my friend, they are being more and more picky
Wait, that was a joke, right?
There you go. Who determines who is qualified? HR screening everybody in the dev business that doesn't have a compsci resume? Under 30 years old? Been out of work for a few years living on savings?
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the developer scarcity is artifical
Out of the three of us, I'm the only one with a CS degree. We sure as hell aren't looking at academic qualifications. Basically competent coders are absolutely a scarce resource. More than basically competent are rare and precious diamonds in the rough.
You might not require a CS degree (I see a lot of shops starting to give up on that, but its still common), and hopefully you don't discriminate (3 guys, all about the same young age right?), but I'm convinced there's a lot of development talent out there not being utilized because employers have an exact image of what a developer looks like and is only trying to find that, which would explain why there is both a "hot jobs market" and lots of unemployment at the same time.
The parent post claims that there's some vast, undocumented sea of talented unemployed developers, but I am aware of no statistical documentation of such, and no anecdotes resembling your hypothetical situation. That the parent has a large chip on his shoulder about his age is obvious from his posting history, but in my experience if a dev of any age is having trouble finding work the reason is always that they're not nearly as talented as they think they are. 90% of the people in this industry are just plain bad at what they do.
But let's say it happened: would we give this hypothetical person a fair shake? I'd like to think so. His age is irrelevant. His experience is valuable. But why is COBOL his only listed skill? If that was the only tool at his mainframe job, that's all well and good, but the #1 thing I want to see out of candidates is a lot of evidence that they are keeping up with the industry and keeping their tool chest well stocked with cutting edge tools they're picking up on their own time. I want the people I work with to be autodidacts who can quickly and smoothly move from ruby to clojure to objective-c as a project evolves. 30 years at one tool doesn't scream self-motivated learner to me.
But maybe he could talk me around at the interview.
I've met plenty of very capable people who only programmed 40 hours a week at their jobs. Our hypothetical 55-year-old maybe has a family, outside interests, and so on. This is something that is unique to the IT industry, expecting people to work in the field out of hours. I can't think of any other industry that does this. In the case of our COBOL guy, he's probably been refining his domain knowledge, and has probably learnt a lot about solving business problems with code which is what we all actually do.
If you want to be paid a lot of money to put in 40 hours and go home and never even think about a computer or feel compelled to pick up a new skill on your down time, hey man, I don't blame you. That sounds like nice work if you can find it.
But I don't think you're going to find much of it in a knowledge economy.
So if our hypothetical COBOL programmer had that job and is looking for something like that again, I wish him the best of luck, but I've got nothing for him. We aren't experiencing a shortage in domain knowledge.
We're not hiring H1Bs. We're not discriminating based on age. We're hiring talented, knowledgable people in a knowledge-based economy.
You don't want to educate yourself, upgrade your skills in your own time, keep your own knowledge of the industry current? That's perfectly fine. You want a job that lets you re-use the same knowledge for 30 plus years with no need for effort on your own time to keep you relevant to a changing marketplace? That's fine too. Go stamp out license plates or resurface roadways.
But don't whine about how this industry is so mean to you because of your age. The only thing that's being discriminated against here is your unwillingness to put in the effort to keep up with the changing needs of the people looking to pay money for the right knowledge.
You don't get it. For most old COBOL geezers, that's just how they've always worked, they don't know any different - and neither would you in their shoes. All their peers and their managers are that way, that's normal to them, just as blogging and GitHub is normal for us. Show 'em there's another way and they'll take to it like a duck to water.
But don't whine about how this industry is so mean to you because of your age.
I'm in my mid 30s, and haven't encountered ageism myself. But I am aware that it is a huge problem, and when I'm hiring, I don't overlook these guys, because they don't have the latest buzzwords on their CV, and 90% of the time, I make a good call. A few are like you say, stagnant. Most just need their eyes opening a little.
Twitter was fucking obnoxious to deal with, and I was referred by an employee. My recruiter there only responded to messages when I harassed her or emailed my friends working there. Phone screens took forever to set up.
A9 blew off my resume, also internally referred, for two and a half weeks then wanted to rush rush rush! when they finally contacted me and I was in late stage interviews with other companies. After I dropped what I was doing and went there for a day, they didn't even have the courtesy to contact me and say, "no thanks." I'm not pissed they didn't move forwards; it's just they are assholes w/ no class for not contacting me after I wasted a day there.
Linkedin: I turned them down because after I took a day off work to interview there, they then only used four hours, conveniently in the very middle of the day so it burned a whole day of vacation time. They then wanted me to come back again for another two meetings. Um... let me think about that. NO. If I kill a day of vacation to interview somewhere, people need to do whatever the fuck it takes so that at the end of the day, they can move forwards to reference checks or say no. I'm not giving companies two days of vacation (keeping in mind that vacation is paid out when you resign, so that's $500 per day I'm paying to interview.) Note I also have a broken leg, which they were aware of, which makes driving places more than a little inconvenient.
Red Hat: Resume submitted in spring, still being reviewed. (It says so on their careers website.)
Mozilla: Have a non-responsive e-mail address on their careers page, advertise jobs for months even though the hiring manager has left the company, provide zero feedback in nonacceptance e-mails (just some boilerplate text + request to connect with the recruiter on LinkedIn). One hiring manager there asked me for suggestions to solve a specific big data problem, then failed to follow up to my reply for more than two weeks. After contacting him on IRC, he sent an awkward e-mail that he'd like to postpone the project until later in the year. I sent a lengthy e-mail complaining about the ridiculously unprofessional conduct and he didn't have the grace to send any kind of response. Definitely one of the most fucked-up hiring experiences in my career.
I hate it when people don't reply promptly, and I endeavor to follow-up to each stage within 24 hours either way.
Then again, I am a programmer directly hiring other programmers so I know what it's like. At those bigger places, you aren't interacting with the people you'd actually work with =/
We are hiring people to hack with ruby -- nerds@gobble.com