DEV Community

Discussion on: What I Look for When Hiring Senior Software Engineers

Collapse
 
cjsmocjsmo profile image
Charlie J Smotherman

Are you trying to bait the author? Why would you even ask, "At what age do you stop considering candidates for employment?" That's like asking, "How old do you have to be before I will consider hiring you for a software position?" Come on. You're giving us senior software engineers (over 50) a bad name.

No just asking the tough questions. After being "ghosted" by countless recruiters and hiring managers once they find out my age, yes I feel this is a very relevant question and one that needs to be raised.

Senior has nothing to do with age or the number of years of software development experience.

What does "Senior' mean then?

Any software engineer that has been doing the same thing, year after year, for 20 years, has only one year of experience in my book

I disagree I would call them an "expert" on the subject.

However, any software engineer that has been taking online courses, experimenting, building, sharing with others (blogging, meetups, tech lunches), is worth their weight in gold. They have something that can't be bought - a passion for the craft of being called a professional.

Yea I use to believe that until I started looking for a job. After 4 years of job searching I do not agree with this statement.

To be clear I'm not looking for any special treatment just because I'm old.
All I want is a fair shot, and from my experience that doesn't seem to be the case.

Food for thought, will there be a place for you in the IT industry when you hit 50 years old?

Happy Coding

Thread Thread
 
scottfred profile image
@ScottFred

Yup, there will be a place for me in the IT industry when I hit 50... How do I know that? I'm already 50+ and I've got a great Software Engineering job. Sorry you feel you haven't been given a fair shot, but I would challenge you to look inward and ask yourself what you could be doing to improve how you communicate the skills you have to recruiters. Can you write blog posts about the skills you have? Can you show a portfolio of projects that you have developed? Have you contributed to open source projects? Have you presented at a Meetup? Have you presented things about software topics at previous software gigs? Have you mentored others? If you can't do at least a couple of these things, regardless of your age, you're going to find it hard to find a job in this industry and I'm trying to challenge your mindset rather than pointing the finger at the recruiters.

Thread Thread
 
cjsmocjsmo profile image
Charlie J Smotherman

Yup, there will be a place for me in the IT industry when I hit 50... How do I know that? I'm already 50+ and I've got a great Software Engineering job.

This is good to know, at least there is still hope :)

Sorry you feel you haven't been given a fair shot, but I would challenge you to look inward and ask yourself what you could be doing to improve how you communicate the skills you have to recruiters. Can you write blog posts about the skills you have? Can you show a portfolio of projects that you have developed? Have you contributed to open source projects? Have you presented at a Meetup? Have you presented things about software topics at previous software gigs? Have you mentored others?

Yes I have done all this and more. My sons business website is up on Heroku, my blog is up on Gatsby Cloud, my resume is up on AWS, maintained several packages in Debian and was an uploading developer for Ubuntu. I even moved to Seattle from Texas to be "more appealing to potential employers".

After a 4 year journey that's not over yet, I have looked inwards many times wondering whats wrong with me, what am I doing wrong, why can't I do this, what can I do better. I appreciate your advise and it's good advise that others should follow, but so far it has not yielded any results for me. But who knows maybe one day :)

Happy Coding