alt Hacker NewsWell as a single datum:
After I got laid off in late 2023 I had a devil of a time finding work (despite having AI experience) to the point my unemployment ran out -
And I was 20 years as a dev and tech lead and full stack, (never had trouble finding work) including stints as a leading EM and CTO, I’ve been an industry award winning innovation lead,a digital studio director, switching tech stacks and cloud certs all my career..mentoring juniors and doing podcasts and writing white papers etc, but peanuts - nothing
Getting ghosted by 25 year olds in interviews and doing rounds and rounds and leetcode and all that but no success- for example I had a 7 round interview with NBCUniversal in 2023 and then got ghosted (I probably doged a bullet since they had subsequent layoffs)
a 12 month stint with nothing - we lost our savings as my wife got laid off too
Since then I pivoted to AI and Gen AI startups- joining incubators and finally got some work or at least cofounded some AI startups- now money is tight and I dont have health insurance but at least I have a job… it sucks as a over 45 year old as I have so much experience but no one cares.. still dont have much grey hair so I can pass for 40 to get noticed
No one stable is hiring or your resume just goes to a dead letter queue or is lost in ether or lost amid all the ai generated resumes out there - young ML and PHds and people under 40 seem to be getting work in Gen AI but thats about it
networking is the only game left and most good recruiters I know got laid off too
At least I’ve built up production experience in agents and context engineering RL, pytorch, langchain/LangGraph, RAG, KGa, etc python, BAML, LLM and LLMops to add to my years of full stack work
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I work in a FAANG as a SWE. I'm not the on selecting candidates, but I do interview a lot of them. I'm pretty sure I've never seen a 50+ year old candidate. 99% of the candidates have less than 10 year experience, and are in their 20s or 30s.
So yes, ageism is real. I suppose the company gets away with it by saying they look for candidates with 3-10 years of experience?
At that stage, I think I would pass Leetcode with 2-3 months of practice, and I don't mind putting the work if this is what it takes. I'm just not sure I'd be given the chance.
Are you in a major tech market (SF? Seattle?)
I was a laid off in the beginning of the year from my remote job, landed several interviews, and I found a new job in <2 months. My resume is less impressive than yours, ~10 years of experience.
I was able to land interviews with some remote companies. I used to work at Shopify, a got some interviews at Ruby shops from that.
Some possibilities:
1. Ageism, this is a distinct possibility.
2. You held very senior positions. I think a lot of people don't like hiring people that were more senior than them. So that CTO is being held as a negative. They are not saying "Hey I get the experience of an EM and a CTO in a Senior Engineer for a bargain salary", they are worried you will overshadow them. This is sub optimal behavior for companies.
3. Talking to people I think non-tech markets look like they are doing fine. People I know in Rochester, Syracuse, and Cleveland aren't having issues getting jobs. I think the huge layoffs in big tech have left a big supply in tech cities to less demand.
Being overqualified is indeed a real phenomenom. Employers can think your too expensive, or that your desperatem and that you might not stick around long. All valid concerns.
Yeah, once you hit 50 the wall is real.
You need to maximise your earnings during your 30s and 40s to be able to just do contracting, etc. then.
Were you flexible with re-location or you were looking just at you current region or it is that bad no matter your flexibility?
Do you have a thesis for why that might be happening? Ageism? Overqualification? The next generation of hiring managers not knowing what to do with you? Past experience being deemed irrelevant to modern SWE problems? Is it all just a bad market? Your profile strikes me as the last one that would struggle with landing a gig.
What’s admirable is that you’ve actually applied to jobs below your pay grade. Most people won’t because doing that grind in your 40s is actually hard especially if you have kids.
Yeah, this ageism factor mixed with how unstable in general my industry is had me adjusting my long term plan to focus on being able to survive off my own products. I'm still far off from that point but it's probably best to plan my mid-late career before industry locks me out...
Doesn't help that I've tried to specialize for quite a while but simply can't stay around long enough without layoffs happening. Hard to be a domain expert when companies let you go ever 3 years. T shaped generalist it is, then.
Are you ready for great age of suffering? Because there will be no saving, no UBI, no plan B. This is it. This is the end of careers and beginning of centuries of misery. AI will replace everyone except around 3%. If you aren't one of those 3%, start accepting the reality of infinite pain.
> 7 round interview with NBCUniversal in 2023
Name and shame, this should be the norm. People are too shy on this subject. Thank you.
My brother who is nearly 50 and has worked in tech since the dot com boom, got laid off in January and couldn't find a job until last week. This job, too, was just a contractual position at his old Fortune 50 firm.
He has an engineering degree from one of the top 5 engineering colleges in India, a Master's from one of the top 5 engineering schools in the US. He built some of the systems that form the foundation of the entire call center industry.
And now he pivoted to GenAI and has dozens of very impressive public projects including some heavily starred open source repos
And yet...nothing.
Ageism in the tech industry has never been worse
The number of just straight out NO's I've gotten has been surprising and disheartening. I've been a developer for 20 years and genuinely don't think I've gotten an outright "no" before this year. Usually just no response. I've gotten maybe eight or nine actual rejections this year. It's honestly worse, emotionally.
Ideally I want a job outside my wheelhouse to learn and move forward, but it seems like no one these days is interested in any sort of training.
There have been two gigs I was really excited about that seemed more-or-less exactly what I have spent the past decade doing and they've BOTH actually replied that they didn't think my skills were a good fit. I genuinely have zero idea what you're looking for if the literal perfect fit isn't it.
Before COVID I would regularly apply for jobs, almost always get them, and decline largely to keep my interview skills fresh.
This last year of looking has been the total opposite. I've applied for umpteen places, and gotten a little bit of email back and forth, and a single interview (it's in a couple days, wish me luck).