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I lost my last permanent job in London at the end of 2008, at the beginning of the financial crisis in the UK.

I applied for about two thousand roles in 2009 alone, and from 2008-2013, about 3,500 roles in total... In about 6-8 countries in multiple disciplines.

I averaged 30+ applications _per day_ at first... and 1 interview per year.

From 2009 to 2013 I got 2 months of paying work in total.

Reason? I think it's because I was 41 when I started.

I used to mainly work in support, from 1st/2nd/3rd line to sysadmin, systems design and spec, network architect, everything. I do Windows, Linux, Mac OS, networking, comms, some programming knowledge, training, all sorts. But I'm too old to get work as a techie.

I eventually moved to the Czech Republic. I'm in my 3rd position in 4 years, having nearly doubled my salary from its lowest point since I moved here. Mainly because I'm a native English speaker and we're in big demand here.

I can _turn down_ work I don't want over here. But I did have to move to a new country, where I don't speak the language, and accept an initial pay cut to about one quarter of what I hoped for in London.

8 comments

Sorry, those 3500 recipients could not have known that you're 41 and tossed the application on that basis. There is just some problem other than the one you imagine.

> I used to mainly work in support, from 1st/2nd/3rd line to sysadmin, systems design and spec, network architect, everything. I do Windows, Linux, Mac OS, networking, comms, some programming knowledge, training, all sorts. But I'm too old to get work as a techie.

Across all the organizations where I have ever worked, I remember plenty of "old" guys doing this kind of IT stuff.

With that background, it's probably going to be hard to apply for anything different. Hundreds of applications but very low interview rate sounds like some sort of insurmountable mismatch between background and job. Or something silly in your application that is raising some sort of "red flag" for no good reason. If your age or date of birth aren't in the application, then that can't be it.

> those 3500 recipients could not have known that you're 41

A likely-accurate age estimate is easily discernible for applicants who follow the common practice of putting their education history with graduation dates. A much rougher estimate is also possible with nothing more than specific technologies. You can do pretty well with employment history as well -- and I'd suspect that many among hiring managers or HR staff quickly develop a profile (consciously or not) that rules out both inadequate experience AND experience that feels too scattered or too long.

There could also be other factors, of course. Timing can be an issue. I've heard stories of people applying for hundreds of jobs (who were getting hundreds of applicants per open position) during the 2001-2003 bust. I wouldn't be surprised if it were the same thing in 2009 (though I found 2009 was a great time to be contracting -- businesses still wanted stuff done, they just didn't want the liability of an FTE on the books).

And there's always the possibility that the GP was simply not matched to the job, but it's not the foregone conclusion you seem to be assuming.

> I remember plenty of "old" guys doing this kind of IT stuff.

Most of the people I remember working with have health insurance, too, so naturally not having health insurance has rarely been a problem for working people.

(Which is an indirect way of saying: survivorship bias! The existence of companies that employ workers over 30/40/50 is positive to observe for anyone who'd like to make software/IT their career as long as possible, but the figure that'd probably matter most would be the relative hire rates among different age groups.)

Exactly so.

I have tried most things.

I removed all the dates from my CV. No difference; a minimally intelligent pimp can add up. Degree, that's 3y; 3y in this role, 2y in that role, 2 years there, 16y freelancing... This dude is old.

So I removed the early junior jobs from my career history. Result, I got quizzed on how I walked straight into senior roles straight out of university.

So I left out some gaps in the timeline (I've freelanced quite a lot) -- and got curious about the specific tech I'd worked with in particular roles. Deploying Windows NT Server 3.1, or managing a migration from DECnet to TCP/IP, dates you.

You can fool the idiots, sure. But then your CV gets passed to non-idiots.

I don't advertise a DoB any more, nor dates of education, but I do give the years of my various permie jobs. It's easier to just be honest.

If they're ageist, as many are, then you can't lie or BS your way past that.

It's terrible that you haven't gotten a job or any attention. I still think there's something on your resume that might be affecting this. I am in my early 50s and I had no problem getting my last job. But it might be because I have several degrees in CS and experience at leading companies. My resume does list the year I graduated from college and the time at the company's but I had thought of retracting that for my resume in case there was ageism but I didn't see that. I'm an engineer and not in it / support staff so maybe that's part of my advantage. I wish I could see your resume and then I could maybe offer some advice.

If your 25 years of experience are on the application, it doesn't take a math major to spot that you're not 23.

Yeah, all hiring managers know roughly how old you are by the time they've scanned your resume.

Besides the other examples which have been given here there are some subtle flags, too, which apparently are often used as indicators of age on a resume. I saw a whole list of these things somewhere once but I only remember a couple of them right off the top of my head.

For example, I took a typing class back in the day and I was taught to always put two spaces after the end of a sentence. But today this flags you as "old".

Also, for me a properly formatted phone number looks something like this, per convention back in the day: 800-123-4567. But today you'd better write it like the following, else you're "old": 800.123.4567.

And so on.

Of course, one of the benefits of being "old" and still working in the tech field is the ability to toss out little gems like the following, which can be remarkably effective at putting some youngster in their place, when necessary: "Jesus, what a freaking noob thing to say/do!"

Another benefit is being able to walk into a situation where the local kids are maybe in a bit over their heads, whipping out what is to them some old and mysterious IT magic, and then start solving their problems in short order. One of the last times I did this I heard "Wow, we've been trying to figure out how to do that for years now!"

I haven't noticed any particular habits of numerical formatting or anything, but this might be US-specific.

But I have done the pulling-magic-fixes-out-of-a-hat thing. It's fun. :-)

Yes, it was amazing (to those kids) the number of things that I could do for them just using basic commands like DIR and FIND and such under Windows. And when I started using Powershell for the more complex stuff, I got "Powershell? I think I'd heard of that." These were folks in their 20s and 30s, so you'd have thought maybe they would have been a little more on top of such things. But in reality if it wasn't "click, click, drag, drop" then it was generally quite alien to them.

BTW, I think I remember a couple more of those resume flags. Back in the day I was taught to list things out like this, this, and this - that last comma being known variously as the Oxford, Harvard, serial, or series comma. (See what I did there?) But the "modern" way of doing it is this, this and this - with no Oxford comma.

Another had to do with email addresses. Dare you ever list something like an aol.com email address (which my wife still has, for example) lest it flag you as "old school"?

Interesting aside here as to things like Facebook: a few years back there was a notion being promoted among hiring folks (no doubt being pushed by Zuck himself) that if you weren't on Facebook then there must be something seriously wrong with you - that you were probably socially or technologically inept, and you were likely then not a good fit for hiring purposes. Today, of course, "Delete Facebook!" is all the rage.

— EDUCATION

1994-1998 Univerisity of Whatever

BS CS

—

Let’s guess the likely minimum age?

I'm very sorry to hear about your experience. But when I hear that you think 41 is old I have to stifle a slight cough. I'm 58 and started my most recent job 2 months ago. Before that, I worked for FICO in the UK for 1 year and 9 months. I've had 5 or 6 jobs since I was 41, but I've always put the (enjoyable) time in at home to learn new stuff. It keeps you young.

Also 58 and working as an SRE at a company I love. Greybeards unite!

I have a tiny handful of friends in IT older than I whose careers are still thriving in the UK. Most are specialists of some kind. I wish them well.

For the first >50% of my career, my speciality was that I wasn't a specialist. I can work anything with a keyboard and a display, fix it, tune it, make it talk to anything else, or at a push virtualise it.

But that's an obsolete skill in the near-monoculture of today, when IT means Unix, Windows and nothing else, talking Internet protocols. It's all boring now.

Usefully, though, I also write, so I changed course and became a tech writer. That's working out OK so far.

Well I think it is far from boring. The growth of cloud platforms, containerization, orchestration, there's a lot going on.

Good for you! Sincerely!

I am very happy about the move. I'm glad to have left the UK and my quality of life now is far better than it was. I wasn't forced into it. I had a fallback plan: I wrote and sold a book, and used the proceeds to pay for a TEFL course. My plan was to go travelling as a TEFL teacher.

As it happens, I didn't need to do it. Just as I was planning on it, a role abroad came up, and once I adjusted to the idea of a 75% pay cut from what I was expecting, it was a very good move.

I wouldn't particularly wish the fate of being _forced_ to change countries on anyone, but it's not a bad thing. Mind you, I had no family, no dependents, nothing. And I now have the disposable income to visit ageing parent more often than I did from London.

In retrospect, do you think if instead of the 2000 applications you did in 2009, you had highly targeted maybe 1 position a week, with personalized letters, tweaked resume, and friendly follow up, you might have had success? 2009 was the worst year for employment I’ve ever seen, so maybe there truly were no options for you.

No, not really.

For 2 reasons.

[1] I only did broadcast/scattershot approach for the first year. After I got kicked off benefits the 2nd time (for attending a meeting of my startup -- an unpaid position -- in another part of the country) I stopped trying for anything I could do at all, anywhere, and started targeting my applications far more specifically, at things I was a really good fit for, with customised CVs etc.

No difference. Maybe a slightly higher rate of rejection letters.

[2] As others have said, timing.

I was freelance for most of the period 1996-2001 and 2003-2007. I decided to return to F/T work in '07 and applied for about 500 positions in 4 months before I got my first interview. I was hired over the phone, first interview.

It's getting to the interview that's hard. I interview well. I'm smart, lucid, eloquent, approachable.

These days, that means keyword matching, to get past 1st and maybe 2nd level selection.

2009/2010 were very bad. 2011, I got a role, but only very very briefly. 2012, I was even flown to Scotland for a 2nd interview, then got a second, non-IT role. 2013, I retrained in TEFL and went looking for teaching roles. End 2013, I applied for, and in early 2014, I got, a role in Brno, Czechia.

Another idea: I don't see you talking about using your network of friends or LinkedIn. I get a lot of things from recruiters trying to get me to interview with them just based on my resume. And then I ask friends about working at the company they are in.

OP here - and I agree. 2009 was a worst-case scenario.

this. I had substantially the same experience in 2009 except I was 27 at the time. I could't get a job writing C++ with a degree and 4 years experience. I couldn't get a job flipping burgers. I later learned that the reason I could't get a cashier job at home depot was because they had already fired half the floor staff and made the office staff work two jobs. A friend of mine worked at a bank, and the accountant at that home depot was complaining to him that they were training her to cut lumber. It was work lumber + accounting or get fired. Of course they were still accepting applications :/

"I think it's because I was 41 when I started."

Doubftul. I was 40 when I was looking a couple years back and had a better conversion rate of application -> interview than I've had in my entire life. This is for Rails/React work. I had 15 interviews out of maybe 25 or so applications, had a few opportunities I turned down and landed perhaps the best job I ever had.

I'm beginning to look again at 42 and got 5 interviews in the first week and turned down at least at least 3x as many ops that I didn't like because I'm rather picky.

Are there companies that are pushing my resume to the side because they can glean my age by work history and graduation year? Perhaps.

What I will say though is your experience matches much of what I saw circa 2001 during the .com upheaval. I applied to 50 companies in the first month after the startup I was at blew up at, not a single interview. I was 25 at the time though. I knew many people in their 20s who gave up trying to get work.

I imagine looking for work in 2009 was a whole heckuva lot like 2001 depending on what field you were in.

Good for you. Seriously.

It does seem to be better for programmers.

I was primarily a support guy, but also systems admin, network architect/rollouts/installation, training, even project management and security consultancy at a push.

We're regarded as far more fungible than coders. Coders make more money and if you are good in a niche, something popular, or something wildly obscure where it's hard to find people, then it's easier to find work.

2 of my former partners are programmers. One a general database programmer; she found it hard to retrain into suitably trendy databases, but once she did, she was off and running. Another in a very obscure language, but once she found a role, after a few years, she was making 50% more than my best-ever pay in London.

Either you write in something desirable (even if niche), or you're good enough to switch languages easily and readily (and regularly) retrain in something desirable. If you do that and are good, there's work out there.

If you're a humble grunt who fixes stuff, it's much much harder.

This is basically it. If you're in tech it's huge having some sense of career progression - either vertically, up the management chain, or laterally moving into more current/progressive/desirable areas.

This is really where the notion of age discrimination would come into play, just this concern someone has been doing the same thing for X years and stopped growing - passion and curiosity is ageless.

That said, regardless of this timing is a big concern. I am bracing myself for a difficult market if the tech bubble deflates, and to that extent the next position I get is one I plan to be at at least 3-4 years.

I think you've got it. There is more demand for programmers and you're right that companies don't find it is hard to hire people for it support jobs. That's a shame. If I was in your position I would consider trying to train as a programmer. But reading your other comments it seems like you've got it worked out and have transitioned into something new so good for you.

Maybe you're the outlier; maybe the other person is the outlier. Maybe 2009 is the outlier. Based on anecdotes, I feel like it's hard to say one way or the other.

Is there a collection of data that outlines the average time spent looking for work amongst programmers, and other different tech fields? And how it has changed over the years?

Wow thousands of jobs! Could you explain:

* How do you even send that many applications? Is there some site where you can click thousands of checkboxes and apply? Do you send individual emails?

* What modifications do you make when applying from job-to-job?

* What adjustments did you make along the way? Did you change your resume or make any other major changes to how you were presented?

* For how many of those jobs did you proceed to an interview?

> 2008-2013, about 3,500 roles

> * How do you even send that many applications? Is there some site where you can click thousands of checkboxes and apply? Do you send individual emails?

(3500/2) = 1750 hours, or just shy of one work year with holidays/vacation/etc.

If he is applying to multiple countries, of the course of 5 years, I wouldn't be surprised if 3500 jobs were posted for him to apply to that his qualifications were relevant for.

To be honest, I've applied to a non-negligible number of jobs every year just to keep interviewing and looking for better options. At 30min per application, the limitation was my time rather than the # of positions that were open given how flexible I am about location.

The only difference is I've been continuously employed and the applications are as much about maintaining my ability to interview effectively as it is firing bosses I don't care for.

Just so. Aggressive job-hunting is a nearly full-time job in itself.

As I said, though, from 2010-2013 I became a lot more selective, meaning it was only an hour or 2 a day.

I’ve seen this happen to people. You get depressed and focus on sites like Monster/etc that are mostly bullshit generic posts and agencies trolling for resumes. No interviews because there are no jobs.

Up to a point, yes.

I tried to use as broad a range of places as I could find. I bought the Guardian every Thursday for the ads in the Tech pull-out, until they cancelled that. I subscribed to Computing and Computer Weekly and went for any print ads in there, too. I applied to a few from New Scientist as well, borrowing friends' copies or going to the local libraries.

There are indubitably many ads for each role, and also fake ads for agencies wanting lots of people on their books, but you can't really tell real from spam, so I just applied for them all.

I'm stuck in this rut. What can I do to break out of it?

Dabockster- I did a stint as a tech recruiter a while back (not doing that anymore), so I can offer some perspective from the other side of the table - although limited.

A few questions:

1. How many events do you attend per week? (could be related to any industry at all - could be a tradeshow, a panel of speakers, tech meetups - anything really)?

2. How many hands do you shake at each event?

3. How many people from these events do you follow up with?

If your score is "0" for all of the above then you are doing it all wrong.

You need to meet people in person, each week. The only way to do that short of showing up at the front desk, resume in hand, is to go to events.

You need to set a goal of attending 1-2 events per week (minimum), and figuring out how to get in front of hiring managers from companies you admire.

Figure out what events those people might attend socially or professionally. Get up to speed with events in various industries in your city.

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable at events, and find a way to make them enjoyable.

People who log facetime at events do immediately jump to the top of the pile compared to people like you who are #200-300 at the bottom of the stack in the applicant tracking system for some BS job posting on Monster (many of which are for non-existent jobs).

Don't be #300.

Start attending events!

There's no reason you should have to apply for 3,000 jobs, that is a waste of time.

Start working smarter - even if you are introverted and awkward in person.

Now pick your head, up, get out there and get started!

You can do this!

I signed up with every agency in sight -- Monster, Reed, Manpower, whatever. I had saved keyword queries on all the major agencies and sites. I joined mailing lists with job ads -- I recall https://www.environmentjob.co.uk/ had some interesting ones, but many, you have to pay your own way, and I was broke. I went looking for as many ads as possible.

I had a file of application letters, needing minimal customisation to fit. Copy, paste, add salutation/role/location, attach CV, send.

My CV is longish -- 3 pages -- but then, so's my career. I've done what I can to optimise it for keywords that will get hits when pimps do searches.

The CV didn't get customised for specific applications unless I really wanted that role and thought I'd be perfect for it. It didn't help. I don't bother doing it any more. I maintain a "writer" and a "techie" CV, just in case.

Every morning, I would make a cuppa and breakfast, sit at the PC, read a few comics and the news, then start applying. I'd keep going until there were no vaguely relevant positions left. It took from 2 to 5 hours most days.

I logged every application in an OpenOffice/LibreOffice spreadsheet: date, title, reference number, agency. Every fortnight, I signed on at the Jobcentre, and took the printout of the last 2 weeks' applications to get it initialled as evidence. I needed that in August; by then, the printout was about 2cm thick.

I probably still have it somewhere. Perhaps I should put it on Dropbox for people to see the evidence. :-)

You should have stopped at the 50th application without response, and asked for professional help. As the saying goes, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." A career coach could have helped you figure out what was wrong.

Without knowing the details, I'd guess that the age prejudice is in your head, and instead your resume just raised a bunch flags. One common mistake is listing several disparate skills, with no coherence; recruiters need to be able to categorize you in one of their "boxes" - SRE, engineer, Unix sysadmin, Windows sysadmin, security analyst, leader CTO-type, etc. Jack-of-all-trades are usually the first ones to be dismissed.

Other common flag is lack of consistency in your trajectory. Candidates jumping between jobs too quickly may be a problem, unless you're looking for a short-term contractor.

Also, after you've been out of the market for a couple of years, it gets harder to get back in. So it's natural that now you're having to turn down offers. Again, another proof that age had nothing to do with your low success rate.

When applying to those roles how did they discover you were 41?

Former recruiter and current professional resume writer. As the other respondent said, the quick formula a recruiter might use to guess your birth year is "college graduation date - 22" or "date of first job - 22".

You should keep this fact in mind as you write a resume and decide which jobs to include, which jobs to perhaps delete, and whether you want to include your graduation date. It isn't necessary to include a graduation year or all of your jobs, so you can usually shave some years off your age "on paper" without being considered as deceptive.

Sometimes I'll add a line "Previous experience included..." to indicate that there is prior work experience, but I don't list the years.

Just to add to that, these are the rules I follow. Needless to say, I am 50+

1. Don't include graduation dates in your resume, just the University/School name and Major(s) 2. Truncate your resume to just slightly over the required years of experience. e.g., include past 12 years experience for a job which requires 10+ years 3. Keep your resume to under 3 pages (max). Nobody has the time to wade through an 8 page resume, even if you have worked on the most awesome projects at the start of your career

Seemed to work for me

I am curious. If what you described is a standard technique people can use, what prevents the recruiters/talent acquisition to, by default, discard resumes/CVs without exact dates?

I assure you it is a standard practice, but why would recruiters discard resumes without exact dates 'by default'? Because the assumption is that those people are 'old'?

That may answer the question for you, but ageism is a legal concern and disqualifying candidates because they didn't tell you when they graduated isn't dissimilar to asking someone how old they are in a job interview and refusing to hire them if they don't.

You should target 10-15 years of relevant job experience on your resume and keep it to 1-2 pages.

The goal is to appear no older than a 30-39 year old professional on the job application as much as possible.

22+15 = 37 (24+15 = 39, if a masters)

It could be as simple as having over 15 years of professional experience on the resume.

I never thought about this one.

If your resume says you graduated from college 18 years ago, and worked at <some corp> for 17 of them, they can make a pretty good guess.

Reason? I think it's because I was 41 when I started.

The implication of your post is that the hiring managers responsible for 3500 jobs are *all" discriminating on age. That seems unlikely, if only because there are people in the UK tech sector older than that who can still find roles, so evidently not all managers discriminate.

Not all, but most.

It is endemic in the Anglophone world. I also speak a little German, French, Norwegian and at a push Spanish and Swedish, and I applied to anywhere that was hiring English speakers there, too... with cover letter in the local language, naturally.

Zero interest.

So I think it's a Western problem.

Q.v.

https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/silicon-valley%E2%80%99s-d...

https://newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-brut...

I encounter virtually none here in the former Communist Bloc, where people are more interested in me because of my experience.

I think it's just an oversupply of people in it support and it really contrast with the shortage of software engineers. Now that you're teaching English as a foreign language you're in a skillset area with a shortage and that's why you're more in demand. Age might matter a little bit but I think you've just got the right skill set now in the area that's short of experts.