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Comment by brandall10 | Hacker News Reader

As mentioned elsewhere in the this chat, I'm a 45 yo principal engineer at my current company who has seen nothing but an increase in attention from recruiters since turning 40.

I'm also directly involved in hiring for my team, having helped add 15 members over the last year, working directly w/ the director to review all resumes, handling maybe 30% of the screens, and usually the veto vote. We've interviewed a number of engineers in their 40s and 50s.

Experience is great and we're always welcoming of older devs... but there is a caveat. If that experience is tempered by a somewhat pessimistic attitude, which is often the case, there is rarely a chance to move forward. It's not being old - it's being worn out.

AFA the resumes of older devs, we often cut them out because they're an objectively terrible, wall of text mess that goes on for 4+ pages. Like 2/3 of the time this is the case.

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I'm a 50+ staff eng, and I agree that I'm getting as much interest as ever from recruiters. Just gotta stay current and never take on the attitude I see from older engineers of "this new crap is just what we used to do back in the day". New stuff is different and has value, just accept it and stop whining.

As for resumes, I personally don't get the page limit, since I love long resumes with detail when I'm evaluating engineers, but understand the marketplace absolutely hates them. I don't know if it is HR or auto pre-filters or the hiring managers, but it doesn't matter. All I know is that when looking for a job most recently, I had a 3+ page resume and was getting some, but not many, hits. Then, as an experiment, I trimmed it down to a single page, making it ridiculously thin in my judgement, ran it through the various sites that judge the resume based on keywords, and came up with a custom resume (lightly so) for each posting. I suddenly jumped up to a 75%+ call back rate.

Keep your resume to 1 page, cut out the details on the old jobs unless it is really interesting, and basically just list the tech you know.

For me it’s all about communication style. I see those wall of text resumes and I see a person that is going to be a poor communicator and possibly a sloppy coder - not knowing when to self-edit and separate the wheat from the chaff on what actually brought value to the roles they took.

Detail is great but concision is greater. The resume is a marketing vehicle and it should be well honed. We can dig into what someone knows during the half dozen hours we spend interviewing them.

I understand the need to fake overwhelming optimism to get by interviewers with mindsets similar to yours. Too much honesty can be bad in this industry, especially at higher levels, where diplomacy and soft skills are very important.

I have that optimism and it certainly is not fake. I love what I do. Yes, I bring experience to the table but not bad energy.

WTF would you want to hire someone who poisons the well? It doesn't matter what the job/industry is, in what situation would that be remotely desirable?

If you say so. But just as you doubt the vigor of the “somewhat pessimistic” candidate (in your words, you didn’t say they were toxic), others will doubt the sincerity of your overwhelming optimism. So is life.

When we discuss these types of candidates, that is always the tone of the discussion.

It's good to discuss the pluses and minuses of an approach, we encourage this in our architecture section of the interview loop and during the initial screen when discussing line items in the resumes.

It's having a general negative attitude... bad mouthing past employers, being negative to a tech stack (and literally not couching it with any reasoning what-soever when we try to dig in), being negative to past arch decisions by co-workers without providing what are better solutions, things like that. Sometimes it's implied, sometimes it's more direct, but it there is a distinct lack of social intelligence that seems to happen more w/ older candidates that just suggests someone is burnt out. Wisdom should bring skill, not attitude.

Forest from the trees here. You pay someone to bring value to the team. That is not valuable to anyone. We're not running charities.

You’ll find a lack of social intelligence in the entire age range, but younger candidates seem to get more of a pass than older ones (or perhaps because the senior candidates have more rope to hang themselves with). Over negativity about past employers is indeed a warning sign (though some negativity is fine, like if you ask the question “what did you dislike about your past employer? “), but pessimism in small quantities shouldn’t be taken as an automatic negative. I would definitely be suspicious if all the opinions a senior candidate had were positive. If they can’t list the bad as well as good about some tech, they probably don’t really understand it.

"You’ll find a lack of social intelligence in the entire age range"

But this is specifically an issue more prevalent in older candidates, and is in large part the reason for a pass. We pass on younger candidates as well for this reason, but most prevalently for skill.

"If they can’t list the bad as well as good about some tech, they probably don’t really understand it."

I literally just said we consider this a positive and that we specifically dig in for this. It seems like you're willfully misinterpreting the message here, which is underscoring the point I'm actually making.

Seriously, don't be that person.

Really, what you are saying is 100% spot on, but seems to be misunderstood for some reason.

If presented with a difficult problem, there are people that go "nah, that can't be done, here's a long list of reasons why".

There are also people that go "That's going to be difficult, but maybe we can try A, B or C and I recall reading about this cool new tech that could perhaps help"

Be open to change and open to accepting that new things could be good and interesting.

I'm 43. Hiring engineers. Working with some 50+ engineers that are the absolute best I've ever worked with.

This is 100% correct. As a hiring manager, the attitude of candidates was probably equally important as their skills when it comes to the decision of whether to hire. The baseline of is this someone I would enjoy working with every day? Is this someone my team would enjoy working with every day? If it's not a solid yes I'm going to pass on you.

This must be some kind of cultural difference in the purpose of jobs. Where I come from, the purpose of work is get things done, put food on the table, and hopefully not make the world a worse place in the process. Enjoying the company of everyone you work with is not a significant consideration.

You might be missing out on a lot of great people because of your high first impression bar. And I don’t mean good workers but bad social skills, but people who are actually really chill to work with even if they don’t show it so quickly. This is why most culture fit filters really don’t work well, people have a wrong or too narrow impression of who they would enjoy working with everyday.

> The baseline of is this someone I would enjoy working with every day?

And a problem is that hiring managers, but especially recruiters are often relatively young, and thus biased towards people closer to their own age.

I can't stand the jaded senior engineer archetype. They're absolutely toxic to the junior and mid-level engineers who look up to them.

Years ago i was at a coffee shop and overheard a conversation between a college student and what had to have been an assigned mentor. This guy was going on and on about the very worst of his experiences in his career yet, in a weird way, bragging about them at the same. This poor kid was writing every word down in a notebook she had. He got up to the restroom and i walked over and politely told her this guy is only filling her head with poison and to run as far and as fast away from them as possible. She got up and left.

As long as you're not gonna be ageist that's fine to hate a certain type of engineer. Remember you will get old one day too and you'll be surprised how fast time flies.

I understand what you mean but I’m 45 and have been around the block a few times. I’m not sure if this analogy works completely but teaching someone how to climb a mountain safely is good.

Beating into the head of an aspiring climber the details of every injury/death disillusioning them of even an attempt is full stop unacceptable.

I get you buddy seems like you had a bad experience with some old dude. But you're no spring chicken yourself, you will get to that age eventually. Let's just all be humane to each other and judge each other according to merit as much as possible. I'm 37 and wanna keep working 15 years from now...

Some pessimism is good. We're older, we've seen it fail already. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again just in a different programming language. That's why you hire older programmers.

From one older dev to another - you’re misinterpreting the message.

Why do you think they have a pessimistic attitude?

I´ll use myself as an example.

I started coding professionally at 23 (I´m 43). For years I pushed myself to be the best coder I could. At 35 I got laid-off. After that I just got sucky jobs were I´m treated like they have me there as a favor (and I work with the latest, and I´m, even with the pessimism, a top performer).

A coworker of mine that thought that coding was a losers job, coded for some months and went to work as a B.A and later as a PM, nowadays is an engineering manager which earns way more than me and is treated way way better. His whole programming experience is an 8-month part time stint with Winforms. And sadly he is not the exception...

In most places devs are being had.

With all due respect, there is no reason to have had sucky jobs over the last 8 years. The market has only gotten increasingly hotter... if you're in a tight spot career-wise, do the work to get into a better company working w/ better people.

If it's an issue w/ passing interviews at better companies, interviewing unto itself is a skill that should be regularly honed.

When I was a younger engineer I was stuck in a job that was unsatisfying for about 5 years... every 1.5 years or so I would interview w/ 3-5 positions, usually one or two would be close to an offer but I ended up empty-handed, would get deflated and give up.

Over the last decade I've taken the job search much more seriously, usually interviewing at 15-20 companies so I can end up w/ 3-5 offers to choose from. Yes, it's very time consuming (probably some 60-70 hours of my time over 5-6 weeks), but the quality of the companies I've worked at has been consequently more satisfying.

I've met plenty of toxic/ego maniacs/pessimistic people who were in there 20s or 30s. Sure age might correlate a bit with the pessimistic side of things but not terribly so imo.

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