Some years ago the governor of one of the western states said that older people should die and get out of the way. Oh yeah, well I hope your damned Tabernacle falls down!
Unfortunately that attitude seems to pervade the workplace, at least the software world part of it. Now I’m the sort of fellow who thinks outside the box, a practice which will make you a pariah in the software world even if you are young. As a result, I have had three careers, the latest of which is being a software weenie for the last eleven years. An old friend of mine, regrettably now passed on to his own reward warned me about this as I was about to leave career number 2, (Trial Lawyer) and go into number 3. He told me,”Everyone trusts an old lawyer, but nobody trusts an old programmer.” He was spot on.
Initially it wasn’t so bad. I was in my 50’s then, there was some aerospace contracting to do at the Johnson Space Center down the street from my house, so I managed to stay employed. It is true that aerospace does have a somewhat higher Dolt factor than the industry generally, but what the Hell, it was a job. As time went by, the contract jobs began to show up way on the opposite side of one of America’s largest cities by geographic area, but I drove it and my trusty Nissan Quest (masquerading as a Mercury Villager) managed to get 112,000 miles on it and still run pretty much as new. I adapted.
I like to coast between contracts. Since I tend to be as frugal as Scrooge McDuck, I save my semi-big bucks when working so I can live about the same life style when coasting as working. Even though I am coasting now and could for perhaps the next year or two, I decided to go back to work early. At my current age, it takes a lot longer to get a contract. Off goes the revised resume to Monster.com.
In the past, my resume contained a detailed account of the software experience, plus a brief summary of what I did before. Since the latter part was a sure clue to my actual age, the resume didn’t generate much interest. This time, I left the past life summary off, and submitted it with just the most recent eleven years of software experience. Goodness, what a surprise! Employers actually started calling me!
One of the more egregious experiences came in dealing with an organization which handles the pension plan for a major law enforcement agency. They had brought in contractors to do the major software development but wanted a direct hire to stay on and maintain the application after the contractors were done. In addition, the contractors were to help this agency screen the direct hire applicants. I did well on a couple of telephone interviews with the contractors, managing to pass the obligatory pop quiz on how to program I got during the call. They recommended that I be called in for a face to face interview.
You could see the interviewer’s poorly concealed double take when he came out to meet me in the lobby of the organization’s office. From that point, it was a matter of him appearing to take the interview seriously so the organization wouldn’t get a nastygram from the EEOC. Silly paper shuffler, the EEOC doesn’t care about age discrimination. He did slip up and reveal his attitude though. “Are you sure you don’t have issues with working for a younger man?”, he asked.
Now the goal here was simply to get some work, not to catch people at age discrimination. After all, the EEOC and the courts want older people to die and get out of the way just like that former western governor. So, when employment agents would call, I told them right off that I was a couple of years older than God, I wasn’t going to sue anybody, and make the situation clear to any client before submitting my resume. The usual result was that they never called again.
Realizing that all this was simply an exercise in futility, I emailed Monster.com and told them to close my account and don’t make my resume available to potential employers. I’ve wasted all the cell phone minutes and gasoline I plan to on that. It’s time to take a different tack. I wonder if the Mafia needs someone in their IT department. Opps, I’m not Sicilian either!
Tags: age discrimination, EEOC, Monster.com, software
