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Comment by fecak | Hacker News Reader

I'm a former tech recruiter for startups and now a resume writer and career consultant, and I've written for software engineers from 18 through their late 60's.

- Older software engineers (40+) won't be discriminated against if they are doing cool stuff and are doing different stuff than they were doing a few years back. I've written this a thousand times before, but we often confuse ageism for stagnation. If you've had the same job for 15 years working on the same system and using the same languages, you aren't a victim of ageism as much as you are being discriminated against because they don't think you'll be able to learn new tricks.

- On resumes, don't advertise your age if you're a bit older. We don't need to list that internship, first job out of school, or graduation dates from college. List 15-20 years of your career and leave the rest off. It isn't a biography.

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> Older software engineers (40+) won't be discriminated against if they are doing cool stuff and are doing different stuff than they were doing a few years back.

But I don't do cool stuff. What I do is to keep a ~$25 million per year money printing system from falling over while the youngsters are in year 7 of the 18 month project to replace it with super cool tech. Making money is so overrated these days.

Maybe what you do IS cool, but you expect others don't think it is, or you don't make it sound cool when you talk about it. I've made some pretty mundane work sound cool, but it's not always easy.

You may be right about that. I should note, however, that I am not out there looking for a new gig. I have kids, am getting a master's degree part time, and have a small side business. Yet I still have time to read books at night. Find me another job where I can do all that :)

having been part of many candidate interviews you would have massively scored in my book with this comment. you have values other than work. that's something I value very highly.

wish there were more like you these days to interview (I am just 42, so take it with a grain of salt) but the youngsters, straight from college with a streamlined CV are sometimes difficult to deal with imho.

You sound like you hold a lot of disdain for "the youngsters," and you'd be a liability on a team if you had any younger teammates.

Oldies can be hard to work with, and you're sort of proving it right here.

I have a disdain for people that don't finish what they've started and don't satisfy requirements. I don't feel as though that has much of anything to do with age. Anyway, if that makes me hard to work with, so be it.

Wait, are you telling me that you develop software to solve business needs and not as a personal art project?! What kind of crazy talk is this?!

> I have a disdain for people that don't finish what they've started and don't satisfy requirements.

And everyone younger than you fits this criteria? You're quite bigoted, I hope you realize that.

You'd be surprised how little corporate bureaucracy values the act of "keeping the lights on" for an existing and stable revenue stream. Obviously, keeping the money hose going is good for the business, but it only gets recognized in the case of failure. To put it simply, it doesn't create new value, which is what corporate culture in the US is all about.

^this is a really underrated statement.

Coming from “sysadmin”/tech/keeper of the lights on: there is no win at the bottom line. Keeping the lights on always costs money, they always wish it could cost less (except when inter-company bragging about having the new hot tool), and when you’re doing your best possible job they will forget you exist. If something happens on your watch they can just as easily assume you have not been working at all.

One thing I’ve distilled from all this: Always keep at least some focus on how much your work costs vs how much value it’s providing.

No one pays for prevention. Few pay for maintenance. Everyone pays for the fixes required from the lack of investment in the former.

Wouldn't listing education without a graduation date basically mark a resume as "old"?

Not necessarily. If you list say 15 years of experience and a degree with no date, the reader will assume you are "at least 37". We're just trying to get an interview here - when you show up they'll have a better understanding of your actual age (in most cases), but at that point they're committed to the interview and hopefully the candidate performs well enough where age won't be a factor in any decisions.

And you can just use a different style of CV that doesn't use the chronological layout.

Something like a functional resume can do a good job in masking age a bit, but typically we still need to list employers, titles, and years.

I list education without graduation date because I attended for 2 semesters. I've never considered it labeling me as old, but I've never had a hard time getting jobs, with the exception of a few jobs near me that only hire out of specific universities.

If you didn't graduate, omitting dates is not at all suspicious. I rarely see someone writing "Earned 80 credits at UCLA (2011-2013)".

I do the same. I went to college for 2.5 years, never completed a degree. I'm not going to lie and claim a graduation. I used to list the date range I went to school, but now I leave that off entirely. No one has ever once asked about school. With 20+ years of experience on my resume, I doubt they even read the last section.

At this point in my career, if I was prepping a resume, my education section would have one line:

Wossamotta U, Computer Engineering, BS

Doesn't need a date or any details, my job experience is more relevant, and if they've got questions, they can ask. If I had another good stint of work, I could just put Education: yes. Also going to leave off my college jobs and write Recent Experience. Although I got my last job through networking without writing a resume, and I'd expect the same for future work.

> On resumes, don't advertise your age if you're a bit older. We don't need to list that internship, first job out of school, or graduation dates from college. List 15-20 years of your career and leave the rest off. It isn't a biography.

I started doing this years ago. If I listed every job on my resume, it'd be 4-5 pages long. Most of them aren't relevant to what I'm doing now, and only serve to make me look old, or like a job-hopper (which I am--about every three years--but job-hopping in tech isn't a negative unless your list grows too long). At first, I compressed older jobs into one-liners at the end, but now I leave them off entirely. I list 4-5 of the six jobs I've held in the past 22 years.

I have no way of knowing what impact this has on my employability, or how people interpret my age based on it, but I'm 47 years old with 22 years of experience on my resume, so I assume I come off as both old and senior-skilled. I never have to try hard to find jobs.

I feel job hopping in tech has gone from a negative to a positive in the eyes of many who are hiring, as long as the hops are for good reasons (better opportunity, company shut down, finished what you were hired to do, etc.).

Jumping around because you can't keep a job or nobody likes working with you is another story.

> On resumes, don't advertise your age

In Germany you're expected to include your age and a headshot on your CV[0]. I always considered that an insane invitation to prejudice and have only ever done it once, for a job I was guaranteed to get.

I'm sure other countries have other expectations.

In the US it's easy to forget that not everybody is "against" discrimination in hiring, even in tech.

[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lebenslauf&t=hk&iax=images&ia=imag...

I've written for clients in probably 50+ countries, and many do commonly include photos and birthday. I would hope people are 'against' discrimination.

Your first statement contradicts the second one, which only confirms a theory that recruiters aren't the smartest people. If you want to argue that ageism doesn't exist, please provide some stats from your former work. I believe that the real situation is even worse than we can observe exactly because people over 40 had to clutch for the old uncool systems/languages just to keep their job.

"doing different stuff than they were doing a few years back" so engineers who fail and need constant redos? Because the project I'm working on has had the same stable and productive architecture and tools for years. The only reason to redo it would be if the opposite were true. Our users don't know what technology we use. They just know the product does what they want, and keeps getting cool new features.

The skills to build from scratch and the skills to maintain are different. If you've only been doing maintenance, why would you expect to be at the top of the list to build something new? Maybe you personally are perfectly skilled to do it. How would anyone know?

Who said anything about failure? If you're happy doing the same stuff day in and day out, that's great and I hope it works out for you. In my experience, people doing the same thing for a long time tend to struggle to find jobs when it becomes necessary.

If you keep building 'cool new features', you don't appear to be doing the same thing over and over again.

I’m curious whether employers associate age with chronic diseases, and take it into account.

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