Hacker News Reader

My resume has always been one page. I hate looking over 3 page resumes. I don’t care what you did in the 90s.

No one cares that I wrote C for DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes in the late 90s or the systems I wrote with a combination of C++/COM and Vb6 in the early 2000s. I only go back 10 years.

In fact, I negotiated not to be a team lead at my current job.

Not only that, but I don't want to be hired to fix some old VB6 app or write Crystal Reports. If I'm ever desperate for a job I would change my tune, but that's a different situation.

I took off anything related to C for a similar reason. While C and C++ have a special place in my heart, I was interviewing for a C# position around 4 years ago and I had an interviewer spend 5-10 minutes on C minutiae even though it had nothing to do with the job just to prove how smart he was.

I got the job. But, when I interview there are certain things I want to emphasize and that wasn’t one of them.

>My resume has always been one page. I hate looking over 3 page resumes. I don’t care what you did in the 90s.

This is very culture specific.

Example: Like you, I usually keep a revolving ~10 years history on my CV. As the years progress, I drop anything > 10 years, as it's really no longer relevant.

Anyways, I was pointedly asked one time during an interview, recently, for a company in a different country, "Where's the rest of your work history since university?"

That was almost 20 years ago, now. You have any idea just how long my CV would be, now, with all of that information?

/tableflip.gif

My solution to this has generally been to add a "1997 - 2000 Various Previous work history available upon request" at the bottom.

And then just carry a copy or two of the full CV with you to the interview. If someone wants to see it, let them. Generally interviewers have just been curious.

Even though I think ageism is overblown in the software development industry if you are buzzword compliant, I don’t take any chances. I leave everything off before 2008, my year of graduation and I go completely clean shaven and bald in an interview. (I’m Black it’s not abnormal). Most non-Blacks have no idea how old I am without the obvious signs of gray hair or a receding hair line.

White men can shave bald too, and anyone can dye their hair. There's even a famous hair dye brand that specifically advertises its product for use in gaming age doiscrimination! The product (Just For Men) and ads are gender-discriminatory, of course!

Isn’t being bald culturally more of a negative among White men?

Do you just cut off the jobs after that point entirely, or company, start date, end date?

Everything. After 10 years it doesn’t really matter how much experience you have. I took off the two jobs I had between 1996-2008 because the skillset was outdated (VB6, Perl, Classic ASP) or something I didn’t want to do (C and C++). I’ve been doing C# since 2008 so I don’t think that will be irrelevant even in 2022.

> a surgeon of my age is usually not experienced enough

Forget surgeons. My dentist is nearing retirement age and a younger dentist was brought in to be groomed to replace him. The youngish dentist on more than a few occasions mentioned he couldn't/wouldn't do certain procedures because one with more experience was necessary.

The 'young' dentist is no more than 30 years old. And in coding world, if you are over 30, you are considered over the hill.

> The experience is not valued here. So what is? The lack of experience?

What is valued is someone who can get productive with new trendy framework right away, while receiving minimal pay.

"And in coding world, if you are over 30, you are considered over the hill"

Pure hyperbole.

> I still require to work in a company where my manager/boss/CTO know much more than me. I'm almost 40.

This is a hard requirement to meet because as you go up the hierarchy of positions, the first level leader initially knows more than the junior contributors, but that pretty rapidly flips. Maybe the second level of leadership still knows more than the first, but almost never after that. How could someone be an expert practitioner in all the varied disciplines that they likely oversee? It skews towards general tech leadership quite quickly.

> "you know, here I have dozens of resumes of people 10 years younger than you, who have lots of experience in managing team

So they are 23 year olds write lots of managing experience? Sometimes I just dislike this industry with its title inflation. I am 33 having been a recruiter for a short stint, I can tell you most of them just checkbox candidates because they have no idea what they are hiring. As they say, no one ever got fired buying an ibm.

There are 23 year olds who don’t have the technical chops, so rather than being fired, they are put on a management track. This started to happen around 2000.

Back when I hired into my company in ‘96 (I’m 47 now and 23 years at the same place), all the managers were in their 50’s and 60’s, who had done real engineering.

Then they become younger and younger, and eventually my manager was an idiot in his late 20’s whose relevant technical experience was “designing a power supply for an FPGA”, with me in my 40’s and an expert in my field. I told them I was leaving, so they gave me a promotion, and now I report to a 50 something female. She is a good manager.

Fortunately I’m at they point now where I’m the graybeard in the basement who gets to solve all the hard problems.

> As they say, no one ever got fired buying an ibm.

No one ever got fired going Big Blue...

I know a director or two lol.

> The experience is not valued here. So what is? The lack of experience?

Experience in software development is sadly irrelevant for much of the software development industry. Instead what is today valued is knowledge of some new framework, the ability to describe data structures and algorithms (for interviews only), and the ability to pick-up (hack) at things quickly and without complaint.

All of these things are equally well done by a newcomer, of which there are ever increasing numbers. What future does someone increasingly older have over time, in an industry where the only qualifications (really) sought are "smart, eager, compliant, cheerful, and quick to learn"?

Is this in the US? The way you structure your writing makes me think you're not a native English speaker. What you could be describing is either a bias against hiring non-Americans (i.e. they should be cheap labour) or it's an issue from another country.

Aren't some of your earlier bosses and colleagues able to make introductions?