Failing that, there's always tuning your CV to precisely match the job description so you pass the first automated system. So far I've been unlucky on that front. If it's because I'm not good enough at tuning, or if it is indirect ageism, I don't know...
Best of luck to you!
Also I think that in a lot of cases it's more "we can't afford to pay a guy with 20 YoE" than ageism, maybe you're punching below your weight.
Recently I noticed that I get more answers for jobs that seems too hard for me than too easy.
Not sure if removing experience would have helped. After all, qualifications on nearly-extinct tech was an advantage in this case.
My problem is that I almost always get hired when I can talk with the technical lead. But I get filtered out before that step, like dozens of times past year.
I only list the last 8-10 years of stuff on my CV. Not specifically to combat ageism (I keep a "full" version also -- 6 friggin pages these days) -- but mostly to acknowledge that just because I did something cool 20 years ago, doesn't mean I am current, fluent, or even looking to do that again -- so why bother? If anyone cares, they'll ask and I'll answer.
My full CV is basically buzzword bingo at this point, and is spanish fly to the body-shop recruiters who love to email, text, and call me with just the worst jobs ever. :) Keep that thing offline unless you like to stay abreast of junior QA analyst jobs in West Virginia for $27/hr.
* The job market is very tough right now. Not getting a lot of responses seems to be a pretty common experience.
* Thought experiment: imagine you have 100 applicants and need to move some of them on to a phone screen. How much about each applicant would you want to read? Keep resumes on the short side. I've heard 1 page is a good limit, as is last 10 years of experience. Throw the old stuff out. Make your resume a picture of your experience and capabilities that is easy to understand at a glance.
* From my own experience in this market it is much better to have a human point of contact -- a recruiter, an employee referral, etc -- than cold applying.
I pruned everything that doesn’t match what I would be looking for today.
For organization using biased software to make hiring decisions, there is a necessity to tailor fit your experience and abilities to 'thread the needle' into an actual human decision making level of the hiring process. If an HR department is unhappy about this process; which will yield overqualified and adept professionals, a change to those biased systems to accept truly competent staff may become the obvious remedy.
I really doubt that any significant number of companies are using age to filter resumes as people over the age of 40 are a protected class in the US.
But you still might want to leave off older experience to avoid unintentional ageism. You don't want to avoid intentional ageism, if you are 40 years old and someone really thinks people 40 years old are too old to code, you don't want to work for them.
I'm over 50, when my previous job was off-shored, I was advised by the outplacement agency to remove experience older than a certain point and replace it with something like "additional experience available on request", I don't recall the exact wording, and they also told me to remove the date from my CS degree.
If people want to discriminate against you, this is isn't going to fool them, it's more about the people who explicitly do not want to discriminate against you, but still have an unavoidable reaction on seeing something like a graduation date that is before they were born.
All that said, the reason you are not getting many responses now may simply be that the current market for programmers is the worst since at least the Great Recession, and maybe even worse than that.
Hope you find work soon!
In general, I can't see any ethical objection to leaving off any previous jobs from your resume. The resume is not a legal document, it's a marketing document: you are presenting your best case for a half hour of somebody's time to interview you as part of the next phase. If you think that removing your earliest jobs—or your latest jobs, or some jobs in the middle—would help, then that's what you should do.
US figures are here, https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/employment-l..., click "Information" in the graph options and you'll notice it hasn't rebounded much since the 2022/23 downturn.
If you have people you can get your direct referrals for positions, you'll better your odds of getting something right now vs cold applications.
Especially in countries like the UK.
Intercom, once a promising startup, now is basically dead because recruiters destroyed it.
They mismanaged the hiring pipeline and made huge errors by looking at keywords and skipping promising candidates who went elsewhere. Worse yet, it's still going on now.
Unfortunately engineers are not interested in hiring at all so it's a huge problem for companies and recruiters have stepped in.
I still list all the companies I've worked at, with dates and city, and either my job title or a one-line summary of what the job entailed. Over one-line and it gets edited to fit. Most of the companies I worked for in the early days no longer exist, have moved offices, or it was so long ago I'd have no idea who still works there who might remember me for a reference, so it seems pointless giving more details.
When I last updated my CV, I had good chunk of information about my previous 2 jobs to give any potential interviewer a range of things they might want to ask me about. I always considered it good practice to check-in on my CV once or twice a year and just add a line for everything I'd worked on recently... when you actually want to polish up the CV for a job, it makes it much easier if you have something to remind yourself when you did N years ago. Although having said that, I worked for a FAANG for a couple of years and never updated my CV because it was all for unreleased products and covered by an NDA. And when I left there, I was doing my own thing and found a contract by word-of-mouth, and as a result my CV just stops 5 or 6 years ago.
Personally, I also try to cut stuff out of the CV so that it prints out onto 2 sides of A4 (assuming they just take my word file and print as-is) - 1 isn't enough room for any detail, but beyond 2 it's easy to include stuff that isn't useful.
As for being 40, that's not that old. I'm closer to 50 and haven't ever really noticed any age discrimination anywhere I've worked - if anything it's worked in my favour most places.
1. applicants over 28 don't qualify for the corporate tax subsidy for youth employment programs
2. government sponsored projects/faculties must show they interviewed external candidates before getting their preferred picks
3. immigration worker-visa (+ unregistered staffing agency) companies must show several existing local candidates CV _can't_ meet the oddly specific employment criteria. Note, priority is given to upper-level degree holders for intake.
4. No one wants to take on any training costs in a high-churn position
5. Data mining by AI-startups/spammers/staffer-lead-gen-firms is still very active
6. Management doesn't want to hear "No" even when they are about to do something silly
7. racism/nepotism/nationalism is far more common than "Culture fit"
Sure it is illegal to exclude people from the candidate pool due to age/experience. However, very few HR people are ever fined for the shenanigans, and sums are negligible when firms do get caught.
We all know the appearance of youth gives people with Novelty bias a sense of progress.
Have a nice day. ;)
There are so many ways to track down your age with automated databases linked in clues, etc
And they will eventually zoom or meet you for most jobs, and know.
Definitely curtail and curate the resume, in general the last 10 years or two jobs should be fine, keep it to two pages. But it’s not going to inoculate against ageism
Will show you how an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) will view your resume, including how much management experience it thinks you have. It can take a few hours to get a response, but it's the only site I've found with a free ATS evaluation.
I've also been using these sites to find issues with my resume and they provide instant responses:
https://app.tealhq.com/home - 15 free AI generated achievements and a lot of the feedback is only available if you pay, but it still highlights where the issues are.
https://resumeworded.com/ - limit of 6 free uploads, and 2 credits with their Magic Write AI
I removed a third of my shortest and most useless experiences, and it turned out fine. When you reach 20 years of experience, recruiters don’t care anymore, but they can be suspicious if you have too many bad jobs, and you waste your time during recruitment explaining why you had to leave instead of what you did.
Drop the rest. It’s just noise.
What gave good results for me was cutting down my resume to 1 page and highlight the important parts of my career.
Think of it like a one-pager for a startup pitch, but you are the company.
And also remove anything you don’t want to be contacted about
Nobody cares that I used MS SQL Server or Visual Basic that far back, at least for my current career goals.
No idea if that affected my job prospects though. The last 18 months have been a really challenging job market either way, and I only recently found another job.
You said you don't want management track. Do you want to just be only a rank&file IC software developer? What about technical lead of a project team? Do you have interest and experience in being a real Principal Engineer (potentially lots of cross-company technical responsibility, including direct with execs)?
If you just want to do "Sr. Frontend" or "Sr. Backend", I hate to say this, but, if your last several years of resume has enough of the keywords that people are looking for right now... maybe that's the experience that goes on your 1-page resume. The abbreviated version could be enough to get your resume past some shadowy unseen influence that is mysteriously filtering what resumes a great hiring manager sees. Nothing says you need to list every job you ever had, and you can always have a 2-page version you show the potentially great hiring manager. (Realistically, there are better individuals and teams than there are companies, so don't rule out a job because the company has ickier elements. Go for the manager and team first, and they have to see you.)
(My own situation is different than yours, because I'm targeting the role of startup technical co-founder, who defines and builds much of the MVP, and then grows into building and leading an engineering team. And advertising a big pile of experience is not only relevant to wise founders, but a very useful way for me to filter-out founders who don't value experience.)
(But when I look at an IC role at an established company, I still occasionally consider trimming the 2-page resume down to 1-page, and eliding some very relevant earlier experience that I was fortunate to have. Because I know I look a lot older on paper than I am in person, and I'm well aware of not-unusual biases in techbroland.)
Perhaps try to ensure that the resume is attractive and focused on the relevant areas that will help you. Leave less detail in older jobs or less relevant positions?...
Add things like certifications, projects, or other things that could make you stand out. With these added, years of experience shouldn't be a problem IMHO.
This is just my opinion of course. It's not a great job market right now, so it could be that.
I've talked with hiring managers from a FAANG that told me that they just skim the resumes - they care more about performance during the actual interview. So hopefully this gives you some hope. Good luck in your job search.
In my opinion you should tailor your resume to the job minimizing irrelevant experience that is clutter.
Also do not bother applying to positions that you can't verify actually exist, and spend extra effort on positions you can properly verify.
The number of unenforced fraudulent/fake job postings today is moronic, and requires some knowledge of Open Source Intelligence practices absent use of internal connections through the career grapevine.
The last study/report on this showed for every actual position, there exists something like 7-10 fake ones. Its third-party interference acting to sabotage labor relations. This is why conversion rates for callbacks and resumes have been non-existent.
Some of the major red flags I look out for as indicators of credibility might look like this, each are weighted differently (some with less, some with more importance):
The mailing addresses listed in the Secretary of State filing paperwork/lookup is a PMB or UPS Store address or mailing service for the agent of service.
History of failure to file required SOS informational returns on time based on expiration date which is public information.
No physical/public office locations.
Failure in correspondence to follow CAN-SPAM FTC guideline requirements.
Inconsistent information required by law to be on their website (for business). This includes absence of functional contact us information or means for sales inquiries, DNS contact information that is out of date and other historic DNS information that shows a trend of inconsistency or deceptive behavior.
Metadata analysis of resources indicate they are hosted outside the region the job is posted for a non-global company.
Inconsistent google maps and streetview presence.
Arbitrary requirements to agree to pernicious or ambiguous legal agreements as a pre-condition before application submission. Any business that does this will be out of business in a short period of time, as they will be unable to replace talent, and will be unable to perceive any feedback signals related to the filter they created. Sustainable businesses do not pigeonhole their talent ingress.
Companies who rotate the same job postings every few months (make a note and build a list, most platforms don't remove paying customers even if they are fraudulent; PatternedAI being one notable example on LinkedIn).
Postings that fail to disclose up front that the advertised position is being advertised by a headhunter, or intermediary, or source of the posting. Any deceptive behavior is a major red flag.
In addition to formalizing this type of vetting process, you can automate many of these types of lookups as a fixed time cost and assign a credibility score.
Statistical/Bayes analysis of posting words may sometimes inform somewhat on GPT-generated related posts which are more likely to indicate fraud by volume for the most common word distributions. These positions should receive only the minimal attention/effort if any; time is your constraint/loss function.
Additionally, it is almost a necessity to set up an email, web server, and domain where application contact information provided as part of your CV is tailored to a unique mailbox and other fixed resources that differ for each application, on a server you control and that you have access to the access logs.
This will allow you to link bad actors with their associated resources similar to how spamhaus does their work to reduce spam, and identify malicious ip blocks, and it can be used to monitor engagement, and other aspects that you would ordinarily not have available. Some knowledge of automated monitoring and alerting is necessary for this. Sustainable businesses have a semi-static or slow changing web presence.
You can mine additional ideas for this by examining discussions and whitepapers from the industry working group for M3AAWG.org. Reputation scores, and deviance from good practice are commonly used as mitigations.
Sending a physical letter of introduction and CV to contacts can be a useful way of reaching out, and standing out as well. I've heard some data brokers offer subscription services that include contact info and org charts.
Unfortunately, absent actual legal enforcement (which isn't happening at all), many anti-spam practices are the next best thing to limit and suppress these fake job postings.
It is really too bad there isn't a platform that will do this for you. All existing platforms monetize to the job seekers expense heaping costs in favor of the employer (to suppress wages through interference).
We need more engineers into decision-make positions, not less. And technically, if you do want to perform at the very best, interacting with other people is not avoidable.