Comment by jean_claude | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jean_claude | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, I empathise with you. Once the crystal embedded in your palm starts flashing red(1), nobody in the industry even wants to acknowledge your existence, let alone your experience. I have a youthful voice and went to university for CompSci long after graduating from a technical high school, so when I show up for the in-person interview, the atmosphere often gets sucked out of the room.

The absolute worst experience was a technical phone interview that was going very well, I thought I connected with the interviewer(2). So I was shocked after being complimented on the breadth and depth of knowledge I had, near the end of a 45 minute conversation, there was a pause and he asked "so, when did you graduate from high school?" Needless to say, the tone changed somewhat and I didn't get the in-person interview for the position that "wasn't really a good fit for me," and he, "wasn't really sure [we're] going to actually fill this position," forgetting that he earlier said he wanted someone as soon as possible.

(1) See Logan's Run -- it's a documentary about the Bay area companies' solution for aging software engineers. /s (2) And I knew him, but only in the sense I knew him from several mailing lists stretching back to the days of USENET as a knowledgeable, respectable guy with a good reputation.

TL;DR ageism is a thing everywhere.

A friend of mine, aged 46, recently graduated with an IT degree.

He has had many interviews, and in about half of them he tells me he was rejected by the interviewers at the end because they're "looking for someone 'fresher'." One interview he had started out with a phone interview, and they loved him and his experience. He turned up for the interview, and the first question it was some time before the first question was asked because of all the awkward ways the interviewer tried to broach the topic of my friend's age.

I'm 41, with a Computer Science degree, and I don't even get half the number of interviews he has. He previously worked for an educational institution, I worked for what turned out to be one of the least reputable employers in town. That guy's business practices destroyed any hope of finding work that I've had. (In my country, if you're unemployed and signed up with the government support agency, whether receiving financial support or not, you agree to accept any reasonable job offer.)

Aside: in the last eight years, I've had three interviews. The first one found out that I have a disability, and much like your interview, he forgot that he'd told me I was well suited to the role due to my knowledge and skills. He turned bright red and started screaming at me, literally screaming. He was threatening me with legal action and bills, for wasting his time because I didn't have enough experience, threatening to lay a formal complaint with the referring agency.

Please tell your friend that most engineers have no business interviewing anyone. They may be intelligent in some ways but my experience in interviewing 100+ candidates for various positions is that most of my fellow engineers should stick to computers.

Perhaps you should too..

@tamana

I'm a great interviewer because I have a bit more empathy and interest in understanding other people.

You can downvote me if you like but my words still ring true.

>Aside: in the last eight years, I've had three interviews. The first one found out that I have a disability, and much like your interview, he forgot that he'd told me I was well suited to the role due to my knowledge and skills. He turned bright red and started screaming at me, literally screaming. [...]

wat. I presume this was after you called him out on his contradiction?

I'm sure unemployment is worse than paid employment , but it sounds like people who do work with that hiring manager would also have a pretty bad time of it. Hateful ill-tempered people rarely compartmentalize it (except when sucking up to power)

FWIW my company does embedded development and we take in many older engineers because of our skill base working with low level hardware and unmanaged code that much of the younger crowd is lacking.

I suspect that the trouble is that, while work like yours does favor the pre-Ruby/JavaScript generation, there just isn't a whole lot of it. It is probably growing in absolute numbers though, while the supply of low-level near-metal experience is not.

Yeah, I can imagine. About half the kids (adults, really -- it was a grad course) in a systems programming course I took had that deer in the headlights look in the computer lab sitting at a Unix prompt. Not that they couldn't figure it out, but there was a definite learning curve.

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