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Comment by amiune | Hacker News Reader

I'm 37 I thought I was too old but I decided to start all over again. Took some courses from Coursera about Deep Learning and last month started competing in kaggle and similar competitions sites. I earned 7k dollars but the most important is that I'm learning a lot like if I was in the university again, I think I'm learning even faster.

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I'm 36 and have not once experienced blatant ageism. I keep my skills current and have pivoted my career many times when things got less interesting or I could tell the market was falling off. I went sysadmin>neteng>syseng>SRE and will have to pivot in 4-5 years again, probably, once some other culture-breaker has hit distributed systems for the 3rd time in my career.

Now, I don't have kids so you might go "hey you've got so much free time" - I'm also a 36yo engineer with 10+ years of experience. Most of the positions I take nowadays allow me AMPLE time (as in months) to do research and learn new systems before deploying them to production. I almost never study or work at home these days. A LOT less than in my 20s when I worked in startups.

I just went through a few months of interviewing, what did every company want out of me at this "age" (experience)? They wanted a strong desire to mentor and cultivate teams. I've worked with a lot of older engineers who aren't happy to do this, and that's a huge problem and something majorly wrong and undesirable in tech.

FWIW I will not ever consider the 30s or 40s old. I am working with a lot more 23-25yo developers now and feel like half of my skillset is bridging communication between zoomers and gen-x bosses. They love learning and its incredibly rewarding helping them grow their careers - something that I never got help with when I started in the toxic tech world of ~2008.

I'm a lead/staff IC, not a manager, fwiw.

Had the opposite experience in London and I am not even 36 yet.

Could quote almost 10 companies that cancelled the interview in early stage or didn't interview at all, saying too much experience and worry I'd leave after 6 months for a better company (higher pay).

Gave up on interviewing for startups and medium companies. Get a job in a top tier company or starve to death. (Top tier is mostly finance in London because FAANG don't have big offices here).

Do you list every single position on your CV, like is it multiple pages with 15+ years on it? I believe CVs are like that whereas my resume is a 1 pager that only has my last decade of SUPER relevant experience listed; my last 3 SR Eng roles.

I could submit a 3 page resume with all of my sysadmin, etc jobs on it but then I would definitely be aging myself, even worse because my career actually started when I was 16 (I only mention this in casual interviews). If I started back then it'd probably look like I was 42+ on paper but at that point it's kind of more of a "why is this person listing irrelevant skills from 2005?"

Unfortunately I think that's the expectation with CVs? The ones I've seen look like they're describing the persons entire life to me.

One page both sides. Only list the most relevant positions.

I had to cut out positions very early on in my career because there were way too many to fit. I did some short contracting back in the days, imagine 5 jobs over less than 5 years.

Also removed all the dates for degrees and all the locations. (London recruiters have a bad habit to ignore experience outside London).

> Could quote almost 10 companies that cancelled the interview in early stage or didn't interview at all, saying too much experience and worry I'd leave after 6 months for a better company (higher pay).

This isn't ageism. People do leave jobs they're underqualified for at a much higher rate. And if the salary band for a given job is £50-75k and you require £85k then why would they interview?

The cheapest companies in London pay around 90-100k base, which is quite respectable. Your concern would be valid if the pay was really low but it is not. There are few companies that will significantly top that.

Sure, an employee might leave to Google for the money... if only Google had an office in London and they could get an interview and pass. It's not like it's going to invariably happen over the next 6 months. It's far fetched from the company to assume that.

In the meantime the candidate is out of a job because companies refuse to hire them (I don't know if that's ageism but that's certainly something) and the company gets no work done because it's understaffed.

My point wasn't about the pay figure exactly, just that if you want more money than they want to pay, that's not ageism it's wanting more money than a position is worth to someone.

> companies refuse to hire them (I don't know if that's ageism but that's certainly something)

What is it then? Nobody is owed a job as a human right, and companies are under no obligation to hire a specific person.

Thanks for sharing your experience! I think this “They wanted a strong desire to mentor and cultivate teams” is a fantastic insight!

31 here. I almost did the same. I was working as fullstack developer + infrastructure engineer on AWS and I have recently pivoted to deep learning field and now working for a nlp product at this moment.

I don’t want to be a downer but don’t you think it’s just way easier to learn now because we have so many great resources available to us?

Of course and even more for me that I’m in Latin America and now I can easily access to resources from US and Europe

We do, but there's more surface area to cover because job requirements have also gone up and technology is more complex. Interviewing for tech has also branched off into its own skill with an industry that promotes its own existence.

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