I've written software for Intel, Nintendo, Samsung, LG, DirecTV, Applied Materials, Microsoft, and Apple to name a few. My last project was the basis for an entire business line at a 500m/yr company.
I am unemployable because I'm a white male whose in his 40s, has a family, and because somehow, in this industry experience is a bad thing.
It amazes me how intolerant of age and differing opinion tech culture is.
> I am unemployable because I'm a white male whose in his 40s, has a family, and because somehow, in this industry experience is a bad thing.
What indications do you have that those are the reasons you are unemployable?
I have many well respected, senior coworkers who fit this description so at least personally I don't understand why people would be hesitant to hire you based on that description alone..
I can attest that many tech companies are hostile to older people. I'm a white male in my 40s, and I've felt it myself and heard many more accounts. The existence of counterexamples doesn't falsify the claim.
The temptation to blame victims is strong. I think it comes from wanting to reassure oneself that "it can't happen to me." So you have to actively silence that voice in your head, and assume that victims are actually victims unless there's real evidence to the contrary.
As advice for senior people, I'd suggest: don't apply for junior jobs. Apply to lead large teams, or start your own company. It can be more stressful than coding, but that's the way the industry is structured.
The software industry has few required degrees, certifications or titles. There is no rigid career path or unions forcing companies to retain people they have had influence over for a long time. This is great for people starting out, but like everything else there is no free lunch. It is entirely possible, even likely, to navigate this wrongly.
General experience doesn't mean much since there are few standards. Ones experience would generally be used to take more responsibility, do more important things or in other ways advance ones career. Not as some measurement of quality, since that would be very subjective.
In a changing industry it would even be expected that when things change a certain amount of people won't last, because they get squeezed out between new people coming up and old people already specialized.
So while surely part of the industry focuses to much on youth I think people jump the conclusion that it is widespread too quickly.
I apologize if I made it seem like I was blaming the victim; I was genuinely interested in learning how one would know the reason they were rejected. I've often been rejected and wondered why.
I don't at all find it hard to believe some interviewers would be biased against older candidates, especially for junior roles. However, given the person who posted seemed to have such a wealth of knowledge and experience, I was very surprised that they wouldn't have a very easy time finding a job even if places that refuse to hire older workers exist.
Well, I'm sure nobody's ever walked up to oceanghost and said, "I'm not hiring you because you're an old(er) white male" (although, unlike every other possible form of discrimination, that would be perfectly legal), he just probably has a sense that this is what's going on based on the attitudes around him. But I doubt that the author of the linked article has ever had anybody come up to her and say "I'm not hiring you/promoting you/supporting you because you're a woman (or 'of color')", either - if they had, I suspect it would have worked it's way into her article somewhere. Instead, she just gauges the attitudes of the people around her and makes her best guess as to why things aren't working out the way she wants them to. If her suppositions are reasonable, then oceanghost's are, too.
As a fairly old woman(mid thirties) for tech anyways and with a family now, I really feel your pain.
I get the ageist comments too, and contract work has really been dwindling. Web Dev really seems a young person game.
If my husband didn't have a stable job, I'd be in a lot of trouble.
Anecdotal experience - the last few companies I've worked at have all had white males over 40. Hell - I've interviewed and given offers to white males over 40.
Edit: Not to discount your experience with ageism. Ageism does exist and is something we need to be aware of. Just that it's not this way everywhere.
I do find it interesting that the authors are ok with saying “Susan grew up on the Internet,” which is another variation on digital/internet natives, and clearly ageist.
White male, 44 years old. I'm a principal engineer at a big tech company and could get a job at a moments notice paying really well any time I choose. I'm not sure ageism really exists, outside of some toxic startups with a "bro" culture, and in my experience, those are the types of places that nobody wants to work anyway.
I'm focused more on infrastructure than software engineering lately: AWS/CloudFormation, but I still write some Python/NodeJS/Bash, mostly infrastructure glue rather than actual apps.
The key to keeping yourself relevant is understanding the big picture, and learning stuff that is outside your area of expertise. For example, I started as a network engineer, but got into UNIX because I wanted to know how the provisioning systems worked that ran on Sun boxes. Then I moved into UNIX sysadmin work, and I found that I could run circles around most sysadmins because I understood how the network functioned and could troubleshoot beyond a single box (hint: it's (almost) always a DNS problem... :) After you've stood up a few complete datacenters or soup to nuts web infrastructure for a few medium sized companies, you move into architecture, but you need to keep yourself relevant and current. Here is a rough timeline of what I was focused on:
1990-1994 - Novell Netware, WordPerfect Office (became Novell Groupwise)
1994-1999 - Network engineering at an ISP, got into UNIX.
1999-2005 - Solaris system administration (2001-2002 was rough and was out of work for about 9 months during the dot com crash)
2005-2008 - Linux system administration - got into storage administration and became a SAN/storage architect. Started going really deep on configuration management, CFengine, later Chef/Puppet - automate all the things!
2009-2013 - VMware and private cloud - my skills as a storage architect led me to a natural role as a VMware architect, and automated provisioning infrastructure as a service.
2013-now - public cloud/AWS.
Keep reinventing yourself, and you have to really enjoy learning new things, or you won't last long in this industry. I think that's probably true of any job, though, honestly. Would you want to see a doctor that hadn't learned anything since he left medical school? I sure wouldn't...
Would you consider yourself to be a specialist in cloud storage/infrastructure? Anecdotally the people in their 40's--60's who continue to find employment as individual contributor software engineer seem to be specialists in a particular field.
I do consider myself a specialist in cloud computing (of which storage is just a component). I think it's important to become really deep in one or two areas, even if you are a generalist. For example, cloud computing has too many services to be an expert in all of them, but I do consider myself very deep in data and analytics (Hadoop, Spark, data lake concepts, etc.) and containers (orchestration, service discovery, CI/CD and deployment automation).
I'm white male, 46, and last time I switched jobs (14 months ago) I had 3 offers to choose from. My stack is enterprise java. My peers are mid thirties and up.
I'd rephrase that a little: it is not because you are a white male.
It wouldn't have helped if you were a minority either: in fact that can be even harder - at least around here.
But it is annoying in a special way to hear about that male privilege thing and know it means next to nothing - and still be told you should feel bad about it.
As someone who firmly believes in "that male privilege thing," people who tell you that you should feel bad about it are wrong. There's nothing wrong with privilege.
It's a lot like privilege in the operating systems sense. sudo isn't a bad program because it has root privileges. The kernel doesn't need to apologize for running in a privileged CPU mode. But sudo and the kernel both have abilities that regular userspace programs don't - and the ability to cause damage that regular userspace programs don't. They (or more specifically, their authors) need to be aware that they're privileged, be careful about doing things with the privilege by mistake, and realize that other programs can't do the same things they can. But that doesn't mean that they can do everything, or that it's their fault if there's something they're unable to do, and it certainly doesn't mean that it's meaningful or productive for them / their authors to feel bad about the privilege.
So, maybe male privilege exist, but so do female privilege:
In my childhood girls were never beaten. Boys were by each other.
During my studies girls got extra study points for higher education - just for being girls. IIRC this held true even for studies who were mostly girls anyway, like nurse and chemistry. (This has been fixed to some degree now I think so boys will now get extra study points if they apply for nurse studies.)
At work they count and celebrate how many women we have. In a way it feels obvious since we want equality. But lets not pretend it's 50/50 if two equal candidates come through the door and hiring one of them will make your stats look nicer.
You may not be aware, but these days there is basically affirmative action for male college students, at least at elite colleges - they are even exempt from Title IX gender discrimination wrt to admissions. Basically so many women were applying - and qualifying over men - that universities have lowered the bar for men to get in, lest they become even more female than the 50+% women they sometimes are. Cite: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/07/30/...
One key quote: “Were Brown to accept women and men at the same rate, its undergraduate population would be almost 60 percent women instead of 52 percent—three women for every two men.”
> In my childhood girls were never beaten. Boys were by each other.
No, they were just sexually harassed. To be fair, plenty of boys get sexually harassed to.
It's all gonna come out in the wash, man. Relative to all the shit (sexual harassment, rape, being denied the vote until 1919, getting their pussies grabbed by the President, etc) women have to put up with, a bias towards hiring them in certain situations is not that big a deal. IMHO, making change for all of the above issues would make our society such a better place, for women and men, and matters more than this. So you're right, it's not 50/50, however I'm not sure that making a list of all the things that are not 50/50 is really a game that one wants to play.
Do you honestly think you'd even get to where you are if you were, say, black?
Do you think you'd want to be a part of such a hostile crowd who assumes less of your ability and that none of your credentials are deserved due to handouts?
You having pesky distractions like children, however... how can you be trusted to put the company's deadlines first in a situation like that? It's just that... the thing is... you're just not a good culture fit.
From personal experience, this is the problem rather than age. God forbid you aren't purely a machine that takes money and produces vastly more money for the company.
I am unemployable because I'm a white male whose in his 40s, has a family, and because somehow, in this industry experience is a bad thing.
It amazes me how intolerant of age and differing opinion tech culture is.