It’s not age discrimination per-se, but it’s because you're actively dragging your heels on the technologies that companies are hiring for. You can probably find a job doing maintenance on some PHP or Rails app that hasn't been updated since Obama’s first term, but the pay is likely also going to come from that era.
because only AI, cloud, and startups are hiring? What a weird interpretation to make of someone based off of a comment history on the internet. We don't even know what domain they work in.
Or I can give tactical suggestions, which may be a bit hard to stomach, so he can improve his odds at landing a job.
It’s fairly easy to infer his job domain from comments. He mentions web technologies and SQL often. He refers to himself as a dev, not as an engineer, and he mentions running numerous websites. He probably got his start working in “IT” (nobody says IT anymore, but he still does) in the 90s in support or technician roles and moved into full-stack web developer roles around dotcom.
He also comes across as low self-confidence due to “I've almost always gotten good to great performance reviews” instead of telling us why he’s an excellent dev. That likely comes out in interviews and further hurts his chances.
Regardless, I don't exactly see the good faith when saying "well you don't like AI, just find some crusty old phpjobs and take the cut". Which is both over-presumptuous (we don't know the domain they work in) and not very helpful anyway ("old" companies may not be laying off thousands but still aren't exactly throwing jobs out like candy).
>It’s fairly easy to infer his job domain from comments
Even 20 years ago. Web has so many pieces of tech (some that didn't survive) that I wouldn't assume. Could be IT (which no one says because it evolved into its own separate domain. A 2000's IT engineer wouldn't really be doing what SDET or DevOps do today), could be old style vanilla JS website development, could be flash. Or something entirely different.
>He refers to himself as a dev, not as an engineer, and he mentions running numerous websites
Titles don't really mean much. My domain calls people developers, programmers, or engineers as the company sees fit (also, it's awkward to say "game engine engineer"). The terms are almost as flexible as "senior" these days.
Personally haven't had to deal with Cloud. My domain leaves that to network engineers on the product and probably devops for the company servers. It's there but Ive never been expected to touch it.
I should, but I find it draining.
You will have to stomach finance or the military industrial complex though.
The rents are no joke, but if I had to be out of a job and in tech, NYC or SF would be top picks (maybe Denver, Austin, DC, or RDU after that).
* web dev - today the majority of the jobs are very heavily ts/js, react, next.js, vercel, etc.
* data engineering - AI/ML is very hungry for clean, organized, and accessible data. so we're talking sql, data warehousing, spark, beam, kafka
* infra/devops - nearly every tech company needs these people: docker, kubernetes, terraform, ci/cd, gitops, metrics and monitoring tools like prometheus and grafana