I'm 62 and just got a great offer from a biotech startup two miles from my home.
I took a different approach from what many of the comments here recommend. Instead of weeding down my resume to recent and "relevant" experience, I emphasized the wide variety of projects I've worked on, and I listed everything in my LinkedIn profile, all the way back to my first programming job in 1969. I got rid of my traditional resume entirely and let the LinkedIn profile be my resume.
Also, I made up a new title/tagline for myself: "Low Level Full Stack Developer". At the moment, I'm the only person in the world with that particular description. :-)
I wanted to distinguish myself from the other common definition of "full stack developer", which often seems to imply somebody who is an expert on website scalability. That's not really my thing: I'm better at going down the stack into hardware and device drivers and such.
So I included some interesting side projects that were outside the usual web developer arena, such as PdfChip where I took a PDF datasheet for an ARM chip, connected it to a development board, and made the pinout diagram in the PDF interactive so you could see the state of the pins in the PDF, and click on pins to toggle them.
Then I started writing back to all the recruiters who had been pinging me, including the ones that were way off like the place that was looking for a "Drupal themer". Always be nice to recruiters; you never know when you'll need one. :-) And indeed, some of them also had more relevant opportunities.
And these conversations helped me in my thinking about what I was really looking for: something very different from the traditional web work I've been doing for several years - something more hardware oriented (and I don't mean just computing hardware).
I noticed that there were a couple of local biotech companies looking for full stack developers. Wrote to one and never heard a peep back from them, not even after a couple of followups. Wrote to the other and heard back from the CEO right away. Got together with the team a couple of days later for a fairly informal interview.
They didn't insult me with a coding test - they had already looked at some of my code, and the questions I've answered on Stack Overflow. It probably also helped that I had submitted a small but good quality pull request to one of their open source projects the day before. :-)
Had lunch with the CEO a few days later to work out some of the details, and they made the offer a few days after that.
I can't really disagree with the advice that you should focus your resume/LinkedIn/whatever on recent and relevant experience, and I used the introductory section of my LinkedIn profile to highlight those things.
But if admitting that my first programming job was in 1969 gives people a clue that I'm old, so what? They will figure that out when they meet me! I would rather work with people who see my 45 years of experience in a wide variety of projects and think it means they can learn something from me - just as I can learn some cool new things from them.
Congrats on the new gig! Being somewhat older myself and in a position of hiring (seeing a lot of young developers) I would have to say that you are just doing a few simple things that make your age a non-issue.
The negative thing about older developers to me is when I see that they simply haven't kept up. They don't have the interest anymore (or perhaps never did). Their resume reflects that as well as just, lack of an online presence.
You mention answering questions on stack exchange. You sent pull requests on github. You're re-appropriating the somewhat recent "full stack" title. These are simple things that current developers do without thinking much of it. But developers who kinda checked out 10 years ago and have been coasting - they are sometimes not even aware of this stuff going on. They don't have github profiles. They're not contributing. You, on the other hand, are out there doing things.
To me I'll hire a developer of any age that is out there doing things, learning, teaching and continuing to be curious.
I'm a 45 year old developer who's rolling the dice hard and heading out to SF next week. I've had a lot of talks with recruiters over the past few months and they've all crashed into a wall where the phrase "Oh, you're in Texas" kept coming up.
I understand companies want to keep hold of their cash these days, just in case, so no flying me out to meet the folks, but we live in the future now, don't we? Skype, WebEx, and a couple dozen others exist.
Anyway, Mohammed, mountain.
I may borrow the general approach of this, if you don't mind, in working out options when I'm out there.
And if there's anyone out that way that's looking for someone who's been doing C#, did PHP, teaching himself functional programming and is working his way through Euler (81 solved so far - friend key: 51000425304827_c78cb3e2345fa50b98591ce10f15341a), then drop me a line at [career][at][richardvasquez][dot][com].
That is weird that people couldn't understand that it would be very easy for them to learn a lot about you and how you could work with them, long before any face to face meeting.
In fact I've had several contract projects where I never even met my clients in person - or met them at a conference after the project was finished.
And yes, of course, if there is anything of value in how I approached things, please feel free to lift any ideas. My LinkedIn and other links are in my profile here.
My email is in my profile too - if you'd like to meet up while you're here, or just run any ideas by me, please feel free to give me a shout. Since you have the travel expense, lunch or dinner is on me. And I can't claim any promise of expertise. If nothing else, I can be a pretty good rubber duck:
Also let me share a personal stereotype. I can't be too far off on this even if it is a stereotype, since I've lived here for over 40 years.
When you say SF, if you mean the city of San Francisco, my feeling is that it is very youth-oriented up there. 20-somethings who work at Google way down here in Mountain View live in SF because that's where the hip culture is. (I don't mean that as a term of disrespect, I think hip culture is cool.)
As you travel down the Peninsula, people get older. By the time you get down to Silicon Valley in the far South Bay, you're in the land of hardware hackers where no one really cares how old you are.
Here in the Menlo Park and Palo Alto area, you've got a real mix. Little hardware/biotech shops where young and old all work together, and of course Facebook down at the end of Willow Road, where a 35-year-old developer would stick out like a sore thumb!
As I said, this is a total stereotype, but I think there's some kernel of truth in it. :-)
I like your reappropriation of "full stack" - it always feels a little jarring when there are devs who seem to think web development is all there is. Uh, you do understand there's a vast pyramid of solid and fascinating technology underneath all that frothy HTML you are playing with up top, yes...? I've never lost my love for the foundational stuff and I wish there were more opportunities to hack on system software.
I am with you there. This recent job hunt was really a great exercise in re-discovering the kinds of things I love to do.
I think there are more opportunities to hack on system software than we may realize, what with all the emphasis on web this and mobile that. That's part of what got me thinking, "do I need to be in a "software" company or a "web" company?" And found that the answer was no!
After all, there's software of one kind or another in just about everything now.
Of course there would be a lot of system hacking jobs I would not enjoy much - like where it's just system level work in one language and one environment, following a closely defined specification and with no contact with the customer. Not so fun.
But I think there really are a lot of jobs out there for low level full stack developers who are fearless about tackling difficult problems.
I took a different approach from what many of the comments here recommend. Instead of weeding down my resume to recent and "relevant" experience, I emphasized the wide variety of projects I've worked on, and I listed everything in my LinkedIn profile, all the way back to my first programming job in 1969. I got rid of my traditional resume entirely and let the LinkedIn profile be my resume.
Also, I made up a new title/tagline for myself: "Low Level Full Stack Developer". At the moment, I'm the only person in the world with that particular description. :-)
I wanted to distinguish myself from the other common definition of "full stack developer", which often seems to imply somebody who is an expert on website scalability. That's not really my thing: I'm better at going down the stack into hardware and device drivers and such.
So I included some interesting side projects that were outside the usual web developer arena, such as PdfChip where I took a PDF datasheet for an ARM chip, connected it to a development board, and made the pinout diagram in the PDF interactive so you could see the state of the pins in the PDF, and click on pins to toggle them.
Then I started writing back to all the recruiters who had been pinging me, including the ones that were way off like the place that was looking for a "Drupal themer". Always be nice to recruiters; you never know when you'll need one. :-) And indeed, some of them also had more relevant opportunities.
And these conversations helped me in my thinking about what I was really looking for: something very different from the traditional web work I've been doing for several years - something more hardware oriented (and I don't mean just computing hardware).
I noticed that there were a couple of local biotech companies looking for full stack developers. Wrote to one and never heard a peep back from them, not even after a couple of followups. Wrote to the other and heard back from the CEO right away. Got together with the team a couple of days later for a fairly informal interview.
They didn't insult me with a coding test - they had already looked at some of my code, and the questions I've answered on Stack Overflow. It probably also helped that I had submitted a small but good quality pull request to one of their open source projects the day before. :-)
Had lunch with the CEO a few days later to work out some of the details, and they made the offer a few days after that.
I can't really disagree with the advice that you should focus your resume/LinkedIn/whatever on recent and relevant experience, and I used the introductory section of my LinkedIn profile to highlight those things.
But if admitting that my first programming job was in 1969 gives people a clue that I'm old, so what? They will figure that out when they meet me! I would rather work with people who see my 45 years of experience in a wide variety of projects and think it means they can learn something from me - just as I can learn some cool new things from them.