Comment by jamhan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamhan | Hacker News Reader

Oh please. Spare us the pearl clutching. I'm willing to bet that if I filed a freedom of information act on this company's 457 applications that 1) there was little or no attempt to find a suitable candidate in the local market and 2) the 457s they did get have some relationship to employees already at the company.

The 457 visa was a government program that was being exploited, and quite obviously too, for quite some time, just like any government program eventually will be. For another recent example, look at what happened to the child care subsidy program. Government programs can serve a good purpose if they are well regulated and audited but comically and sadly for citizens they never are.

I just wonder if the 457 reforms would have taken so long if the Commonwealth Public Service had outsourced their IT to some South Asian consultancy and discovered that suddenly and mysteriously there were not enough skilled Australian IT workers to support them in Canberra (and elsewhere) and rather rapidly offices were filled with 457s. But this is exactly what large corporations in the private sector have done.

In IT and other sectors (notably health), companies are using 457s to save on employee salaries, pure and and simple. I have knowledge of assistants in medical practices being told to accept the lower salaries that their 457 co-workers are on or lose their jobs.

Oh, and it really annoys me what Atlassian founder Mike Cannon-Brookes keeps on saying. How about you invest in training locals instead of whinging all the time about not being able to import people?

BTW, I'm a UNSW CompSci graduate, 40+, have a lot of international experience, can operate at the technical and business level, speak a couple of languages, and after my last (5-year) contract ended I spent 2+ fruitless years searching for more IT work, while conspicuously the suburb I used to work in (with telcos, Cisco and software companies) filled with people from certain demographics. Despite all my experience, I didn't get invited to a single interview. Not one. Ageism and 457s killed the job market for people like me.

Atlassian hires tons of graduates.

> I spent 2+ fruitless years searching for more IT work, >I didn't get invited to a single interview

If you didn't get a single interview in two years of looking either you are vastly overestimating your capabilities compared to your CV or your CV is junk. How many different CVs did you try during that time? What are you skilled in? You say IT work but are you a programmer, ops, support? What are you business skills like? How does ageism factor in when you didn't even make it to the interviews for them to be able to tell your age?

Are you really that obtuse? I write my CV. It has 20+ years of experience plus degree from my University. Simple math not your strong point perhaps?

If you have 20+ years of experience on your CV it's a shit CV. Why would anyone hiring care what you were doing over 20 years ago?

I'm wondering what else was wrong with it that you didn't get a single response in 2 years of trying. Were you including unique cover letters? Where were you finding the jobs you were applying to? Did you try going through a recruiter?

And now we get to the crux of the matter. I wonder how old you are? Why is it that in IT broad long-term experience is considered irrelevant? If you have not done exactly that something in the past six months you might as well not exist. I love the conversations with recruiters/companies that go something like this:

Them: I see you you used technologies X,Y,Z in your last job. Me: Yes, and <I explain in further detail what that entailed> Them: Did you use <some tangential A-framework> with technology-X at all? Me: No, I used B-framework because reasons. Them: You are dead to us.

BTW, I find it puzzling you are focusing specifically on my perceived failure in the job market rather than the topic of the original post.

I'm in my mid-30s and I don't care how old you are I've worked with many excellent programmers in their 50s and 60s and learned tons from all of them.

Broad long-term experience isn't considered irrelevant it's just not needed on a CV. If you haven't done it in the past 5 years you're probably just not that skilled at it anymore and if you have it's already on the CV in the newer role.

Are you just imagining those conversations because you said in 2 years you never made it to the interview stage.

You are blaming your failure on the topic of the original post so it is relevant.

I was talking about actual in-the-flesh interviews, which are the only ones that count in the end. Recruiters/companies often do phone "interviews" or "pre-screenings" or whatever and those were the "conversations" I was referring to. So now you've called me a liar as well as having called my CVs "shit". What a pleasant co-worker you must be.

Edit: On that note, perhaps you could post somewhere an anonymised version of your CV so we can all benefit from the pinnacle of CV design.

So you've had interviews?

You shouldn't be so defensive of your CV but I apologize if I was rude. Plenty of mine were shit over the years too. I've had to read thousands over the years and discuss them with others so I have some idea of what turns hiring managers off. There is no need for that much history on a CV regardless of your age. You want your CV to tell the hiring person you can do the job. A full listing of all your work history doesn't do that it just adds pages to the print out that aren't going to be read and will probably annoy the person for having to scroll through them all since I assume you include other information at the end. 20+ year old educational qualifications don't do that. 5 years outside of uni you should drop it unless you have some particularly special and amazing qualification. Tell them if they ask.

I haven't needed a CV for like a decade now but rest assured my last one was pretty shit too.

Sigh. Clearly I wasn't referring to graduates. Read his comments recently regarding 457s.

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