Job applicants over 40 filtered out by employers

I am constantly pestered by recruiters and companies to interview. I think one of the things that helps is that I trimmed my resume to omit material older than 5 years, removed unnecessary dates, and I make a point of drawing attention to studying for new industry certifications. It probably doesn't hurt that I stay physically fit, either. As cruel as it may be, if you're out of shape and look "frumpy" or "run down," that will count against you far, far worse than your age.

The key is to make the age factor irrelevant by not drawing unnecessary attention to it or by projecting a stereotypical "middle aged" image. We can argue all day about whether that's fair or not (it's not), but you have to do what you have to do.

With age comes maturity. It's allowed me to get along better with my co-workers (so many upper 20s, lower 30s tend to be a bit... hot headed) and I'm not afraid to negotiate. The older I've gotten, the more comfortable in my skin and in my skill set I've become.

If there's ageism I've yet to experience it and I've worked with people well in their 50s doing mobile. It comes down to who you're working for, what your skill set is, timing and, in my opinion, health. You've got to stay healthy and look healthy! Also, I tend to prune my resume, no one wants to see your experience 8+ years ago.

Or maybe it's all luck, ask me in five years what I think when Objc/Swift goes the way of PHP, I might be singing a different tune.

Many 40+ year olds have families or other life obligations outside of work, and thus they may not be as willing to put in absurd hours that a young employee could be squeezed for. The older employee also might be more likely to take weekends off, and want to use vacation time.

Additionally, someone over 40 is supposed to be in or near their peak earning years, which lasts ten to twenty more years (or did historically anyway) so their expenditure is going to be significantly more than someone with a few years of experience.

I realize it's one of the lamest analogies possible, but for many companies, employees are quite literally a cog in a larger machine, and so they want the cheapest possible cog at a reasonable quality level that works the longest before breaking down (quitting, getting fired, burning out, etc).

To fight this, I'd bet those over 40 would have to aim to get into important management and executive positions, which are less likely to be swapped out for less experienced, less demanding, and cheaper labor.

The funniest interview I had was with some blonde girl in her twenties, who read through my CV and said: "Oh, you see. We cannot send your application to our client. You see, here I have hundred of applications from people at your age, who are managers in their thirties, and you are not. There is most probably something wrong with you." And it was a position for a programmer, not a manager.

And it was when I was in my early thirties, not forties.

Currently, I'm almost 40, and I seek only for remote work (family issues). I have been paid for programming for the last 14 years. I had different jobs like sysadmin, dba, programmer; using over 10 different languages.

And despite all that searching for work is really hard. Usually, it stops at the recruiter who is only interested in an answer to "how much do you want to get?". After that, there is no counter offer, no negotiation, nothing. Sometimes there is an answer like "you want too much, but don't negotiate at this recruitment step".

When I get to the technical part of the interview, I usually get some Yeti-Level programs to write. Yeti-Level, because you are not going to write anything like that in those time restrictions in that jobs. A good example is implementing a program which gets input from a file, in the input, there are domino tiles, and a function needs to match them and find the longest chain... all must be super optimized from the beginning. And you have 5-10 minutes to do everything, including reading the task description, examples and writing tests.

The funny fact is that this company is searching for candidates for months. The sad fact is that due to such strange recruitment process, good old experienced programmers will starve.

I really think that I did very bad choice with my career. There are so many other jobs where people are not removed because of age, and experience is really appreciated. In IT you just need to accept that companies want young inexperienced kids, who want to get little figures, but a game room is a must.

This is why I decided to start my own company again after 4 1/2 years at Square which was probably the last time I ever would be working for someone else.

This way age becomes an asset rather than a liability.

This is exactly the sort of thing they make better.

It isn't a perfect approach, but it makes it more difficult to discriminate since by the time you have a face-to-face interview with the employer you are already well along in the interview process.

Not trying to be in denial, but all these jobs appear to be blue collar jobs (assuming "administrators" is office admins and not Sys Admins / Network Admins :) .

Any data on whether this happens in our Tech / I.T. Industry, where every other month, you read a story on severe shortage of skilled tech workers everywhere?

Part of the challenge of getting a new job after 40 is deciding whether it really matters whether you're making the same or more $$ in the next job or not. Many people are unwilling to take a pay cut when they have 20 years of experience, even though the job only requires 5.

Challenge is to prove it.

As a hypothetical employer I might think these roles are lesser roles, so if you are older I would wonder why you had not been able to secure a greater economic situation.

Second, as consumer facing roles, attractiveness is a benefit, with those over 40 having less of it. It is not discrimination on the basis of age, but attractiveness that would be the cause.

Another talking point: the trend of waiting until late 30's to have kids greatly compounds this problem.

Open question - is there any research on to what degree these three worries are true?

Job applications generally don't and possibly can't ask about age, but it's a required field on applications for YC or other incubators.

Personally I would strongly prefer that resume's I review were anonymized and all hints that might bias me were removed before any decisionmaker see's them or they are filtered. This could help more women and minorities get a foothold at that step in the process (I mean generally, not with me specifically).

However, while relatively simple censoring of resumes would remove some bias from review, such as race (can often be hinted at by the name or university attended), gender, etc, and it would prevent googling of the person's name, age is extremely hard to hide. You can see a person's job history, which is generally will tell you their age within +-5 years. One partial solution might be to only list job history for the previous 10 years and remove the year a degree was earned, but relative seniority at the beginning of that 10 year work history will still be a very effective proxy for determining age.

So, unfortunately I think we can't hide age in an effective way without removing critical information from a resume (removing everything else we can that can be removed should be removed or hidden), but I think it's interesting to speculate on why older workers will be filtered out. I suspect it is a belief (or intuition aka unconscious belief) that someone applying for junior or entry level positions when they are > 40yo is correlated with 'something being wrong', since if there is nothing wrong you would have expected them to have reached a point in their career that they no longer have to blindly submit resumes for these kinds of positions.

I wonder what would happen in a study like this if the resume's representing older hypothetical candidates included some kind of cover letter explaining the situation. For example, saying that they started out working at a bank for 15 years but they found a passion for cooking and that is why they only have 5 years of experience as a chef. My guess would be that not only would this undo the bias against them, but you would find a strong bias towards them (just a guess).

Might this be a clue?

Any job application which is in the reaches of an automated process must be a joke endpoint. How many other automated applications do they get selling employee skills, sex, penis enlargement pills, fast loans, malware and other trash.

Disclosing information should be the first "BS" smell for a job. I'm often well into getting work done before the person I'm working with figures out how old I am, where I live or other personal details. Granted, that's freelancing.

I live in the Philippines where the age requirements are actually advertised. And these ages seem pulled out of a hat. And I get the sense that people running the show at all levels couldn't tell their asses from a hole in the ground. It's a pleasant surprise to find someone who seems competent at convincing you that there's some purpose for them taking up a spot at that spot or role they are taking up in a serious time commitment out of their life.

Clearly the hiring process is just as broken as everything else. Why expect that hiring is going to be significantly more awesome than the rest of the system?

Don't interact with machines. Get to know real people. Show people what you can do. Preferably find people who tell you they could use your help rather than you telling them that you need a job. ;)

That said, there are qualifications and there's "fit." The more experience you have, the stronger the signal on what you might (or might not) enjoy.

For example, if you're 40+ and most your resume says startup, do you really expect a blue chip international to be interested in you? Do you really want them to be? Sure, maybe YOU really need a job. But history probably shows you'll leave as soon as you can land another startup opportunity.

Again, not doubt there's bias in the hiring process. But bias can have a purpose. And sometimes you have to live with the depth and breadth of your CV.

Companies want to hire professionals in their prime, and look at anybody else as a second grade cadre.

I work fifteen hours a day, can't stop learning and trying new technologies to keep myself on top of the wave.

First off, companies like Cisco, Microsoft and Oracle, and even Google, are running entirely off of the centralized education system in the US. These are companies that got their software into curriculum and taught everyone their way of doing things, then engaged in shoving their software and a lot of labor into large organizations making a gargantuan mess that was glossed over with lots of "free overtime". Compare Cisco CLI to Juniper, or Microsoft to Debian, or MS SQL to Oracle; who's going in who's direction.

Why?

If you made the investment in understanding exclusively those companies products you went along the technological imperialism trip and now that you're on the other side, and you never spend time understanding the theory or building critical thinking skills, you're washed up. 20 years working on a massive oracle mainframe or with purely Cisco R&S becomes a liability, the reason being, you never tried to find a better way to do things or try to eliminate your job and replace it with something better.

There's an honesty in Meritocracy; The market has always valued the independent thinking, hard-working, incredibly knowledgeable IT staff with a tremendous depth of understanding of infrastructure, programming, politics, and equipment over what 95% of the IT market has become. 95% of the people I've worked with expect the solution to be in some arcane google search result or in a book; they don't expect to go on the journey of finding the answer. What they never develop is real creativity, a real understanding of the systems they work with, or a real understanding of the architecture, why things are done, or the process of how to build on themselves; to set a path for themselves and others that that eventually brings about a finished product.

The entire IT industry is maturing and getting older and as they do, older staff that haven't done this is viewed as a liability. I'll agree, there's all kinds of ways to try to hire gullible people who don't know their own self-worth. Fact is though, those kinds of companies are on a long-term death spiral of their own making. Every time a large corp outsources, I go look at the 10-k and I see a major cash flow problem of managements making. "The old cranky sysadmin way" is beginning to take at more and more companies and that will trickle into academia as time goes on as management begins to understand what technological imperialism means and what the results are; generally, a total mess.

It's a very controversial thing to say these things because it makes a lot of people who aren't that good, or who invested their time in the wrong things feel like they are doomed. Fact is, there's no set career path in IT like there is in other fields like Attorneys and Lawyers, Stock Brokers, Research scientists and Academia.

The trick I've discovered is to put in no more than 40hrs a week at work, and if overtime is needed, come home and practice, do architecture work, learn algorithms, make good notes, read programming and architecture and project management books. 40hrs a week is for work, 10-20hrs a week is for self-betterment. Then you come into work, and find ways to eliminate your job. A new approach that saves butt loads of time. Get your assignments done early, then either come up with a new project to work on, move on, or study. Within a few years of doing this, you will be a top-tier programmer\architect\systems admin, whatever you want to do.

And while I do feel for people who feel they've fallen behind due to having a family, the fact is from my perspective, the real issues with society are things like 21% of GDP being spent on a scummy healthcare industry, or high incomes of the top 1%, or lack of wage parity tariffs on imports from China. The baby boomers have really messed things up for us. The fact you can't go from a high paying IT job to a factory job or retail management position and still have enough money to put your family in a decent home with 3 hots and a cot and to put your kids through school and college is a failure of society in general, not the IT industry. Those issues need fixed and frankly, contribute a heck of a lot to our messed up society.

Technology and mobile/web/games are still young industries, in all new industries they start/skew younger. Radio for instance was young at inception but is now older in terms of age, it takes a couple decades for people to decide it is worth pursuing or starting in.

Being a web developer has only been around for 20 years and being a mobile developer only a decade truly (smartphone era). People are going to skew younger here and more coders are 40-50 and younger. As time goes on this will change and skew older. Incidentally because it is a young industry, there is a large divide of people that grew up with the internet and ones before, same on mobile. I think that hangs over the age thing. Older people used to be bad at tech but most people in their 40s even grew up with it or used it very young. Many of my older coder friends started with commodore 64s, Apple IIs and had to find answers before Google, they are now mobile/game/app/web developers. Many of them are more knowledgeable than younger coders today may ever be because they were in the time when everything was being built and the layers were easier to see. There is tons of cruft for a young coder to navigate and once you get out of college (22-24) or masters (27-30) and work for 5-10 years and get your head around this skill, they call you too old, it is a bit cruel but goes back to the young industry bit.

On the brightside, our industry is also unique, we can break out on our own and still compete enough to provide a living. In other industries and lines of work, the costs to startup are immense and risky, bootstrapping is easier in technology. Either in freelance or software as a service or starting something, there is always an option if you keep coding/building/shipping/solutions. Programming is a meta skill like business and marketing that allows you to literally go into almost any industry.

Most people in tech around their late 30s or 40s want to start their own thing and that is a benefit. Young developers may be too uncomfortable doing that because of their confidence and experience. Even lawyers and doctors, if they don't start their own practice, put up with the same push around that everyone else does as they age and get experience. What you need to do is find your own vehicle around this time so you can navigate the waters with a little more command.

Just ship and build things, don't get caught up in the averages. There is a lack of coders still that can deliver from start to live, in fact this situation appears to be getting worse. Provide that and you will always be marketable.

Side note: if you are over 40, I'd suggest paying for your own individual independent insurance. I feel health insurance is another pressure on older engineers in startups at least. I have seen at least two guys get run out based on health conditions and age. Once health insurance is separated from the job, ageism is less intense at these types of places.

Life is challenging for me now, and this article directly applies to me. Oh, and there's that thing about being a white male and suicide. Now imagine being a kind of intimidating looking type in a very non white anti trump area.

Tribalism is real. Had I stuck with my tribe early on I'd be more secure. My demise is probable at this time.

I am solid in my desire to self terminate yet lack the ability to overcome fear of death. I stay alive but it's closer than ever. It's almost a humane thing to let me go. I wouldn't wish my brain on anyone.

Good luck all.