Grizzled Veteran

I’ve been reading more and more about ageism in tech.

Probably because I’ve reached a certain age milestone and also have been at my current employer 9 years (2x longer than any other job in my past). Ten to twenty-five years older than anyone else in my department, older than my manager, his manager, his manager, and the CEO.

Reading a thread today about a guy that had moved up in a company 10 years in his past, dev to cto, but he is now having to drop that from resume to get interviews.

Here is a comment on that thread that stuck out to me.

There is less ageism on the operations side. I am a dba. A young dba is 30. There are virtually no entry level dba jobs. People start as a developer or unix admin and move over. I am 44. Have not been on the market in 5 years, but in my late 30s no issue. More demand. Saying 20 years experience in operations opens eyes.

When dbs or servers go down at 2 am, you want the grizzled veteran who has fixed this umpteen times.

I cant speak for developers.

Take off all management experience. It makes you look over qualified. No one checks back more than 7 years. So change all experience to tech and put more tech stuff in it.

I like to think my company appreciates the grizzled veteran in ops … in fact it has been mentioned several different times how I have pulled their bacon out of the fire or helped keep everything calm and helped others cut to find real issue and fix it.

It’s like I’ve always had two personalities and under immediate stress/pressure of something bad on fire I just get all quiet and calm and extremely tactically efficient.

Makes up for being a sarcastic pain in the manager’s ass the rest of the time :)

Perhaps I am experiencing something more than the cometary perigee this time, and recognizing I’m in a good place in more ways than one.

Still got to review and fix up my plans B, C, and D though.