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.
You’d drop your experience because:
1/ very few roles.
2/ skills don’t match experience. If you’re not at principle level, this could be a flag.
This up-or-out worldview is not helpful, by definition there won't be enough spots in most companies for seniors to progress to staff, even less to principal, the funnel gets quite restricted there.
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.
Honestly, I'm not so worried about ageism. I feel like if a company is so ingrained in keeping people out that they're gate-keeping the hiring process, it's probably not a company I want to work for anyway. A 30 year old engineering manager is more likely to be focused on ego and personal ladder climbing than what the company needs. (For the record I think one can do both ladder climb and manage people effectively, but most haven't learned how to do this.)
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.
We had two-sided printing back in those days and it was still not a good idea to go to two pages.
I was always told it was a rule of thumb to ensure that what mattered got seen in the initial, cursory screening. They're going to spend 30 seconds on the resume and likely won't get to a second page if you have it, so better to just fit what you need to on a single page and scrap anything that's not incredibly persuasive.
Now, today your first hurdle is an automated scanner rather than a 30-second human inspection, which may mean that you need to actually increase the amount of text in order to be able to check all the right boxes. It's the same principle (optimize for making it past the first stage), just with a new first stage.
And also remove anything you don’t want to be contacted about
The lawyer, in a civil case, should already have all of the evidence they need gathered by the HRC.
States, countries, etc. will differ of course.
I do wonder what it'd be like to have something proved and to have an administrative judge tell the company to hire you anyway... Wouldn't that be super uncomfortable?
And you'd need to have much bigger sample size than 2.
I think some do, but probably most don't. Agreed a sample size of more than 2 is better but it will take enormous resources to create those resumes and matching profiles elsewhere in linkedin etc.
Can you give me an example of such evidence? Specifically evidence that would succeed in court?
Like do you think managers write down why they didn’t hire a person, and even if they did, they would type “Too old” (“too black”, “too female”) into such a system?
I have personally witnessed promotion discussion where the most senior manager thought someone should be rated the lowest (which leads to firing) because an engineer was “missing” for a large part of the year, yet was not ignorant of the fact that it was for a legally protected reason. Only after being called out by an engineer (not another manager) did the language change and the rating begrudgingly increased by one. None of the discussion was recorded in any way. I have witnessed similar discussions that boiled down to “person is female”, “person is neurodiverse” or essentially “person is not like me and my clique”.
It staggers me that large corporations are not legally required to record all such meetings - and of course it doesn’t stagger me because the USA is full of “feel good“ laws that are utterly unenforceable by design.
It was either:
A. This guy is worth twice our maximum budget
B. He's used to technical stacks that have absolutely nothing to do with ours
C. New grads perform better at leetcode than him(not saying that's a good metric, but that's not ageism)
D. Culture fit.
This is the biggest place where all kinds of biases slip in, including ageism. Culture is tied up in all of the protected classes, and any time that you hear "culture fit" used as a justification for turning someone down alarm bells should be going off.
The legitimate uses of "culture fit" as a filter should be itemized rather than lumped together: "he doesn't deal well with ambiguity", "she doesn't like frequent interruptions", whatever. Just talking about "culture fit" in the abstract is a lawsuit waiting to happen.
It often can be, as:
1. Younger folks have more recently done their degree and algorithms stuff 2. There tends to be more free time to grind leetcode at a younger age (family, responsibilities, lower energy can hamstring an older person here)
Ymmv, but I wouldn't say LC is neutral in this regard.
- overqualified based on years of experience. We don’t think they’ll be happy with the simple work we can offer.
- low growth potential. If the candidate has been a senior engineer for X years, that’s probably their plateau.
- not a “dynamic self-starter” or other euphemisms for “young and dumb enough to send on a high risk mission.”
It’d be a particularly clueless manager who can’t say what they mean without getting in trouble.
> Like do you think managers write down why they didn’t hire a person, and even if they did, they would type “Too old” (“too black”, “too female”) into such a system?
Managers are looking for someone within specific experience bands. If they downlevel a candidate (hire someone that is too skilled), then it’s unfair to the candidate, as they are underpaid. It’s unfair to the teammates, because typically managers have a limited number of promo slots. Quickly promoting someone after they joined may steal the opportunity for another teammate.
In the case that the skills match the job level, someone that is 20 years of experience and not principle yet, is less attractive than someone that is 2 years into their level and has a strong hunger for growing.
It’s so annoying when people downvote without explanation.
The essence of what you said is this: older people do not deserve a job because they are older. The bigger issue seems to be that you are overthinking, and over analyzing for what in my opinion is just ordinary jobs.
>Managers are looking for someone within specific experience bands.
Common, but very petty. Most work that most of us do is grunt work, over analysis will not give you an extraordinary candidate.
>If they downlevel a candidate (hire someone that is too skilled), then it’s unfair to the candidate, as they are underpaid.
No, it's not. The candidate has applied for a job because he could not get anything better. Ever been in a situation where you are laid off and where you had to pay the bills immediately, and did not have the luxury of finding a well-paid job?
I could go on, but I think some harsh experiences for you, like layoffs would be your greatest teacher.
No. This has nothing to do with age. If you started your career at 45 and have 0 years of experience, then you should qualify for internship roles. If you have 40 years of experience, then you should not be selected for entry level jobs.
> No, it's not. The candidate has applied for a job because he could not get anything better. Ever been in a situation where you are laid off and where you had to pay the bills immediately, and did not have the luxury of finding a well-paid job?
No, I have not. But also, you're right that having that job would help them out, but it would do a disservice to the company. They are more likely to leave early when their responsibility doesn't match their experience level. Imagine how a principle engineer would feel if they were treated like an intern, because their role is intern? Sure they might need that job for cash flow reasons, but they will leave as soon as they can.
> I could go on, but I think some harsh experiences for you, like layoffs would be your greatest teacher.
I have had "harsh" experiences. I have 14 years of industry experience. I've been laid off multiple times. I've worked at companies that completely shutdown. I have had to lay other people off.
>They are more likely to leave early when their responsibility doesn't match their experience level.
What you are saying is that it is perfectly ok for more capable people to not earn a living? ( not saying it is right or wrong, just making an observation). I'm reminded of people who were rejected for police jobs because of higher IQs
>I have 14 years of industry experience
No, that is not a lot.
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.
We don't need more reluctant managers in engineering, they do enough damage as it is. Management should be a strictly personal choice, and it should be easy to bail out of if it turns out you don't like it after all.
We seem to be exiting the exponential growth stage of our industry, which means we're past the point where shoehorning people into management made any kind of sense. If we hit something approximating steady state then we'd expect 1 engineer to transition to management for every ~4 engineers who don't, which means what's actually needed now is a clear career path for the 4/5 who don't need to and don't want to be managers.
> technically, if you do want to perform at the very best, interacting with other people is not avoidable
This is a weird line to include, given that OP didn't mention anything about not liking interacting with other people. Management involves a lot more than interacting with other people—many introverts make great managers and many extroverts make terrible ones.
Most tech companies of a certain size, which unfortunately are they ones paying top of the market, are heavily top down. Middle managers don't effect change, they just hold useless meetings.
It's hard for even CTOs to effect change and give their input to the board of directors so that anything change.
Then, because they have a limited amount of things they can try before they get booted, it's unlikely they'll have results by when they're needed (new investors, someone new acquiring the company).
Being a manager is a generally a terrible idea in these companies.
I went from PE to Senior Eng with a substantial pay rise and way less hassle. I'm planning to accumulate some more money until I can't pass as an Engineer anymore then try to pivot into my own business.