Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

Falsification: around and after age 35 I found it increasingly difficult to find work, until I got a clue and scrubbed my resume of all evidence of exactly how old I was (removed education dates; I'd already been trimming older jobs due to length and lack of relevance). Did that in the midst of one job search and the difference was like night and day.

BIG caveat: my family and I look a lot younger than we are, with no effort at all besides clothing and wearing a backpack I could pass as a 20 something college student through my early '50s. I also had to be careful in talking about my background, in one memorable 2003 interview I let slip that I'd worked on PDP-11s and the technical interviewer who was probably around my age exclaimed "Just how old are you??!?!??!!!"

Which wasn't intentionally an illegal question, just that the mental model he'd been building of me suddenly went TILT. I did get that job, software archaeology where experience made a difference.

> until I got a clue and scrubbed my resume of all evidence of exactly how old I was (removed education dates;

I've done that.

> I'd already been trimming older jobs due to length and lack of relevance)

And will probably try that as well. I agree that removing any indicators of age helped a lot with getting interviews. This would also help with clueless agents contacting me about PHP or Perl jobs when it's been a very long time since I did either of those things.

As I mentioned elsewhere in this subthread, my heading for this section is "Recent Relevant Experience". So I can leave out things like PHP or Perl if I've decided I never want to use them again. Or to indicate I'm a programmer who likes/is willing to do some system administration, but not indicate I'd take a pure sysadmin job.

Or not cluttering it with no longer particularly relevant technologies. E.g. programming Windows at the Petzold level (although some discussions on HN have given the impression that right now that might be the way to go :-( ).

How many years of experience do you keep on your resume? I've been keeping 20, but it seems the bay area startups can smell that I'm old. (I've not met age discrimination outside of the bay area startups run by 22 year old type companies.)

Interesting idea. I had never considered "aging off" experience. It might be doubly useful in my case, because my first and oldest job was almost pure EE.

Indeed. Your resume is just a tool to get your foot in the door, to get that first conversation with a hiring manager or an interview. Extraneous things, like irrelevant experience, get in the way of that.

Note this will depend on such things as having enough experience to show you're a generically good employee. If you were a new graduate I'd look favorably on e.g. in high school starting out at entry level in a fast food restaurant and working your way up to, say, shift manager (if you could make it that far, very favorably).

Roughly a dozen years, under the heading "Recent Relevant Experience".

But I went more by the oldest jobs that looked really good on my resume, like being the VP of tech or being directly or indirectly responsible for most of my company's revenue, and including figures. Even better than developing software that you claim works is having people buying it and proving it works.

My first post-college job I created a piece of security software and I still run into people that say "you wrote that? We use that!"

But I've also noticed the people who love talking with me about that are not hiring me. It seems they bring me in to reminisce about the old days, and then go hire someone else. As nice as it feels for my ego, I might drop it.

MIT's operating systems class used to (in the early 2000s) be based on Lion's book on UNIX Version 6 for the PDP-11:

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2014/xv6.html

And I can attest the Lions' book is great, I read it as samizdat in the very early '80s, found it more useful than the K&R of that time (or at least K&R's chapter on pointers and arrays was awful, and Lions went way beyond teaching you C). Of course it helped that the system I was supporting for pay was a PDP-11/44, and the student run computer center I founded used a surplus 11/45, all running UNIX(TM).

Its the reason I still wear my hair in a pony tail - I have good genes and am not losing my hair.

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