When I briefly dipped my toe in the waters of the cesspool that is the tech job market a number of years ago, one thing that immediately hit me was how normalized ageism had become.
It was right out there in the open, to the point of being celebrated.
And I was in my mid-40’s at the time. I couldn’t imagine how bad it was for anyone with *gasp* less than 20 years of utility left as a cog in the machine.
On The LinkedIns, I started to notice posts giving “strategies” (i.e. clickbait-y workarounds) on how to not give off Over-30 vibes when applying for jobs...things like:
- Don’t put your college graduation year on your resume
- Use Comic Sans on your resume to look hip and cool (bonus points if you use modern words like “cutesy”)
- Don’t look like you’re actually experienced in your LinkedIn profile photo because experience is a dead giveaway to being older
When I look back on that period, my reaction now is…thank (insert deity of choice) I didn’t actually get hired by any of these toxic companies.
Because when I think about the people who hold these biases that blind them to the opportunities right in front of them…and when I think back over multiple decades of people falling for the same Big Tech promises of utopian futures where somehow tech just miraculously does everything for us…
It makes me think, damn I’m glad to be “old.”
I got to grow up in a time where we played with our friends after school until literally the street lights came on. And that’s not a “meme” - that was an actual thing.
I got to see hundreds of concerts before everyone decided it was appropriate to have their mobile phones out, taking videos and pictures the whole time, and missing the entire point of being at a live show in the first place.
I got to experience a time in the workplace where tight-knit teams of humans were trusted to solve the right problems without being micromanaged by frameworks, processes, and KPIs. And we did *awesome stuff* that made the world better, not just line some billionaires' pockets.
I got to experience a time before we were all so hyperconnected...before we learned to manipulate each other at scale...before we forgot what it was like to even *feel* human.
So OK, it wasn’t my ultimate intent to get back into the corporate grind anyway, but my brush with the utterly broken hiring system post-Covid showed me how lucky I was to be so “old” that I was no longer palatable to the new generation of corporate overlords. What a relief.
Thank you for this clarity, kiddos!
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