 years of experience".
It feels like there's an implicit expectation of expertise in doing something that comes with my age. It's almost as if I'm not allowed to learn and get good in something that I want, simply because I was late into "the party", where party can be whatever but since I'm a web developer that's what "the party" is.
I've had multiple people telling me that "we saw people with fewer and less polished projects get jobs". I've been seeking for 8 months, I'm almost at the point where I might as well freelance to bypass the discrimination. I get barely any calls back, and the one interview that felt somewhat fair was because I had my former manager from a completely unrelated field introduce me to someone looking for web developers, and that didn't worked out because they wanted me to learn their stack and build an assignment within a week, which failed gloriously.
Is there something that we can do so that people can just be amateurs regardless of age? I'm sure since we're making SOME progress against sexism and racism we could somehow do something for ageism too, because I can't blame Zuckerberg's opinion anymore.
Recommendation: don't do that. Instead aim to get a job with people who value inherent capabilities and flexibility, and who aren't abusers. To do that you may need to do some work first. For example, develop a web application of your own, open source, using some modern tech stack (doesn't matter which specific one). Then, when you interview you can talk about your experiences, thoughts, etc with that tech. This shows the interviewer that you have the capability to pick up new tech, to understand its strengths and weaknesses, to produce output. A good interviewer will see that and know that you will therefore be able to pick up whatever tech they want you to use. It's not about specific knowledge and buzzwords : it's about the ability to learn and apply. You can now go into interviews with the approach : I don't know anything about some of the tech you're using, but that's ok because I have proven I can learn, and I know a huge amount about _something_, and perhaps the interviewer will be interested to learn from me about that.
One of the advantages of age is that you have had more time to meet more people, with with more people, build a network. Use those contacts to look for jobs rather than recruiters.
a) Young people don't care because it doesn't affect them and the industry is mostly young
b) Companies don't care because no one can stop them if they discriminate surreptitiously
c) Older people have no recourse unless they can prove discrimination in court which is difficult. See b)
d) No one wants to think about getting old and what will happen to them, so it's not given any consideration or taken seriously because it makes people feel uncomfortable
e) young people are judgemental because they all think they're going to get rich in tech, so an older person needing a job must be a loser
I have a few projects on github. NO... ONE... EVER... LOOKS. Maybe they will do a cursory glance, but I've never had anyone actually look through them in any detail.
Sure, if you created a library with some decent traction and have a good amount of stars, it might help. But for your average developer with personal projects, no one has the time to look at your code. Even for someone with a hit project, they are still probably just looking at your stars as a proxy for your ability to write production code and not your actual code. There is so much HN advice focusing on having projects to show people and I think it's mostly bad advice.
Here's my two cents:
1) Pay someone professional to look over your resume. If you aren't getting interviews this might be a factor. It'll cost you a few hundred dollars and may potentially earn back many many times that amount. Bonus: Have them look over your linkedin profile as well.
2) Find companies on linkedin that you'd potentially want to interview with. Send messages to developers there. This might required a paid linkedin account for a few months, but again, think of it as an investment. Have your resume on dropbox or similar and then include a URL with a link to your resume in there, since I don't think linkedin allows attachments.
3) Interview, interview, interview. The interview process is very imperfect and it sucks. But every time you fail, go back and see where you went wrong. Eventually you will see that a lot of companies ask the same questions with small twists, so practice makes perfect here.
4) Don't sweat it when you get rejected. Remember it's a numbers game. More interviews == more chances to get an offer. You only need one job at a time.
For every node.js driven pet social network with a 26 year old CEO that discriminates against you there will be an insurance company who will view your graying hair as reassuring evidence of your deep experience.
But jesus, the ageism against older "juniors" is just brutal. Their CVs are always the first in the trash can.
Perversely, a lot of men in tech have hopped on the tech "diversity" bandwagon by demonstrating a somewhat creepy overt preference for younger women when hiring junior developers, ironically making things harder for other minorities. Yay diversity :/
And it's an oversaturated market, which is where quietly stated prejudices really come out to play.
The hiring market is a real shitshow. I'm relieved not to be a grad anymore.
To be clear: Someone using only your age to discriminate is not okay and I’m not suggesting it is.
However, reading the hints in your post (“amateur professional” and referring to a manager from another field) suggests that this is more of a recent career change for you.
When changing careers, it’s important to be able to demonstrate that you’ve accomplished things and gained experience in your prior field. If it looks like a complete career reset and you can’t really explain what you’ve learned in your career to date that makes you a better hire than a fresh graduate with similar experience, why would the hiring manager assume you’ll thrive in your new career path any better than your old one?
> "why hire you over a younger graduate?"
Not very tactful, but this should be a softball question for you: They’re asking you to explain how your prior career experience, even if not in programming, makes you a good choice. Think of what you’ve learned and accomplished and explain how it makes you the more mature employee and team member. If you can’t think of anything, that makes you more of a liability for them because even average new grads can accumulate some degree of accomplishment and achievement.
> I had my former manager from a completely unrelated field introduce me to someone looking for web developers, and that didn't worked out because they wanted me to learn their stack and build an assignment within a week, which failed gloriously.
Being able to do a basic assignment is table stakes when it comes to getting jobs with a non-traditional background, like it or not. You can’t win them all, but I’d suggest working on getting to a point where you can demonstrate your skills quickly to new employers.
There's this weird fiction that recruiting companies are only discriminating based on age but they have the ability to discriminate on anything they want.
Okay, if this interview was in the United States, interviewers can't actually ask these questions.
About 'amateurs': developing software for sale is a professional endeavor, so by signaling that you are an amateur, you are telegraphing that you are less suited for the job than someone who doesn't. This is a function of maturity, and maturity is expected from someone who is older.
Most valley companies simply do not care if you are a 34-year old with 4 years of experience, provided your education and training were not in computer science. If your resume clearly shows your educational and work background, absolutely no sane mainstream company will care. There are larger companies that do insist on hiring people with degrees in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering to do software, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
My advice: - Polish your speaking and presentation style. Convey maturity that is commensurate with your age. Maintain a positive attitude and a professional demeanor in your interviews no matter what. Take some time to familiarise yourself with the terms of art, and speak the lingo.
- Do not deal with very small shops. They generally do not have processes and management structures that are suitable to integrating people such as you (or reigning in wackos who ask illegal questions during interviews, thus showing their total lack of interview training and common sense). You will have better luck with companies that have explicit programs to bring in people from nontraditional backgrounds into software dev.
- Freelancing is a good idea if you want to make some money and connections, but getting into an established company such as the one I have described is a much better bet to get into the industry.
A lot of companies view juniors as expendable coding drones to handle the crappy tasks or something you take as you cannot afford anything else. Both of those correlate with long hours and those are easier to get from unattached younger people. So it isn't always about age, but what age generally means.
That aside, what's your stack? Post a bit of info and maybe some of us can lend you a hand.Plenty of companies pay for referrals, so even asking around on LinkedIn will net you plenty as it costs me nothing to toss your resume into the box and is essentially a lottery ticket for a couple grand.
To answer your title question, it just doesn't impact people enough. Refactoring a large culture is a massive undertaking, especially when the people impacted are not part of it yet/are at the bottom rung.
Until companies hear “I passed because of the ageism I saw when I googled your company,” there isn’t any reason not to behave this way.
Its not like a job at mcdonalds, We are talking about complex creative jobs where you need to invest a lot of time and resources to integrate new hires.
The last thing companies want is to waste all that resources into a bad hire and spend even more money getting another guy for the job.
You bet they are gonna look at all the signals and trust me a 40 year old amateur is gonna ring a lot of alarm bells!
Like literally what did you expect.. for them to completely overlook the fact that either you've done fuck all for 20 years or just jumped ship mid life.
I have 10+ years of experience working at non-tech companies. Nominally I was a Senior SWE. However I am certain I am not at the same caliber as a Senior SWE who has spent his/her career working in Silicon Valley tech companies. I'd love to join a tech company as a midlevel engineer and work my way up again despite both my age (30s) and years of experience (10+). I've noticed there are some companies that outright disallow this. It can go like:
"You have 10+ yoe, you either interview and qualify as a senior/staff SWE, or we don't want you at all regardless of whether you'd make a great midlevel SWE"
That said, my suggestion is the current best way around this is to probably become a Leetcode Master. Not all companies make or break you over leetcode, but I'd say the majority still do, so you will have breadth of scope covered. Utterly wow them with your leetcode skills (which admittedly can be a completely different skillset from your day to day SWE work), and that seems like it can overcome many other perceived cons.
Young people think that just because they got into a FAANG they are safe when they get older. You are never safe if you depend on an employer. And trust me you won't be responsible with your money while young anyway.
Can't find ref for the article now but someone recently posted stats of how CS has the worst longterm years of experience to remuneration compared to other degrees/industries. While the rate of learning never slows down as you get more experience. Meaning that your years of experience matters little and your pay won't increase much as you age.
Point being adapt to other pathways as you get older.
I hope you told them it's because you have enough experience to know what they said is illegal.
Out of interest what do you mean by "amateurs" here, I'm not sure it's the right word for what you're expressing?
Sometimes people want to test how you react to offensive questions, although these seems to be borderline illegal depending on your country. Maybe they want to know if you take the opportunity to advertise maturity or something or get defensive about it.
Old people do not have the time, energy or naivety that young people do. This is fact. The only thing going for them is experience, if you can't bring that, then you've got nothing.
Maybe finance is different?
We just hired a career change guy in his 30s straight out of code boot camp. In fact we have hired a few of them.
How much experience do you have? Is this an American thing?
What exactly do you mean by that?
Instead of bristling, start by coming up with a good answer for this.
We ask because younger people don't go off about ageism the way you do. They raise other problems however, chiefly inexperience and wokeism.