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Comment by cjamesd | Hacker News Reader

My father-in-law holds degrees from Stanford and Harvard, and has similarly struggled to find a job as he's grown older. When I referred him to an open position at my company, his un-edited resume matched almost perfectly, but the recruiter called him "too operational" -- and obviously had not dug in to who he was. I didn't push it but it seemed that his gray hair visible in his LinkedIn profile was a put off. I can't understand this. What is their line of thinking? That older people are too set in their ways? They command too much salary? They will not be a cultural fit because of an age gap? Can anyone describe the position of those who slyly or effectively hire a younger crowd only? (I realize this is a different context than VC world, which the author is talking about but I think it's similar enough to contribute to the discussion here.)

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My resume scares and likely confuses most people. Most EE's with 30 years of experience have been EE's their entire career. I hired a guy once out of Intel who had, at the time, devoted ten years to designing nothing but power supplies. I couldn't even ask him to design an embedded MCU board, much less write the code. That's fine, nothing wrong with that.

My case is diametrically opposite. I can design anything and tackle just about any discipline. And my resume shows it.

Back when I was just trying to take a break from entrepreneurship and take a job for a few years I got no callbacks at all. Finally a recruiter took pity on me and opened up.

He said I had two problems. If I was dealing with a small company, one look at my resume and their would fear that I wanted a job to learn their business and become a competitor. And, at a mid to large company, when dealing with a VP or manager making the hiring decision, my resume would make them fear I would be after their job after gaining a foothold. So, he said "Nobody is going to hire you. You have no choice but to stay an entrepreneur or lie.".

Not long after that I landed a nice contract to help get astronauts to the International Space Station. That was fun and interesting...yet I eventually ran into the realty that they were paying 20-somethings about 1/3 (or less) of what I was getting. When my work was done my contract had nowhere to go.

Fuck me.

> What is their line of thinking?

Bias, plain and simple.

> What is their line of thinking? That older people are too set in their ways? They command too much salary? They will not be a cultural fit because of an age gap? Can anyone describe the position of those who slyly or effectively hire a younger crowd only?

All of the above. In my experience, hiring managers want to hire someone they can have fun with outside of work so commonalities such as age are very important

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