Any job boards and age-friendly companies for older developers?

My experience is anecdotal and second hand. I've seen it twice now.

It began with a friend who was in the job market as a 50+. More on the hardware side. This guy has some cool experience. He gets lots of interviews, they go well, but no offers.

As his frustration grows, he grows desperate to try something different. He dyes some color back into his hair, gets some tinted glasses, and lets his daughter take him shopping for some more hip interview clothes.

A month later and he's in bidding wars for who to hire him. He said the difference was night and day. He was now pointing out his age in interviews "are you sure I'm not too old?" and the interviewers were like "no way man."

I wondered how one off this was. A year or so later, knew another guy who was having this same struggle. We shared the story with him. He raised his eyebrows, hesitated for a week or two, the colored his hair, got his niece to take him shopping. And pretty much same thing.

Obviously, this is a small sample set. But the lesson I took from this (and haven't had a chance to prove for myself yet) is that it's not your age that will limit you, but your apparent age. If you are old, but look like a younger/fresher version of yourself, you do well. If you appear "old", you struggle.

Best of luck.

The age bias is real, but it may not be as big as the perception is. My current position is with a company that pushes the "youth" message very loudly; and for that reason, I ignored them until a recruiter convinced me to allow myself to be presented.

During the first interview, I brought this up. The average age in the company was 28, so why would they want me? The answer surprised me: they wanted me because of my age, experiences (generalist), and wisdom. Lots of youthful, intelligent people are an asset - but so are a few veterans to provide perspective and keep a check on reality.

You are just as likely to get rejected for a reason other than age, so you might as well just approach with enthusiasm any opportunity that interest you. If you don't show up to an interview angry about age discrimination, you're more likely to be accepted irrespective of your age.

Lastly, remember that companies are made up of people, and people come with all sorts of mentalities. A few will indeed have a bias against people their parents' age, but I bet it's not as many people with that attitude as you might expect.

The only place we really cannot compete with is on salary (unless you're willing to work at entry/medior rates). Experienced people generally cost a good bit more, and the value proposition may not be there for some candidates/situations.

I've been programming since 1979. So long that "programmer" has become an integral part of my identity. I don't think I'll ever stop producing software.

However, starting around 2016, finding work started to become difficult. The work I did find was no longer enjoyable. It took a few years, but I finally did enough self introspection to realize: it's not them, it's me. I aged out of the industry. I didn't notice it in the moment, it just happened.

I cannot work in open-office fishbowls. I cannot stomach Agile process and how it has turned something I love into menial factory work (N.B. I get it, your [A|a]gile shop is awesome. I only had such luck once). There are many more things about modern software development shops with which I disagree.

Now, it hadn't occurred to me until later that this was showing through in my attitude. Of course, I really did not want to work on the 500th BBA in my career with six Scrumm Masters all demanding 30 minute meetings every morning. I did not want to write more JavaScript or deal with yet another hotness-of-the-week library that does the same thing as the previous 10 such beasts. I did not want to play Schedule Chicken yet again.

Is it my age? Sure, people change. I'm not bored with the programming I enjoy but I did grow bored of modern corporate software slave shops. Hey, more power to them. It's their shop; they can do what they want.

However, it does mean I have to move on. I'm not saying any of this is true for the OP. Just something to ponder if you're constantly facing rejection.

I retired a year ago, but before retiring in 2013 I was invited to work at Google on a Knowledge Graph project and I don’t feel like there was any age discrimination. In 2017 I interviewed at Capital One for a deep learning team manager job, which I got, and I never felt like there was any real age discrimination there either.

So, try those two places.

I did feel like I was the target for extreme age discrimination at WikiMedia Organization. All the phone interviews went great until one was a video call and the interviewer literally started laughing when he saw me and he quickly ended the call, and their HR immediately sent me a no thank you, thanks for applying email. The same thing happened at Electronic Arts about 15 years ago. They kept calling me with invites to come up to Vancouver for an interview. Three of people, when they saw me and realized that I was in my 50s, they literally started to laugh.

So, I would say to stick with quality companies and you will have better results.

No great advice other than to look for tech roles in non–tech companies.

The FAANG gang will never see your resume or application as their automated screeners will silently reject you. Startups will advise you that you cannot possibly understand the complexity of the problem space they are solving because no one in the history of the industry has ever tried building complex software, which is why they are writing their own version of make in two week sprints.

I wish I had better advice but after seven years of trying I’ve moved on and out of the industry.

I find myself biasing towards older devs. The old guys tend to trend towards reliable tech, reliable architectures. They're done playing around. They have families at home, so they want to get the work done... and go home. They do things that they know will work. They might not be using whatever the fad of the day is... and sometimes there are missed opportunties from that. But more often it means the stuff they build has less bullshit issues that comes from untested, immature technology.

That said, older devs can be very stubborn. If in the interview I detect that I'm not going to be able to work well with the person. I might pass.

40+ here. There is definitely unconscious age-ism going on, and if you want to beat it:

* If you have 20 years of experience in the software industry, let's be real, you kinda need to be at a senior/lead level (whether IC or manager track). If you're not, then people are going to wonder why you aren't, and whether you're stuck reliving the old days

* Decades of experience in C/Java is not going to work at a React shop. Either learn (and be opinionated about!) frameworks built in the last 5 years, or stick to somewhere within your expertise

* Don't make yourself appear ancient on your resume, but don't lie either. If you got a degree in the 90's then it should be apparent from reading your resume, and if they want to discriminate they'll do so right from the start and not waste your time.

* Avoid the "grumpy old programmer" stereotype at all costs. Instead, you want to be the "bad-ass wizard" that people need to solve hard problems, and people want Gandalf, not Saruman

Not saying your situation isn’t real, but this is more of a general reply to all of the comments. I am 45 and have had no trouble getting your standard enterprise senior engineer/lead/architect roles in a major metropolitan area on the east coast of the US.

After staying at one company way too long when I was 34, I’ve been able to quickly get jobs at 34, 37, 40, 43, and 44 years old.

Pre-Covid, there were a few conversations I had with managers of consulting firms for full time roles as an overpriced “enterprise architect”, “solutions architect”, “digital transformation consultant” type jobs. I just wasn’t in a position to travel for family reasons until my youngest graduated.

Now, actually I am targeting the three major cloud providers for an SA type position. I should be able to get into at least one of them according to my contacts.

But another thing I’ve found about many older developers who scream ageism is that they haven’t stayed up to date on the latest trends and they haven’t nurtured their network.

I've worked in companies that have had numerous developers your age or higher so don't worry, you will find somewhere. One thing I'd suggest is looking at consultancies in your area where experience is important. I've heard banking tends to have a slightly higher average age too. And finally, consider contracting! A senior experienced developer can earn a good bit of money and being 45 works for you rather than against!

FWIW, the consultancy I worked at that had multiple 'older' developers was https://oxfordcc.co.uk. They did some pretty cool stuff :)

MITRE. (www.mitre.org)

When I joined at 43 the average age of the company was in the late 50's. It's dropped a bit, but not much. And I run the DevOps group in my department, so we do things that would interest you. We're strong engineers, but we value expertise over the latest buzz words. Trust me, I plan on retiring here.

Perhaps impolitic to mention, but to the extent that it's possible, appearing younger can affect perceptions.

Consider everything: clothing, haircut, facial hair, smells, and especially fitness.

My intuition is that the appearance of fitness and especially "spryness" goes quite a long way in people seeing past your age. Our monkey brains are easily fooled, up to point.

My experience is that once I hit a certain age, and salary, almost nobody wanted to hire me full time but lots of people wanted to hire me to consult. General rule: Make sure you take at least 2 times as much per hour when you consult.

I'm a similar sort of age, and having trouble finding something this year - not that this year isn't a terrible time to be looking for anyone, of course. I was actually the oldest engineer in my previous place, out of over 70. I seem to have found myself in a couple of catch-22 situations - I have both wide/shallow experience and narrow/deep, but if I'm looking for senior positions that means mostly only the deep experience counts, which means I've got narrow skills. I'm also a Brit based in Hong Kong, who doesn't speak Cantonese - not a huge barrier, generally, but it just further narrows my opportunities. I've actually had a couple of people this week ask if I'd be interested in something remote for a North American company, but working at least partly in their timezone, which doesn't really seem sensible, given it would mean destroying my social life and/or sleep...

I'm recently mostly a backend web/API dev working in PHP and Python/Django, but I've done Unix kernel work, written a few Android apps, and a few other random things. I've worked in large companies, in a local unicorn, and as a solo freelancer.

I'm not necessarily sure it's age itself that's a problem, but maybe a combination of factors where age is part of the cause/effect chain?

To be clear, as well as my thoughts, this is also a "hire me, please?" post!

I'm 50, living in the EU and have switched jobs three times during the last 5 years. My extra years of working experience were seen as an advantage by most companies where I interviewed. I didn't interview at any FAANG though, maybe those are different.

One tip: make sure you are good at what you do and what you will be interviewed for. Because at our age, the roles that you will be hired for will be senior roles, and the bar lies a bit higher there.

One thing to note is that "front door" recruitment is generally more youth oriented than back channels.

Most people apply for jobs out of college. As they age (a) they tend to switch jobs less often and (b) they have accumulated former colleagues, clients and such that can open back-channels.

Work back channels if you can. Otherwise, just keep in mind that the youth bias you experience at the front door is worse than the actual bias.

For practical advice, I suggest you search outside of the software industry... companies that make their money mostly from software. Most jobs are actually in other industries, and I think they're less youth biased.

An "app factory" probably hires very young, mostly

The situation in EU may be different than in the US. We also have the age issue, but I think the age is a red herring. People in tech change jobs so often that nobody is hiring for lifetime employment anymore. The best people leave in 2 to 3 years, because they get bored, get better opportunities, get poached, etc. So at 45 this shouldn't be an issue at all. But it is. I think that with age people become more aware of nonsense and are more reluctant to work ridiculous number of hours per week. And this awareness is highly correlated with age, the end result is the same. Have you been looking into consulting scene, where the experience counts more?

Have you tried applying for banks? Most of the contractors I worked with in banking in Ireland were older, 40+ including some 60 something, all python developers. I don't know what country you live in but both the UK and Ireland have anti-discrimination laws, so they can't discriminate based on age.

Slightly Off Topic:

As someone who dont work in Silicon Valley. ( Edit: Opps it seems it is in EU as well )

Why ageism?

Even assuming you start developing professionally in 20, you would need to be at least 30 - 35 before you finally understand, everything you believe in so strongly in your past 10 - 20 years were possibly a FAD and had finally witness the industry moving from one FAD to another and start ignoring hype.

You would finally understand most code you once thought were short, concise and clever, and others that once were long, boring, over the top stupid code are actually the better code.

You would have learned KISS not because you love it, but you would have hopefully understand this because it has been burnt deep into your memory.

And that Not doing something, or inaction, is possibly the best action.

Seriously I would have thought developers only start to become productive post 30+. And 40+ is still in their prime. I understand people older don't like working long hours. But working hours have absolutely nothing to do with productivity. Especially in software development.

1) Don't give up.

2) Try boring industries banks, insurance, local govt.

3) Be excellent at something and pretty good at everything else.

4) OK to be opinionated about tech, but more important to be current. It may be a straight Java shop, but you should know what Clojure and Kotlin are if your a Java guy who's current.

5) Maintain your personal & professional networks.

6) Although it's very hard, try to remain upbeat. Enter every interview with the attitude that the interviewer is a friend who wants you to succeed.

Good luck. Its hard but doable. (53 yo who just started a new role)

Why do you say FAANGs aren't right? I'm 45, work for Google, and while the median age is lower than me there are lots and lots of people my age or older around, and many of them are newer hires. I don't particularly like working in a BigCorp, and it's tough to feel like you're ever actually getting anything _done_, but at least I'm not having some 28 year old 'manager' demanding I work weekends and rewiting to use his/her favourite new web framework...

I personally would love to do something else now, and go back to having programming being my passion/hobby instead, but I don't think I can walk away from the money.

And yes, the age bias is real. I hadn't interviewed in 10 years but did so recently and while I am not visually old, my resume certainly shows it, and I could feel the bullsh*t from the younger developers in the interview.

One possible factor when interviewing an experienced developer: how will they share their experience? Some people want to lecture, but many people do not want to be lectured at.

I once worked with someone who explained to me every day -- and in great detail -- all of the problems that my technical decisions would cause. He wasn't wrong, but it was still a demoralizing experience.

But at least he was only criticizing my decisions, and not my right to make them. In the same way that an older dev does not want to be perceived as incapable of learning new things, a younger dev does not want to be perceived as cavalier or irresponsible, and I have absolutely seen talented people discounted solely because they haven't held a particular title for enough years.

People are complicated, and we make a lot of assumptions about each other that we don't want others to make about ourselves.

How about applying to non tech industry companies... most big companies have software engineers. Ive worked in shipping/logistics/warehousing, consumer goods/manufacturing and legal all of which, in large companies, had older software engineers. (These roles werent in SV - europe and apac)

The hiring processes I personally experienced and have some meaning to me at the same time, all favor these traits in general: 1. Enthusiastic problem-solving attitude usually in a specific platform or set of languages / tools 2. Willingness to learn new things and to discover the unknown that a candidate proactively executes by reading or trying new things 3. Ability to adapt technology-wise and ability to collaborate with different kind of people, not necessarily just "the geeks" 4. Willingness and ability to pass or share knowledge in any area

Myself, I experienced it is harder for me to keep pace mainly with point 2. and 3. because I already have learned a lot (full cup so to say) and having less spare-time dedicated for such things (as I dedicate almost all my spare time to family more than before).

There are also aspects directly favoring different candidates (not necessarily correlating only with age) I would like to emphasise, which unfortunately are consciously or unconsciously considered: 5. More skilled and experienced people tend to ask for more money 6. More experienced people tend to have more hard-to-change habits which may be incompatible or hard to include into the company culture / workflows / whatever else 7. Cultural differences between generations of people tend to create tensions

What I recommend to you is to embrace the above points (definitely not a full list) and try to emphasise your best traits or think about how to sell them in the context of the hiring process and at the same time try to mitigate the problematic points.

In general, you have a big advantage you probably do not see now - life experience and also tech experience. Younger candidates simply cannot compete with your age. I think you need to find a way how to wire your hard-obtained experience as "your output" that definitely has a value for any company. Embrace those facts and build your self-confidence on them. It may be the case that the job you apply for will be little different from what you experienced up to now - more mentoring, more leading, more advisory work, more inter-department communication (from/to tech language of the geeks) and so on.

And I sincerely wish you luck.

I'm 34 and I think I'm the youngest at my current employer; most of the development team is well in their 40's to 60's. The domain is mobile networking; these people used to work on things like SMS gateways and other core technology throughout the history of mobile networks, since the first technologies started to gain ground.

There's a lot to do still; right now 5G is on the roadmap, but we have to provide support for 4 and 3G as well. There's a lot of domain and protocol knowledge going on here.

Reliability yes, devops, not so much - our application is deployed as 'just' some RPM packages on physical hardware.

If you are in EU you should know enough to know that it is not a homogeneous place. Where are you located?

Also, what do you have experience of? Different work places may have different sources of people to employ.

I'm 42 in Scandinavia and have never felt that companies care about age, I've been working both for tiny startups and a FAANG. Maybe you're in the wrong EU country?

Start your own business. Best thing to do ever. Life just starts at 45 :-)

Come to the defense industry. If anything, the age bias is the other way around, and contrary to popular belief, there are some very cool cutting edge projects.

I’m about your age and also didn’t get off the dev ops career path. I have found, however that it’s not all bad news. I switched to contracting about 6 years ago and have had a better year every year since. Presumably you have a lot of experience and expertise in some area and that is what you should target if you want to go that route.

For me, I know myself well enough to realize that I like small disorganized businesses that need help getting tooling and process in place. Once that happens I lose a lot of interest quickly. That is often when get things done mentality and trust the people you hire is replaced by process and politics. Usually this takes 6-18 months and I know it’s time to move on. I also do project work for enterprise software which has about the same life cycle.

The common thread of both types of work is that it’s temporary and I can bill a pretty high hourly rate. I don’t have to deal with most employment bs and my experience is generally respected and appreciated vs just being the old dev in a team of fresh college grads. I don’t know what the contractor experience is in the EU, but I’ve had colleagues do this in Germany and the UK so I know it happens.

If you want you can reach out to me by emailing the address present at the bottom of this job offer: https://www.portchain.com/careers/611/full-stack-software-en...

Nevermind the actual job post :) We're based in DK and looking for remote employees.

Where in the EU are you? I'm 43, living in Berlin and working as a software engineer. From what I can tell there is not much age bias here. Some German companies I know have an average age beyond 45 in dev teams.

I even interviewed with a FAANG for a Berlin-based engineering position 2 years ago but canceled the process myself. Being over 40 did not seem to be an issue at all.

If you were in Silicon Valley then I’d recommend https://www.careeractions.org/index.php

It’s from a group of successful business people who help older folks find work at tech companies using insiders.

FYI - if you work at a tech company consider joining to help older but qualified people find work.

Try large companies concerned about their public image and diversity statistics. They would sometimes hire more color/gender/age challenged people. At my last job before retirement, the manager explicitly told me, please don't quit or that will leave us with only young people of a certain race :)

I got a job after 18 months of looking

I'm doing some bullshit specialty software i hate but that I happen to know pretty well

The lesson there, to me, is think about specializing. Why?

Because...why not?

Outside of that

My advice to older folks looking for IT work is

It is not going to happen -- think about stocking shelves or anything you can

Once you come to terms with the situation, then you can get real about what is really required to get a job

A miracle and tons of hard work of the type you don't want to do

I've seen lots of good advice on here that I think is pretty good

Like

Look younger Act younger Dress younger Be younger

Reach out on LinkedIn and other places -- it won't help but I think it is important to check the boxes -- it's a pretty good way to quickly get to rock bottom shame or shamelessness -- completely remove your ego from the equation

Even busted my ass for an AWS cert -- worthless

I've started losing weight and people are noticing

I figure each 10 lbs you lose takes off a year or two of age

What would I do if I got shitcanned tomorrow?

I would probably become an 'out' specialist in this particular software I know

I _hate_ this gd software

But a job is a job

There have also been sites that claimed to specialize in helping to hire older workers

I figure it was just a scam but I would also check it out

I did occasionally get play from startups that I was actually interested in -- by writing authentic-ish notes of interest

But yeah nobody but the 1%ers are getting jobs in this market

And that is some weird mix of the geniuses, connected, etc.

Nobody else getting hired -- I don't care if you are 25 yo or 75 yo -- not happening

Sorry to hear that. It's indeed an unfair situation and nothing is wrong with you, it's the industry that has a problem.

Have you considered building your own company? That's quite a change of skills, but that's what I've seen most "older" developers do.

I'm 25 and bald (not by choice by genetics haha - I don't really mind it at this point). Oddly I think this has gotten me hired as a "diversity" hire, even though I'm a white male. I've only had one experience at a "cool" media startup in LA where I think I was passed up because I wasn't "cool" enough - PM if you want the name of the startup. But LA sucks, so who cares!

I do worry about my looks as I get older in terms of work, but tbh I'm already pretty average or ugly looking anyways. If anything, this post has given me more energy to dump into my side-hustles in order to avoid having to deal with this shit at all.

Anyone else who's bald at a young age get discriminated in interviews?

This is my perspective from the US. I think it depends on the industry. Two industries I've been in that don't care what age you are; Transportation and Healthcare. There are interesting jobs in both depending on what your interests are. I'm near 50 now and nobody is ushering me out the door yet. I do think that as you get older people expect more of you. You need to understand the business and be able to provide solutions to real business problems. You'll be in contact more often with upper management/CTO and you need to be on point.

Devops and reliability will be usefull with the new DIH European initiative. My advice is looking at companies that position themselves as DIH, as they are often wiser than young startups.

I'm a bit younger and it may not be the only solution but the one that worked for me was to stop positioning myself and competing for a pure SW dev role altogether.

In my opinion one of the key strength you get with experience is perspective on solving problem efficiently in a no bullshit way, and more importantly in the business context. There is a limit on how much value a developer can bring by working on assigned stories and tickets, and experience after a few years plateau (and age discrimination start to kick in), but go higher in the chain and suddenly you experience becomes very valuable. I don't know how it is at FANNGs but even there are huge architecture decisions really made by young developers?

Most companies burn millions on poorly driven software projects, with layers of useless abstractions and accidental complexity. Execs love when you bring them a working solution no matter how you did it, e.g. the dashboard they are dreaming of all the while the official team and the consulting company that is costing $$$ are stuck in their big-data/blockchain/whatever grandiose project.

So I would look either expert small shops, or consulting companies with a career track for experts. Anecdotal but you can have a better time in a consulting company as "the guru" moving from projects to projects every few months than stuck in a mono product company for years.

Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon experience, you are not alone.

This isn't a plug, it is something I am passionate about. The company I co-founded (restless.co.uk) is working really hard to change perception and age discrimination across the entire employment market in the UK. Many of our members have similar stories to yours, although we are largely aimed at 50+, we hear the same from 45+ too. Sadly I don't think this is something that will change overnight, changing societal opinions is never easy and takes persistence, which we are committed to. We are engaging with our membership base and listening to their experiences in order to better educate employers on the importance of an age-diverse workforce and how to ensure that's happening for them. We are making an impact but as you have seen there is a long way to go!

I know that doesn't help you right now, I'm sorry. However, we do write a lot of content in this space that may help, restless.co.uk/career-advice/. We're always keen to hear feedback, so drop us an email if you have any. Incidentally, I am the CTO at Rest Less, and my first hire was a 58-year-old software engineer so I hope that gives you a boost. Although we're not looking for someone in your specific area of expertise at the moment I'd be interested in having a conversation, please reach out if that's something you'd be interested in doing.

Personally, and this is obviously my own opinion, I don't think you should be looking to change career if it's something you enjoy.

Best of luck.

I'm one of the founders of https://otta.com - we're specifically focused on helping people find exciting roles at fast growing tech companies in London (but we don't include FAANGs).

Anecdotally, DevOps and Reliability is definitely a space where experience is valued and, although there might be the assumption that many of these startups drink the youth cool-aid, I think you might be pleasantly surprised.

My impression has always been that the EU is much less ageist about this than Silicon Valley. I have no problem finding anything, and I'm 46. My brother is 48 and has recently switched jobs a few times after being with the same employer for 25 years.

Of course it helps if you have more experience than a young developer, and you know how to apply that experience. And you should always stay up to date with new developments. Although there are tons of companies still working with older systems.

Also, developer salaries in the EU are often terrible. My income has gone up quite a lot since I became a freelancer. I'm currently considering becoming an employee of a client (because I want to continue working on the project and they have rules about how long they can hire a freelancer), but I'm encountering a lot of resistance negotiating the pay I think I'm worth.

My approach as a freelancer has been very simple: My CV is on Linkedin, and recruiters find me there.

In the distant past when I had regular jobs, I tended to find them mostly through Monster and CVBank (Netherland). Or sometimes a recruiter; Linkedin is still useful.

I'm 39: I recently interviewed at a FAANG and almost every engineer who I interviewed with was visibly older than me. I was afraid that I was too young for the job!

Ironically, I've had age discrimination go the other way. In my early 30s I looked like I was in my mid-20s, and I had to push for pay in line with my experience. I still get carded when I buy beer.

Send me your CV along with a desired rate (my email is in my profile).

I can't guarantee anything but we do occasional have contractual work where age doesn't really matter (in my opinion), its all about the attitude and getting the job done. I would even consider your age an asset as you have field experience that a lot of people dont.

In this thread: an uncomfortable amount of straight up denial right in the faces of people expressing the affects they've felt of age discrimination. What do the deniers get from denying any experience other than their own experience as 'untrue' or 'doesn't happen', I wonder.

Have you considered freelance consulting? If you are good, nobody will care about your age, since they are not bringing you in to be truly part of their team, but to solve a hard problem they cannot on their own. Of course it doesn't fit everybody, but still an option.

I keep getting more and more recruiter spam the older I get (41). This probably relates to e.g. how many linkedin contacts have etc, but I make a point of not accepting invitations by people I don't know such as recruiters.

If you are interviewing and they think 45 is "too old" then there is a risk that everyone there is 30 or younger so you might not want to work there anyway (I wouldn't).

If you find a company that's at least 30 years old, and has an average retention of over 10 years - then that company is probably a nice place to work, and has old people too (because even 30year olds are 40 once they worked there 10 yearrs).

Huh. What happened to oldgeekjobs.com? ("Domain currently for sale")

This is a very difficult topic. Since discriminating on age is illegal in most countries, there aren't (much) sites/platforms where age is an actual explicit factor. Generally speaking, startups/scaleups are more inclined to hire younger folks. Older companies are more open to hire older engineers.

The bypass might be, looking for companies that have a lot of engineers with 15+ years of experience. You can do so with paid LinkedIn accounts. I'm happy to help with some specific searches if you don't have a paid LinkedIn account yourself.

Interestingly, I've been hitting the age bias from the other end. I mostly work with factories and NDT companies, retrofitting old CNC systems. I have a hard time getting work at certain types of companies because they think that I "look too young" to be experienced enough to work with their systems; granted, I do look pretty young for my age.

It's kind of funny to hear it coming from the other side, but I imagine at a lot of pure-software companies, the age biased is reversed from what I've experienced.

Look for bosses 40 and over who will appreciate the experience.

Where does your idea come from that FAANGs aren't right?

I'm 50, doing fine at a FAANG. My team has a good chunk of 40+ people on it as well. I see a good number of 40+ people on other teams, too. I get regular pings from other FAANGs about recruiting.

So, def. try for FAANGs. Just invest a couple of weeks into prepping for the interview process. Yes, it's stupid, but "behold my algorithmic chops" is what they want to see, so you cram algorithmic chops.

I changed jobs when I was over 50 and it was certainly tough. Hiring via the front door process didn't work for me. My best performances were typified by (i) the recruiter would push me as a good fit for a difficult-to-fill (ugly even) role because I had maturity and gravitas as well as technical skills, (ii) the shop had grey heads/beards already, (iii) I was known and vouched for by someone already on the inside.

Hmm, DevOps+Reliability experience, I am surprised Google is the wrong door. Did you try SRE role at Google London or Zurich office? I can help forward the resume if you'd give G a chance. Contact me at AT google.com.

Edit: can't represent all Googlers but people I know and have worked with (including the SREs in EU offices) don't give a sh*t on how fancy/normal/bad you look or wear.

You might be better off applying to companies directly through linkedin.

I've seen many positions that require seniority and had many colleagues even older than you.

Another anecdotal case here, I am based in Sweden and around your age, I didn't have any problem finding new jobs in the last years.

Same for many of my colleagues around the same age when our local office was closed.

I mainly used Linkedin and a few connections, but i doubt if it matters.

The only exception I have seen is for cookie cutter type of developers, it is easy to prefer young unmarried ones if they have the exact same qualifications as you.

A lot of startups want just young people as they don't have families, don't know any better, and will burn out after a few years. Do you really want to work there?

Same with an inherently young demographic at a company. My last place I was one of the older ones in a very young crowd who liked to hit the bars after work. Not my scene any more. I prefer to be the younger person in an older work environment.

Independent of age, there are a number of areas in tech which are heavily biased towards experience and perspective (usually correlated with age), particularly in SRE/DevOps.

I know we're struggling to find folks in EU with that kind of background - DM me for the specific positions, or consider areas where your experience is a tremendous asset.

Not saying this is the case for you, but a lot of being older and more experienced is also the fact that you are usually more expensive. The young up-and-comers are cheaper, often come with more bluster but are also less jaded... for lack of a better word. People like to feel like they are coming up with something new. They don't like the old guy in the corner saying, "Oh, that's just like X, I was doing that 30 years ago". Also, many smaller companies, especially startups, bias toward action. They like seeing people produce code. Experienced developers usually like to make smaller changes that don't produce a lot of code and sometimes end up deleting more code than you add. I finish just as many tasks/cards as anyone else, but my LoC is not even close to my younger peers. So when I have a big number + I don't have a large, quantifiable amount of code being produced + I tend to sound "pessimistic" even though I say something isn't going to work based upon experience... I can understand why that would be hard to justify. Even though the experience can prevent them from making very costly mistakes that other people have already failed at.

Ever thought about a management consulting company with a heavey it-focus? target audience: banks, insurance companies.

I work in the financial services industry (insurance), and so far I've found it to be very friendly to older developers. Sure, it's not the sexiest work, but you're working on real products that people want or need.

I would recommend looking at insurance companies, banks and other financial institutions.

I am 49, living in the Netherlands working as a self employed devops. Keep trying. Solid companies will value your seniority. But you also need to remain flexible and invest in much needed technology knowledge. Don't give up, be confident that you have what it takes. Radiate your confidence.

In my company (DK Based), the youngest SW dev(not based in India) is 38, so the companies are out there. I'm one of the youngest HW engineers at 35. My guess is that we average close to 50 in R&D. Granted, we are in Medical Devices, so young gun speed is not our thing, but still.

A marketplace for retired professionals to post their resume and skillset for part time work.

This is something im very afraid of, i feel like as i get older my oportunities of finding new places gets shorter and shorter, how do you people deal with this?

Personally i have had the chance of working with older devs (50+) and it was awesome.

Interviewed at Amazon three times before getting hired. Last time I was older than you. Got into a great team, in an incredibly important part of AWS.

You can apply every six months. Thing of each attempt as an opportunity to learn.

It's times like this I'm glad I have an oily face. I'm 38 years old but people think I'm 24. I guess an oily face helps keeps wrinkles at bay.

But also, let's not forget how important it is to get sleep.

Look at Telcos/Semiconductor/Aeronautical industries if that's an option. They are notoriously ageist in the opposite direction and value experience far more than tech in general.

I’m almost 50. I haven’t stopped getting calls from companies across the board. I’m not worried as long as I keep up my skills and can be useful to the company that I talk to.

I work at a healthcare nonprofit as a developer and we have a lot of developers in their 40s and 50s. I would suggest less trendy places and more “get stuff done” places.

It's horrifying how fast the transition is between too young and too old. :(

40 years' IT experience and I don't even get a reply, let alone an interview.

Have you tried applying for a position in a public sector IT-department? The public sector should not age-discriminate, at least in theory.

I suggest Roche or Pharmaceutical companies in general.

During my time in Roche (through a consultancy) at 29 I was one of the youngest on board.

Im working on this: https://tryoldster.com

Look to the East.

I applied for some 3¾ thousand jobs between 2009 (age 42) and 2013. I averaged less than one interview per year and worked 2 months full-time in that period.

In 2014 I landed a role in the Czech Republic and have only voluntarily been out of work since. I am nearing the end of a 3 year contract, my 5th role over here.

The former Communist bloc seems to have far less ageism than in the West. Rates of pay are lower -- I make maybe ½ what in theory this kind of role would pay in London. On the other hand, the cost of living is about ¼ so it is very much worth it.

I can’t find your contact info in your profile, but I am looking for DevOps help right now. We should chat.

Reminds me of Creed from Office (US) coloring his hair black with printer ink to look young !

You could try Atlassian, even though in the EU they only have an office in Amsterdam

specifically what types of companies are you applying to e.g. what size, industry?

Send me an email, I know a nice company that may be recruiting. Remote friendly.

And yet here I am trying to find an experienced Sr DevOps engineer in Mexico...

What about freelancing ? It'll be more flexible

Where in EU, and are you up for perhaps moving?

Give me your email or let me know how I can contact you, we can think of something.

How about upgrading to management with your many years of experience?

Try automotive.

What about self identifying as a 20 year old?

Not entirely facetious, I saw someone in Europe took such a case to court, so he could self indentify as younger on dating apps.

What country are you in? Afaik in the UK you shouldnt have issues. When I was a head of dev I personally NEVER discriminated based on age (or other reasons such as race, gender, region, etc for that matter), and neither have others i know nor have i heard people raising this issue.

They won't spit it out directly of course but people talk and what they say is that I need to be stellar or young to be hired. Companies won't invest in me the slightest bit, so the moment I miss a question in the long interview process I'm out of the door without second thought.

You're saying is that you're not a good fit technically and would need some investment in terms of either time or training, and companies are choosing not to go with that option. Why is that ageism?