Ask HN: Should I Downplay My Age?

84 points by mjones 11 years ago | 86 comments

I've been programming for nearly 40 years and it is still my favorite thing to do. A while back I was reorganized out of the job I had been in for the previous eight years and found myself, for the first time in my career, without a job.

After taking a break and working on a non-technology passion project for several months I am now starting to get back into software development. I have read a bit here and there about alleged age discrimination and wonder if a) that's a real thing and b) if it is a real thing what can I do to minimize the adverse effect on my job search.

So, assuming the truth, more or less, of (b) I am trying to figure out how to present myself during the initial contact with potential employers. One one hand (hand one!) I'm tempted to try to avoid clues in my resume as to my age, but on the other hand I think that the right employer will see my age and experience as an asset.

Hand One might have the advantage of getting me in to a face-to-face interview where I believe I can show that I have desirable traits. But on the other hand I'm not sure I would want to work at a company where ageism is an issue.

Comments?

ps. I had more than one recruiter ask me for my birthdate: "Just Month and Day". I suppose they don't know that I know that it's obvious that my age could be easily determined (+- a bit) if armed with my Birthdate Month and Day, Name, and Location.

sparkman55 11 years ago |

I've built a number of teams, and have repeatedly had the fortune of anchoring the back-end with a senior engineer over age 50. Experience matters, and it helps the entire team from a morale, design, and process perspective. You don't want to work for someone who doesn't recognize that anyway...

I wish I could be so lucky to attract senior candidates at my current gig; they're hard to come by at a trendy downtown-SF mobile commerce pre-series-A startup. Instead, I'm inundated with fresh code-bootcamp graduates. I'd be much more comfortable hiring those junior developers if I knew they would be able to sit next to a reliable senior teammate...

That said, if you're worried about being hired, start by building something on your own! You'll make yourself much more marketable if you show that you can pick up new technologies and actually release something.

zachrose 11 years ago | |

Absolutely. I have had the pleasure of being the junior person sitting next to someone who was close to retirement. His perspective of, "Ok, what are we really trying to do here?" was invaluable. The best teams are always genuinely diverse and seek to really get to know what's special about each other.

One suggestion: don't worry about dating yourself by talking about old tech you once worked on. For some reason the older developers I've worked with take a while to getting around to telling you about the time they wrote LISP in Genera on a Symbolics 3640 for cutting edge CAD/CAM/simulation tools at Boeing in the mid 80s or whatever (such cred!).

jtchang 11 years ago | |

100% agree.

Senior engineers with experience are hard as hell to come by. They offer perspective and focus: something that is often needed but hard to find.

kls 11 years ago |

Also, outside of SF, the ageism is much much milder

Agreed, it seems outside the cultural bubble of the Bay Area the entire technical workforce seems to be aging. I see fewer and fewer of the younger generations entering tech outside of a few markets like the Bay Area and Austin.

I have a theory, that it is due to the work force being more mobile, as well as the younger work force having less to tie them down. There was also, consolidation of the start-up markets and a lot of other markets lost ground while the Bay Area gained. I think this creates a natural draw for the younger portions of our workforce.

Most of the individuals I run across outside of a few specific markets are mid-30's to mid 50's and age seems to be a less relevant factor.

humanrebar 11 years ago | |

My theory is that having roommates only works when you're young. When you're married and/or have children, you need your own place. That makes it much harder to stay in the most expensive city in the U.S., rent wise.

xasos 11 years ago | | |

I believe this is the case also. There is a Quora thread on the pros and cons on raising kids in the bay area[1].

[1] http://www.quora.com/Is-Silicon-Valley-a-good-place-to-raise...

fsk 11 years ago |

Don't give out SSN or Birthdate information until after an on-site interview when you're at the offer stage. Someone dishonest can use that information for identity theft.

I'm already starting to be concerned about age discrimination, and I'm only 40 years old! It's very disturbing when you go on an interview and you're the oldest person there by 10+ years.

The only way out is to start your own business. Do you have enough savings? If you do, consider trying to bootstrap your own thing instead of going back to being an employee.

annasaru 11 years ago | |

Thats 1) A bit depressing - you seem to be conveying that there is no other possibility 2) Starting a new business is not everyone's cup of tea. Even for a young person. Its loaded with risks.

I do face this as well. Age does slow down a person. But age also helps us make haste slowly. I've seen younger engineers scattering their energy around, and then coming to realize that the common sense option was the best. And older programmers (like me) might be too set in our ways.

Can an old dog be taught new tricks? I'd say to test that, make sure you learn a new programming language every year. Show it with non-trivial projects on your github or other profile. Thats proof that you're still sharp.

Edit : Also adopt a new editor every year. That shows you can step out of your comfort zone. (I need to kick that emacs habit).

tjradcliffe 11 years ago | | |

I think one of the advantages of being older is that it gives one the wisdom to be more selective about tools. I'm an expert in the tools I use (C, C++ and Python, mostly, although I know a dozen-odd languages well enough to crash a program in them) and not hugely keen on learning new ones. I poke around at new languages now and then but quickly learn they are either a) so much like ones I know there's nothing special or b) Haskell or Erlang, which I've run at a couple of times hard enough to be convinced there is something interesting there but not hard enough to really have learned much.

So rather than learn a new language every year I aim to learn something about the languages I already spend most of my time in. Functional techniques in Python, the new features in C++14... things like that.

Nor do I see any value in learning a new editor. Really, editing is a solved problem and if you're familiar with vi, teco, emacs, VisualStudio, Eclipse and that other one whose name I don't remember that Microchip based MPLABX on you've covered enough ground that anything you encounter is going to look basically familiar.

I've met programmers young and old who won't leave their comfort zone that I acknowledge it's a real problem, but I don't think you need to spend too much time very far afield of your core expertise to keep current.

hawkice 11 years ago |

My advice is to play up the experience, but play down some details of that experience. For instance, 40 years of COBOL and C++ has some signalling issues (not completely unreasonably, what with carpenters blaming shoddy tools). I'd probably not talk about the technical nature of the experience at all -- just say the industry it was for and what the tool was used for, and not name-dropping old technologies.

Also, outside of SF, the ageism is much much milder. I've had people who had the up/down control on me getting hired not know my age to within 15 years at the time they make that choice (and they consistently guessed _older_ than I am). But interviews in SF seem to bring this topic to the table almost immediately. YMMV.

In terms of being uniquely identifiable (and therefore having few secrets) in the job application process, this is essentially unavoidable. I wouldn't worry about it.

O____________O 11 years ago | |

40 years of COBOL and C++ has some signalling issues

Today is the first time I've seen C++ mentioned alongside COBOL. Today is a dark day...

hawkice 11 years ago | | |

To respond to this and the sibling comment: That was meant to be 40 years split in a first-COBOL-then-C++ type of way. I wasn't attempting to draw any technical equivalency per se, merely a quazi-cultural one.

dinkumthinkum 11 years ago | |

I doubt anyone has 40 years of C++ .... But that's part of the point here. I think a lot of what people are saying is junk. If you want to work as some hipster startup for low pay, there is a high probability that they are looking for you to talk about web framework du jour. However, there are plenty of adults working at companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and thousands of smaller companies that last longer than three years ...

loumf 11 years ago | |

44 year old programmer here -- I keep hoping that one day C++ won't matter, but I keep getting jobs (at startups) partly because I know it well.

fecak 11 years ago |

Recruiter here. I would absolutely recommend you not include any obvious indicators of age on your resume, at least in many parts of the country. Graduation dates are not required, and perhaps your first few jobs can be eliminated from the resume. A resume doesn't have to be a complete biography.

With 40 years of programming (not sure how many were hobby vs paid), you are likely to raise questions as to how many more years you would need to work. You can trim the appearance of some years off to get in the door and avoid the possibility of discrimination.

BorisMelnik 11 years ago |

just gonna be straight here, there are older people that are the really smart, savvy engineer types that school all us young folks, then there are the older people that learned Pascal in 1978 and never stepped outside of their comfort zone. We have an older person working in our office that, if it wasn't for him would practically be a zoo. He constantly schools us on all things tech, and keeps everyone in line. You are gonna be just fine.

The fact that you are on HN and able to have this kind of insight proves you are capable of hanging with the youngins.

sillysaurus3 11 years ago | |

On the flipside, I've personally witnessed a manager firing someone just because he was old. There is an ageism problem in the industry. Like racism or sexism, whether you see its effects depends on where you are.

inmyunix 11 years ago | | |

surely there was more to the story. hard to believe it was only attributable to age without some context.

kevin_thibedeau 11 years ago | |

Reminds me of someone who refused to use revision control because "merges were unreliable". Of course they are when you wait 30 days between commits.

pcthrowaway 11 years ago | | |

Git noob question here (but someone who has been working on that noobishness for a year now): Can't you just rebase the branch you're on before trying to merge to another branch?

dinkumthinkum 11 years ago | |

The other side to that is that there are plenty of younger developers that don't know how to use timers in Javascript or know what the CPU cache is.

WalterBright 11 years ago |

As someone who has also been programming for 40 years (!), I find that although I don't work as hard, I get more done. I.e. one learns to program more efficiently, and make fewer mistakes. There's a lot less of uselessly thrashing about.

nanoGeek 11 years ago |

I think you should not worry about your age, after all there is nothing you can do to end up younger. You should have confidence; you are much more experienced than the average 25 year old developer out there.

On the other hand, as others have stated, you better avoid making your age obvious.

In the end, you know what? In this life your time is limited and I think it's wise to avoid worrying about things you can't control. Don't make your age obvious but have confidence in your skills and experience!

mocfive 11 years ago |

At 31, I feel like I am just now leaving the 'young talent' group, but not yet considered older. Standing in the middle, kinda, I think I can see both sides. To help deal with the agism issue, my hypothesis is that if you can zero in on the exact misconceptions they might have about you, or older programmers in general, and demonstrate that you don't fit that mold, you're in.

Some younger engineers will worry if older engineers lost their hunger for learning new technologies. In their position, they are well aware of what is fashionable, or even just current best practice. This is mostly because as new people they go straight to the new stuff. For example, new programmers don't learn SVN, they go straight to git, and github is a way of life.

So, right or wrong, it is a red flag to them if they see or hear about people advocating what they consider as outdated approaches.

But, importantly, they also read books by the folks who are 20-30 years older, but never lost that drive. They go to talks by these people and take notes, buy their screencasts, and brag about what they learned. They want luminaries to guide them. So, maybe, establishing expertise over what they consider important is a way around this misconception the youth has.

I imagine you could send positive signals by fixing or improving some popular open source project. Maybe write some interesting toy code, a game, or something that solves a development problem, and add that to a personal site or your github account. Any way to demonstrate what someone with 40 years experience can do, in a context they can see and interact with should do the trick.

kuujo 11 years ago | |

I have to say, as a young engineer working at a startup full of cutting-edge technologies, this seems to be the best advice I've seen yet (if that type of environment is what you're looking for).

schlinb 11 years ago |

I have recently been involved in a project where we are analyzing employment offers from companies in different markets (SF bay area being one of them).

We have found that one of the biggest factors in getting employment offers is how you position yourself. For instance right now if you are an enterprise engineer with extensive perl or .Net experience this will hurt you if you want to get into a young web company. On the other hand if you are an iOS or Node engineer in SF or can position yourself as an engineering manager then you're likely to find it easier to get job offers.

In general, the data that I've seen suggests that new companies are basically not interested in older technologies. I believe that the problem a lot of older engineers have is that they try to enter the current market by relying on their old skills and that mis-match is interpreted as ageism.

In my experience having experience (and age) is very valuable IF you're a strong engineer and you can apply that experience to the existing technology landscape. Make sure that you're presenting yourself to the right companies with skills in the right technologies and toolsets though or they will not even look at you.

err4nt 11 years ago |

I"m just a young guy here, not an employer, but I can share how I view your age in a candid way that might help you put your best foot forward.

My parents, born in the mid-1950s are currently in the job market looking for work, and they claim they feel the ageism/discrimination but it completely baffles me as a younger person.

As a person who celebrated Y2K in public school, now in the workforce blazing my own trail: I personally wouldnt have any issue with your age whatsoever. I gauge people based on results and performance, and so if you're an old dog I dont need to teach you any new tricks, you're probably a pro already!

I would be a little intimidated by your age, and it would be humbling and awkward for me to feel like you were my subordinate, but I would cherish your insight and experience (and hopefully mature reasoning skills) and I believe you may have a lot to offer!

I still prepare resumes and cover letters for my parents as they hunt for jobs, and I wish I could encourage you as well.

Age != youth

Age != ability

Age == how many pages have been turned in the 'Book of You'

Best of luck as you put yourself out there!

poppup 11 years ago | |

I enjoyed reading your encouraging words. I know it's not encouraged to post 1 up comments, so I have more to add, but before I do, I wanted to pass along that it's nice to hear how supportive you are with regard to your parents and others.

I agree with your comment and I think the thought of ageism is what is intimidating. There is nothing that cannot be accomplished when a person sets their mind to it, regardless of age, but there is a time and energy cost. Young people have more energy, so more effort is required on the part of an older person to appear energetic and desirable. I am 46 and have worked in five different careers. Experience can be demonstrated and comes across as impressive if it is concise and on point, regardless of age. Being both energetic and concise is an art form. But I highly recommend it as a strategy when seeking employment.

mjones 11 years ago | |

It's on me to deal with coworkers honestly and without prejudices based on their place in the hierarchy within which they work. :)

blergh123 11 years ago |

For me, when I've interviewed older developers, my main concern is that they have too much experience for the role we are interviewing for and may be bored and want to leave.

It probably depends on the job description, but sometimes more experienced candidates get rejected for this exact reason.

I'd love to hear how other people handle this type of situation.

at-fates-hands 11 years ago | |

I can totally validate this concern.

I have a really good friend who's a Javascript pro. Like mad scientist Douglas Crockford good. He's also in his early 50's. He's been hired at some of the largest corporations and has done some absolutely amazing work.

But he never sticks around longer than 6-8 months for the very reason you cite.

Just like in his current gig with a huge financial institute where he completely rewrote all their tools in Angular and Node in four months, and then basically said he was bored and the company was moving too slow for him!

He's currently looking at starting his own app development company and doing his own thing finally, which he really needs. He just has so much talent and experience, he had a hard time finding anything challenging anymore. And since Javascript developers are in such high demand, he can come and go when he wants to - something his experience and talents allow him to do. Something someone in their 20's or 30's just can't compete with.

We both currently work in the midwest, and the tech scene here is really vibrant.

mjones 11 years ago | |

Over the past couple of decades I have become more inclined to stay in a position due to the fact that I am not feeling the need to make more money or climb the corporate ladder. I wouldn't take a job that was going to be boring but I also know that a job is often what you make of it. My experience has always been that there's always challenging work that others don't want to take up because it's not on their career path, not high profile, and etc.

zura 11 years ago | |

>... may be bored and want to leave.

To follow your line, you could reject with the same success persons who have mentioned "Haskell" or "Compilers" (or "Game dev") in their CV, regardless of their age...

(Assuming you're interviewing for "yet another CRUD job")

old-soft-man 11 years ago |

Great discussion here, although so much of it presumes that people whose hiring prowess mistakes CV crafting skills for CS wisdom are worth working for.

Okay, I'm lucky to be at a point where I squeezed enough blood from the software development rock to carry on even if I never wrote another line of code again.

But I can hardly express how much happier I've been in a (relative to "rock star" and/or "ninja" mindsets) silly, part time "data specialist" position for a local non-profit that really needs someone who can spin useful utilities and disparate systems connectivity from any available silk (or dirty kite string) than I've ever been slaving away in the usual "headless chickens" environments managed by the usual clowns whose management training consisted of little more than proving themselves useless at software development itself - which training, of course, tends to result in the aforementioned hiring prowess to boot.

Good bleeping riddance!

arisAlexis 11 years ago |

I'd like to express a somewhat different view while being in the same boat. I am 35 and working as a dev for years now. My recent teammates (small team) include a senior very experienced developer who started coding with punch cards for the British gov. That seemed cool at first but now I am trying to maintain some software he wrote from 2004-now. The software has really bad code in it, the kind you wouldn't expect some experienced guy to produce. It has no testing, it has serious OO flaws. Maybe its this particular guy that was just not very good, but its creeping me out when we talk about things and I realise he is comprehending much slower than the rest. I was wondering if that's just normal age degradation. I would love to code 40 years from now. I am just worried.

sulam 11 years ago |

First of all, I have never... and I do mean _never_ had a recruiter ask me for my birthdate. I've been in the industry for 20 years now (not 40, congrats on almost hitting THAT milestone!), so it's not like I just have low exposure.

Secondly, my advice is to do nothing special. Yes, filter your resume for things you think the company would be interested in -- you would do that regardless of your age. In general a one-pager resume is greatly appreciated by everyone. If it comes up that you've been around the block more than most, fine. You don't want to work for companies that would discriminate against you based on age anyway -- they are probably going to fail due to stupidity like not appreciating expertise learned from experience.

mjones 11 years ago |

Thanks everyone for your thoughts.

I'm proud of the skills I've acquired over the years and the projects I've worked on. And I never think my skills are enough, lately I've worked with meteor, zero-copy packet architectures, iPhone apps, and some security-related issues.

I'm not going to try to hide my age and I'm not going to try to make it a desirable trait. I will hope that bit of ambiguity gets me in for a face-to-face interview which I am very confident will turn out well.

Companies which are so rigid as to wonder whether I'm "young enough" are probably not places I'd like to work anyway.

geuis 11 years ago |

I dunno, this is kind of creeping up on me. I just turned 35 at the end of January and I'm in the middle of a job search because my last startup is shutting down. I've only done a handful of onsites so far and I've been a little worried about perceptions. I'm overweight and because of genetics, I'm much greyer in hair and beard than a lot of other people my age. So far it doesn't seem to be an issue, even when I'm talking to people younger than me. I'd say the issue definitely exists, but so far it hasn't been an issue for me personally.

annasaru 11 years ago | |

Thats yet another kind of discrimination - but I am sure (and hope) there are many who will treat you fairly.

sysk 11 years ago |

Have you considered freelancing or running a small consulting business?

I admit that if I was faced with the opportunity of hiring someone a lot older and experienced than me I'd have two immediate thoughts: "This guy would be a great asset, we need him" and "I think I'd be way too intimidated and nervous being his boss, can't do it".

Doing consulting work solves the second question since it changes the boss-employee dynamic to a more business-to-business like one.

Now, I am not in a position to hire anyone so take my introspection with a grain of salt.

bbulkow 11 years ago |

1. Where are you.

2. Don't be paranoid but don't play it up.

3. There's no way to hide your age, realistically. You have to answer questions like the year you graduated from college, the year of your first job.

4. There are a bunch of people that age I would kill to work with (35 year programmer), we have half a dozen people in our office with that much experience. We're a C shop and we write very, very high performance code. WORK YOUR FRIENDS, you must have friends, those friends have jobs.

mjones 11 years ago | |

Thanks, I'm in LA, if you're into high performance networking then you might want to see https://github.com/pfq/PFQ , if you haven't already.

rajacombinator 11 years ago |

As a startup founder who anticipates hiring some time this year, my feeling is that all things equal I would vastly prefer someone who has been programming for 40 years and still loves it. You're likely to have far more experience, knowledge, and superior work habits vs a fresh grad. However I doubt you would be willing to join a risky startup for lower wages than you could get elsewhere.

mjones 11 years ago | |

Actually, due to the fact that my kids are grown up and out on their own, I am not nearly as concerned about getting top dollar (or climbing some career track) as I am about working on something interesting and having done something I can look back on 10 years from now and feel that my time was well spent.

rajacombinator 11 years ago | | |

That's cool, I like that attitude! Maybe once I am ready to hire I will reach out. :)

hiou 11 years ago |

Honestly, it's more about finding a results based org. I've worked with a lot of different companies and some are very culture fit and some are very results oriented. You will never get a shot at the culture fit crowd so go for the results based crowd. Flood your resume not with experience as much as real results and value you have created.

brudgers 11 years ago |

Life is short.

Why would you want to work somewhere that allows or encourages discrimination on age or anything else?

Let assholes filter themselves out of your life.

a3n 11 years ago | |

Actually life is long, too long work for assholes.

I usually phrase it "No, I don't want to do that, life is too long to write C++," or whatever thing I'm declining to do.

maak 11 years ago |

No, of course you shouldn't downplay your age. If such prejudice exists, you are perpetuating it by downplaying your age.

frozenport 11 years ago |

>>I've been programming for nearly 40 years

Instead of being 59 you will be 49? I don't think it will help. Instead, put a spin on it and sell yourself as experienced in technical matters.

old-soft-man 11 years ago |

It's all poker, especially the part about not needing to have a strong hand to win. Play the game to win, your 40-year-old jack of all trades high notwithstanding. ;-)

vijucat 11 years ago |

"We've been consistently recognized as one of the best places to work for Gen Y", read an ad that I saw recently.

austinwm 11 years ago |

The coin has been in hand 2 all along.

mjones 11 years ago | |

I tend to see it that way too.