I was laid off a year ago at age 37 and have not been able to get a job since, or even get many interviews. I think at this point I've applied to 77 jobs, heard back from 11, and have actually been phone screened by 5.
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
Hmm. It's not clear from your post, but if you are in the midwest, that could be part of the problem. Every company in the SF/bay area seems to in a hiring frenzy right now.
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.
Thanks for the tips. I am hiding out in a family member's vacation home in the southwest to save money. My phone number is 415 and I have a 646 google voice number I use when I apply to jobs in New York. As far as anyone knows on first contact, I am local. I usually do fine in the interview and once I get the job. My problem now is that I can't even get my foot in the door. Hardly anyone ever even responds to my email. One weird thing is, the places that actually did contact me were for the jobs that I was the least qualified for and just applied to on a whim.
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?
It's easy to spin a failure into a learning experience, that's a familiar story arc for everyone in the hiring process. My second job was a massive failure (with a public IPO and everything), doesn't seem to have hurt. I even got a job because of it once.
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.
If you don't get enough interviews in a week of sending out resumes and cover letters, rewrite the resume. Week after week. During interviews you will learn what you forgot to mention, and you should get a sense of what is best left out. Resumes need to be short. They need to sell you as a solution to a company's problems. They need to leave out a lot of details which can be filled in during an interview.
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.
VMS and COBOL are still good keywords at my current client. they even offshored COBOL development and trained COBOL developers in the off shore to make sure they still have qualified people supporting and adding to application(s).
This is an absolutely bizarre claim in light of the fact that the tech industry is the only one in a hiring frenzy through an economy so weak that historians may well end up calling it the second Great Depression, and that programmers are just about the only people left who have a plausible explanation for how robots won't simply take their jobs in 30 years. (Or perhaps rather, the potent combo of robots and their programmers.)
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?
Sure there is; economics 101. Offshore labor won't be cheaper in 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?
"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."
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.
Part of the deal is, you don't need very many people to do cool stuff anymore. Instagram is serving probably around 20 million users right now with 7 employes. Facebook is serving 800 million users with 2000 employees. Even if there are 1000 awesome startups, each one of them may only ever need 20 employees.
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