Being 35 this news makes me a scared old man who maybe won't get hired again ;)
Most of my experience is in relatively "hot" technology at startups... I have three Rails sites I can point to and worked on an iPhone app with 3 million users, with a node.js and Redis backend. I have a github account. I've solved programming challenges from Facebook, interview street, spotify, etc. I don't think I'm a total slouch, and I've worked with guys FAR worse than I am. It's pretty painful to think about some of the duds that are still employed while I can't even get an interview.
People prescribe keeping skills relevant, but focusing on latest technologies can be a mistake. If I had more experience with Microsoft tech or J2EE I could probably pick up a boring job doing enterprise stuff somewhere in the midwest.
I thought I could always just pick up a job through my network, but a lot of guys my age who were friends at other companies are sort of checked out and are not in a position to hire. The younger guys I met I think just don't want to pull me in because they have plenty of younger friends they could hire first. A lot of tech hiring, especially at the startup level, is hiring guys that you want to be bros with. Generally, you aren't bros with guys 10 or 15 years older than you are.
I never thought I'd be one of the guys in the articles like this, so I'm not sure exactly what to do. I've been working on iPhone apps in my spare time, but at some point I am going to run out of money. It can get very depressing and does quite a number on one's mental health. You feel like you can't socialize because you should be looking for work, and not spending money. Your extended family and friends kind of abandon you because they think something must be wrong with you (maybe there is?). This anxiety and isolation makes it pretty hard to focus and I've been considering trying anti-depressant medications, just so I can finish off my apps. However, I have diminished confidence at this point that having finished iPhone apps will get me any money, or another job. I often feel like I should just stop wasting my time and try to get some sort of dangerous but high paying labor job, like an oil roughneck. Or maybe just move to some cheap developing nation and become some sort of ex-pat weirdo guy?
Another aspect of this, is that it seems kind of weird to even get a job stocking shelves at target, or something. Would they even hire me? Would it be worth it to make the 1400 a month?
I now have a lot of sympathy for the "99%" type people. Those Seth Godin and Friedman pieces about the new economy being no place for average workers are pretty much correct. I wouldn't say I'm a C player but I'd say I'm around a B+. Unfortunately, B+ and 35 or above computer programmer doesn't seem to cut it.
P.S. if anyone has any advice it would be pretty helpful to me and maybe others
Get out of the tech industry while you still can. There are no jobs in this industry for anyone, even the skilled.
I'm in this industry and staying because I'm willing to bet with my feet that you're not just wrong, you're dead wrong. To my mind, the question is what the non-tech jobs will be in 20 years.
What do you do? Are you getting out of the tech industry, or merely scoring cheap social posturing points with some fashionable cynicism? Are you taking your own advice, or just posting ad naseum with no actual belief behind it?
Unfortunately, they lack a similarly plausible explanation for how cheap offshore labor won't simply take their jobs in fewer than 30 years.
In fact the economic advantage has already largely dissipated and it's already not cheaper, which is why you don't hear anybody talking about this anymore. The whole "we're all gonna lose our tech jobs to the cheap foreigners" scare is all very 2008; it has failed to happen, and it will continue to fail to happen because equilibrium has been reached and will not rapidly change because there's few to no new markets to suddenly emerge.
Sadly, very few people actually understand economics 101 and simply can't deal with the fact that prices react to things rather than staying static forever.
I also observe your uncareful dodge around my questions. May I simply assume the worst, then?
Wrong. Yahoo!, for example, has been continuously shedding Bay Area jobs and moving them to Bangalore. Right now, in 2011/2012, they are laying off workers in Silicon Valley and hiring in India. Expect other companies to follow suit.
It is certainly much cheaper to hire in India. Depending on experience, you can get three to five programmers there for every one in the Bay Area. They're just as skilled.
You're the same age as me... and being without a job is a scary prospect, but I think it's important to stay positive. I was unemployed for a year once (by choice at first) but it took a few months to get a job once I started looking, and I specifically wanted to get into a different area (games) from where I had been (e-commerce) so I knew it would be harder. I ended up working with a team of young guys right out of school and was able to work well with them. I made an effort to embrace new stuff rather than go in with the attitude of "you should do things my way because I'm the experienced guy", and I got the job and made a positive impact.
I think my experience helped a lot, especially in building up some agile processes and keeping everyone focussed on the tasks at hand. There are a lot of roles that a developer can fill besides just development. Try to play up those skills? Every place I work, I end up in a "team lead" kind of situation just because I'm interested in processes and process improvement and can speak to both managers and other developers about various software development practices and figure out what will work at this place vs some other place.
I really suck at "programming interviews" but I am getting a lot of recruiter interest right now (I'm in the bay area). I feel like there are LOTS of companies hiring right now. I also have a feeling that I probably wouldn't get past whatever screening is done at most of those companies, so I never bother to follow up. I have failed plenty of interviews at Google and Amazon and some smaller hot startups and usually end up working at places nobody has heard of, but that's okay. :) I'm pretty happy where I am now.
I'm not sure if this helped at all. :/
The last place I worked full time was incredibly volatile and replaced almost the entire engineering team 3 times in the 2 years I was there. I probably should have left after the first mass exodus. I often wonder if that is what killed my career. Maybe that company on the resume is a black mark?
I don't know why it's so hard to get a job when you are already unemployed. I think there is even MORE bias about that around here than age. This article might be about age, but I suspect that is probably more your problem here. I'm not sure the best way out of that particular hole, but if you can get any kind of a consulting or freelance gig, that might help. Then you can just smooth over gaps with the "freelancing" qualifier and talk about how you're really interested in something long term / stable, especially after the volatility at the last place. Hopefully you can find employers who are nervous about someone sticking around for a couple of years, reassure them that's what you are interested in (even if it's not). If you drop me an email, I can forward you to a couple of recruiters who have contacted me in the last week or two.
A lot of times we're harder on ourselves than we should be. I'm happy to help out a fellow geezer (j/k). Drop me a line if you want.
Hone that resume. Try several different versions targeted to different types of jobs. Carefully write your cover letters based on the job ad, and with the intention of getting an interview.
A resume is not an employment history so don't include any more of that than is necessary to be conventional. Leave out the summer jobs in highschool if you are older than 25. Focus on achievements, projects completed. Tell them how you helped your employers over and over again.
And weave lots of technical terms into the text so that it shows up on a keyword search. But do leave out useless keywords like COBOL and VMS.
Don't say your age, and be careful not to inadvertently disclose your age by saying that you worked X years with Y technology which we all know was obsolete in 1995.
My guess based on what I've seen in my little bit of the world is that experience and skillset count more than age but you have to have both, hence I need to modernise my skillset in a few places sooner rather than later.
OK, you're 33. The upper limit of re-tooling time required, to be just as up-to-date on the latest technologies is 4-5 years. And all you need to do is be as productive as that 22 year old was during his college years!
In reality. you could do it in 6 months of focused, unemployed time. Or a year of evening work, while you remain employed.