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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, those 3500 recipients could not have known that you're 41 and tossed the application on that basis. There is just some problem other than the one you imagine.

> I used to mainly work in support, from 1st/2nd/3rd line to sysadmin, systems design and spec, network architect, everything. I do Windows, Linux, Mac OS, networking, comms, some programming knowledge, training, all sorts. But I'm too old to get work as a techie.

Across all the organizations where I have ever worked, I remember plenty of "old" guys doing this kind of IT stuff.

With that background, it's probably going to be hard to apply for anything different. Hundreds of applications but very low interview rate sounds like some sort of insurmountable mismatch between background and job. Or something silly in your application that is raising some sort of "red flag" for no good reason. If your age or date of birth aren't in the application, then that can't be it.

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> those 3500 recipients could not have known that you're 41

A likely-accurate age estimate is easily discernible for applicants who follow the common practice of putting their education history with graduation dates. A much rougher estimate is also possible with nothing more than specific technologies. You can do pretty well with employment history as well -- and I'd suspect that many among hiring managers or HR staff quickly develop a profile (consciously or not) that rules out both inadequate experience AND experience that feels too scattered or too long.

There could also be other factors, of course. Timing can be an issue. I've heard stories of people applying for hundreds of jobs (who were getting hundreds of applicants per open position) during the 2001-2003 bust. I wouldn't be surprised if it were the same thing in 2009 (though I found 2009 was a great time to be contracting -- businesses still wanted stuff done, they just didn't want the liability of an FTE on the books).

And there's always the possibility that the GP was simply not matched to the job, but it's not the foregone conclusion you seem to be assuming.

> I remember plenty of "old" guys doing this kind of IT stuff.

Most of the people I remember working with have health insurance, too, so naturally not having health insurance has rarely been a problem for working people.

(Which is an indirect way of saying: survivorship bias! The existence of companies that employ workers over 30/40/50 is positive to observe for anyone who'd like to make software/IT their career as long as possible, but the figure that'd probably matter most would be the relative hire rates among different age groups.)

Exactly so.

I have tried most things.

I removed all the dates from my CV. No difference; a minimally intelligent pimp can add up. Degree, that's 3y; 3y in this role, 2y in that role, 2 years there, 16y freelancing... This dude is old.

So I removed the early junior jobs from my career history. Result, I got quizzed on how I walked straight into senior roles straight out of university.

So I left out some gaps in the timeline (I've freelanced quite a lot) -- and got curious about the specific tech I'd worked with in particular roles. Deploying Windows NT Server 3.1, or managing a migration from DECnet to TCP/IP, dates you.

You can fool the idiots, sure. But then your CV gets passed to non-idiots.

I don't advertise a DoB any more, nor dates of education, but I do give the years of my various permie jobs. It's easier to just be honest.

If they're ageist, as many are, then you can't lie or BS your way past that.

It's terrible that you haven't gotten a job or any attention. I still think there's something on your resume that might be affecting this. I am in my early 50s and I had no problem getting my last job. But it might be because I have several degrees in CS and experience at leading companies. My resume does list the year I graduated from college and the time at the company's but I had thought of retracting that for my resume in case there was ageism but I didn't see that. I'm an engineer and not in it / support staff so maybe that's part of my advantage. I wish I could see your resume and then I could maybe offer some advice.

If your 25 years of experience are on the application, it doesn't take a math major to spot that you're not 23.

Yeah, all hiring managers know roughly how old you are by the time they've scanned your resume.

Besides the other examples which have been given here there are some subtle flags, too, which apparently are often used as indicators of age on a resume. I saw a whole list of these things somewhere once but I only remember a couple of them right off the top of my head.

For example, I took a typing class back in the day and I was taught to always put two spaces after the end of a sentence. But today this flags you as "old".

Also, for me a properly formatted phone number looks something like this, per convention back in the day: 800-123-4567. But today you'd better write it like the following, else you're "old": 800.123.4567.

And so on.

Of course, one of the benefits of being "old" and still working in the tech field is the ability to toss out little gems like the following, which can be remarkably effective at putting some youngster in their place, when necessary: "Jesus, what a freaking noob thing to say/do!"

Another benefit is being able to walk into a situation where the local kids are maybe in a bit over their heads, whipping out what is to them some old and mysterious IT magic, and then start solving their problems in short order. One of the last times I did this I heard "Wow, we've been trying to figure out how to do that for years now!"

I haven't noticed any particular habits of numerical formatting or anything, but this might be US-specific.

But I have done the pulling-magic-fixes-out-of-a-hat thing. It's fun. :-)

Yes, it was amazing (to those kids) the number of things that I could do for them just using basic commands like DIR and FIND and such under Windows. And when I started using Powershell for the more complex stuff, I got "Powershell? I think I'd heard of that." These were folks in their 20s and 30s, so you'd have thought maybe they would have been a little more on top of such things. But in reality if it wasn't "click, click, drag, drop" then it was generally quite alien to them.

BTW, I think I remember a couple more of those resume flags. Back in the day I was taught to list things out like this, this, and this - that last comma being known variously as the Oxford, Harvard, serial, or series comma. (See what I did there?) But the "modern" way of doing it is this, this and this - with no Oxford comma.

Another had to do with email addresses. Dare you ever list something like an aol.com email address (which my wife still has, for example) lest it flag you as "old school"?

Interesting aside here as to things like Facebook: a few years back there was a notion being promoted among hiring folks (no doubt being pushed by Zuck himself) that if you weren't on Facebook then there must be something seriously wrong with you - that you were probably socially or technologically inept, and you were likely then not a good fit for hiring purposes. Today, of course, "Delete Facebook!" is all the rage.

— EDUCATION

1994-1998 Univerisity of Whatever

BS CS

—

Let’s guess the likely minimum age?

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