Am 52. Served as IBM’s “corporate webmaster” in the 1990s (sort of like being CTO but without the cool executive hat). Corporate Webmaster was responsible for all technical operations of IBM’s corporate sites (from systems administration to application development), as well as theoretically responsible for all IBM web sites. As well as serve as the single point of contact inside IBM for anything “internet”.
Have been mostly unemployed since leaving IBM in 2001, other than a few short stints with NYC area startups.
To F100 corporate organizations I was too “internet” and claimed far too much experience than possible (circa 2002), to startups I was (and apparently am) too conservative, too corporate.
And yes, I tried the non–profit track. Every non–profit I interviewed with decided that I was clearly going to drop them as soon as I could reacquire a job in corporate America.
I’ve found other ways to make money instead of being employed by others.
I'm almost 50 myself. I've been coding for 25+ years, and am looking for a new job myself. I have one at a well-known company but I want to make more hay while the sun shines. I currently have a week of onsites booked with the Big N, and I'm in study mode. Because I'm still technical and hands-on and never became a manager, I haven't had any trouble getting contacted constantly for new jobs.
Same, technical and hands on, people love my work. Had a lot of trouble getting hired last time. Was unemployed for a year and whole family was a mere couple of weeks from homelessness when a govt contract finally came through. Next time I won’t be so lucky as little has changed, and feel the winds of recession picking up.
Same, except add nine years to the age. :). I actually did try management back in the late 90's and early 2000's, first at a startup I cofounded, then at a mid-size public company after the startup was acquired. I basically hated my life from the point where the startup stopped being a bunch of us coding and playing Quake III at night, to the point where I quit the public corp. Went back into engineering, stayed there, work at home and love what I do. Have no lack of opportunities being floated my way.
I was burned out after 5 years of 7x24x365. Days were filled with conference calls and escalations about conference calls, nights were filled with the technical work I was supposed to be doing during the day. I was prohibited from filing patents due to some sort of corporate reporting arcanity, which derailed my technical career. I had (and apparently still have) an extremely negative reputation in the executive ranks from all of the times I told people that no, they couldn't run an IBM site under their desk, and many others.
Appreciate that it's not similar to today's concept of CTO. I was not only responsible for all IBM web sites, I was expected to design, develop, deploy, manage, diagnose software for all IBM web sites, even those that I had no direct control over. IBM’s own software products tended to trail what we were doing in production by 12-24 months, when they were actually released.
Hence a classic toxic 24/7 role where you're expected to double as operation and developer and database and architect and all. You should have run away much quicker.
Nothing to do whatsoever with CTO. It's not event relevant to anything executive or management.
I hope that you can describe your position in a more positive light than this text and without alluding to being CTO, because both will get you rejected fairly quickly in any interview.
MY next door neighbor worked for IBM in OS/2. when IBM stopped supporting OS/2 they laid him off. He blamed Microsoft for it and refused to run Windows. I got him a copy of OpenSUSE from my computer because he refused to use Windows. He went to Linux, and had worked on the IBM Mainframes as well before. He had trouble getting hired because he was in his 60s. He recently died and had called himself a Windows Bigot because he refused to use or support Windows.
Mostly retired. Stopped worrying about finding FTE 5-6 years ago and focused on making the cash I had work for me on a more immediate time scale. I do some advisory work with local startups for equity. Angel invested for awhile but stopped as mentioned elsewhere in an earlier thread.
Would love to work again in tech but have never cracked getting on recruiters’ radar and I have better things to do than play whack—a-mole with the latest and greatest in applicant tracking systems automated decision algorithms.
I'm going to rock your world: almost nobody uses the keyword scanners in the ATSs. Sending a resume is mostly a waste of time, if you find a job you like just speak to someone that works at that company, preferably the hiring manager, and your likelihood of at least getting an interview goes up by about two orders of magnitude. Happy to teach you other tricks if you care for it.
As a 50+ chap, I had an instance of a top company, referred by friend, whole team up for it and to not even get an interview as I got `filtered` by HR and the recruitment process.
Turns out they rejected me as I was `overqualified`.
Equally in my early years pre PC mainstream days, there was an age bias towards older people. With many personal experiences upon that in that time/culture - including, believe it or not `overqualified` (they sat a coding exam and I found mistakes in the exam) for a COBOL job at a bank aged 19 (had 3 years work under my belt already in the field). Recruitment agent said it was because I knew more than the boss and he didn't like that. Was a time also back then when the boss would of previously done the job of those under him in such institutional culture of that time.
Dare say starting out today is easier than it was pre internet boom.
I'm sure there are others who equally have experienced agisim on both ends of the scale in IT.
As a gen-x'er, I wonder about being caught in the middle. I was too young for boomers (started as weekend tech in 9th grade). Now I sense I'm too old for millennials.
Supposedly both demo groups strongly prefer their own. Whereas us x'ers were so few, we just had to get along with everyone.
As a gen-xer, I fucking love where I'm at. I have the perfect combination of knowing how to to fix my toilet and my wifi (was third engineer at Aruba - suck it).
>Turns out they rejected me as I was `overqualified`.
I applied for a helpdesk position like this, once. Was required to take an IQ test and one of the questions during the interview was about what IRQ the keyboard was assigned to (you know, in the plug-n-play era, when IRQ and COM ports no longer were a "thing" to configure).
Got a response back, later, that I was overqualified.
I easily translated it to, "Wasn't willing to put up with our shit for so little pay."
Bullet dodged but there are some truly caustic employers out there, who will try to gatekeep every possible variance that they can think of, to keep the line toed[0].
A friend of mine is in his 50s he got tired of being overqualified for jobs. So he sent in applications for CEO of Microsoft etc and got the overqualified letters back. It is ridiculous if you ask me, and he is only overqualified because of his age.
That is one worth framing and adding to the CV. My personal favorite was time IBM said something could not be done, I knocked up some code 30 minutes later doing what they said could not be done. Took IBM a week (which entailed contacting outside consultants) to come back and say my proposal would solve the problem.
I really wished the response of "over qualified" was made illegal as we all know it is used as a way to say no for reasons that are not legal...like age discrimination etc or other forms of discrimination (note I'm autistic spectrum).
Oh well, I've grown to loath and borderline hate HR departments over the decades thru such experiences. Which have been predominantly staffed by females, not that I'm drawing any conclusion to that, but it has been solid observation over my entire working career and at the very least, curious. Maybe there needs to be a drive for sexual equality with HR departments :/
Usually they staff a female minority in HR to make up for lack of diversity in other departments. In some companies I worked at they upgraded a administrative assistant to supervising manager of IT because she was female and they needed more diversity. She was not qualified for the job, and I'd feel better if she was qualified for the job. But that is just my opinion.
Dare say starting out today is easier than it was
pre internet boom.
Hard to say without a time machine, but from talking to juniors & students (I have a lot of friends who teach) it sounds harder to get that first job than it was when I was starting out (I'm 36).
My completely unscientific gut feeling was that it was the easiest to get started in tech in the late 90s & right as the industry started recovering from the .com bust (~2005, when I got my first "real" full-time developer job).
The funny things is that they were already teaching programming in secondary schools when I was a kid (i.e. it wasn't really 'exotic' to be a programmer) but even in my most recent job most programmers are in their 20s.
I used to get, can you start Monday? pretty often after an hour interview back in the day. Sure miss that, and considering I’m a much better dev now it’s a travesty.
Had that, also for contract work that in itself can be a deal breaker as one case I said I could start a few days later and they gave the contract to somebody else. But then contracting and perm work, you can appreciate and respect that aspect.
AT 36, you would of hit the internet explosions about spot on, prior to the PC days with mainframes and `corporate/government ` structure it was not easy at all. Late 90's was the internet boom time and there was a real sudden shortage in skills back then and it was easier.
I was taught programming in school (well, actually self taught from magazines like Byte, computer World and Unix World and a ZX81) in the early 80's, was an acoustic coupler modem that took 30 mins to get a stable line to a mainframe at some college our school had some airtime upon. Today, far more accessible, but back then, was hard on many levels.
Biggest hurdle was HR and one role I went for (was 20 then), had two interviews, HR and then the tech people. Litterly had HR peon say to me "That's a lot of money for somebody your age" and really was a very uncomfortable attitude. Blow the tech interview out of the water, got offered the job and more money than the HR peon bismershed for somebody my age and turned the job down flat solely due to the attitude of the HR peon and made that very clear. Took another job offer, for less money outer principle. Though turned out to be a better job. But had I not had the attitude from HR, I'd of taken that job.
Lot changed in that 15 year gap between mid-30's aged people and people in their 50's today. But then much has changed on many levels and I'd say for the better overall, albeit the age discrimination thing still exists, they just moved the goalposts.
But IT is still a young industry, compare to say accountants. But then accountant qualification from a decade ago, still worth it's value today, not many tech certs/qualifications that you can say that about as the industry changes and is still evolving. That is kinda the crux and what makes IT as an industry, hard to compare to many other industries as IT is just more dynamic.
That said - COBOL has remained pretty darn static. But I moved out of that area decades ago (before you the internet boom and the time you got into tech).
But tech is a constant learning curve, that won't change soon either. Hence any job in tech is not just the job, but a full time education on top of that to stay current.
Yes, I'm sure I had it easier as there were a lot more jobs requiring programming at the turn of the century than 20 years prior! My point was - is it actually harder for people 15 years younger than me to start up?
Many examples of people in that age having started up on their own, be it some wondrous website thru to a mobile phone app.
Ease of access to consumers with the likes of ebay or app stores and lower running costs into breaking into those avenues have opened up many an avenue that was harder to access before.
But that is progress, come 50+, you may end up having the same perspective in relation to when you started out and starting out today.
> I'm going to rock your world: almost nobody uses the keyword scanners in the ATSs. Sending a resume is mostly a waste of time, if you find a job you like just speak to someone that works at that company, preferably the hiring manager, and your likelihood of at least getting an interview goes up by about two orders of magnitude. Happy to teach you other tricks if you care for it.
How are you supposed to find out the hiring manager's name from a job post? I'd be curious to hear some of these tricks.
> How are you supposed to find out the hiring manager's name from a job post? I'd be curious to hear some of these tricks.
Go to meetups. User's groups. Any gathering of technical people. Important people tend to network, but they may not be the "regulars" as they are busy people.
I know more than a couple of technical/user groups where a relatively unknown person giving a good presentation is likely to wind up with an interview on the spot ... if not an actual consulting/job offer.
The key is a good presentation. The content shows your technical chops and the presentation shows your communication skills.
And, while lots of people say "have a GitHub and reference it", I'm going to caution about this. Just like an art portfolio, only put things you can proud of in there if you're going to make it public and reference it for employment. I may make you show me at the interview on your laptop and talk about it and it shouldn't embarrass you.
(Personally, I don't check GitHub unless someone points me at it explicitly.)
Linkedin. If you can't find the person who manages that department, find anybody in that department and ask them about the job and the manager. One "trick" is to let them know you're looking to apply at the company and want to ask them for career advice. Most people love giving advice.
I work for a company with 4500 employees. I assure you, one of the obvious patterns based on first and last names will get you most email addresses there.
Make sure you have something to brag about in github. Highlight it on your resume and cover letter. As others said, contact hiring managers directly. But most importantly, figure out what is it you enjoy working on 8+ hours every day, and look for companies that would let you do that.
It's a capitalistic market. When everyone does X you have to figure out what Y is which will differentiate yourself. When everyone uses linkedin to target then you have to find other channels.
Everyone should read Traction by Garbriel Weinberg. It's for startup marketing but job searching is basically marketing yourself in a world that has one dominant channel (recruiters). The efficacy of different channels is time varying as they get saturated- You have to find the one that works for you at any given time
Have been mostly unemployed since leaving IBM in 2001, other than a few short stints with NYC area startups.
To F100 corporate organizations I was too “internet” and claimed far too much experience than possible (circa 2002), to startups I was (and apparently am) too conservative, too corporate.
And yes, I tried the non–profit track. Every non–profit I interviewed with decided that I was clearly going to drop them as soon as I could reacquire a job in corporate America.
I’ve found other ways to make money instead of being employed by others.