I am unemployable because I'm a white male whose in his 40s, has a family, and because somehow, in this industry experience is a bad thing.
It amazes me how intolerant of age and differing opinion tech culture is.
You having pesky distractions like children, however... how can you be trusted to put the company's deadlines first in a situation like that? It's just that... the thing is... you're just not a good culture fit.
Do you think you'd want to be a part of such a hostile crowd who assumes less of your ability and that none of your credentials are deserved due to handouts?
What indications do you have that those are the reasons you are unemployable?
I have many well respected, senior coworkers who fit this description so at least personally I don't understand why people would be hesitant to hire you based on that description alone..
Edit: Not to discount your experience with ageism. Ageism does exist and is something we need to be aware of. Just that it's not this way everywhere.
I get the ageist comments too, and contract work has really been dwindling. Web Dev really seems a young person game. If my husband didn't have a stable job, I'd be in a lot of trouble.
It wouldn't have helped if you were a minority either: in fact that can be even harder - at least around here.
But it is annoying in a special way to hear about that male privilege thing and know it means next to nothing - and still be told you should feel bad about it.
It's a lot like privilege in the operating systems sense. sudo isn't a bad program because it has root privileges. The kernel doesn't need to apologize for running in a privileged CPU mode. But sudo and the kernel both have abilities that regular userspace programs don't - and the ability to cause damage that regular userspace programs don't. They (or more specifically, their authors) need to be aware that they're privileged, be careful about doing things with the privilege by mistake, and realize that other programs can't do the same things they can. But that doesn't mean that they can do everything, or that it's their fault if there's something they're unable to do, and it certainly doesn't mean that it's meaningful or productive for them / their authors to feel bad about the privilege.
In my childhood girls were never beaten. Boys were by each other.
During my studies girls got extra study points for higher education - just for being girls. IIRC this held true even for studies who were mostly girls anyway, like nurse and chemistry. (This has been fixed to some degree now I think so boys will now get extra study points if they apply for nurse studies.)
At work they count and celebrate how many women we have. In a way it feels obvious since we want equality. But lets not pretend it's 50/50 if two equal candidates come through the door and hiring one of them will make your stats look nicer.
No, they were just sexually harassed. To be fair, plenty of boys get sexually harassed to.
It's all gonna come out in the wash, man. Relative to all the shit (sexual harassment, rape, being denied the vote until 1919, getting their pussies grabbed by the President, etc) women have to put up with, a bias towards hiring them in certain situations is not that big a deal. IMHO, making change for all of the above issues would make our society such a better place, for women and men, and matters more than this. So you're right, it's not 50/50, however I'm not sure that making a list of all the things that are not 50/50 is really a game that one wants to play.
The temptation to blame victims is strong. I think it comes from wanting to reassure oneself that "it can't happen to me." So you have to actively silence that voice in your head, and assume that victims are actually victims unless there's real evidence to the contrary.
As advice for senior people, I'd suggest: don't apply for junior jobs. Apply to lead large teams, or start your own company. It can be more stressful than coding, but that's the way the industry is structured.
The comment would have been just fine with only the first sentence.
However being over 40, having a family, and having experience certainly all can be detrimental.
General experience doesn't mean much since there are few standards. Ones experience would generally be used to take more responsibility, do more important things or in other ways advance ones career. Not as some measurement of quality, since that would be very subjective.
In a changing industry it would even be expected that when things change a certain amount of people won't last, because they get squeezed out between new people coming up and old people already specialized.
So while surely part of the industry focuses to much on youth I think people jump the conclusion that it is widespread too quickly.
The key to keeping yourself relevant is understanding the big picture, and learning stuff that is outside your area of expertise. For example, I started as a network engineer, but got into UNIX because I wanted to know how the provisioning systems worked that ran on Sun boxes. Then I moved into UNIX sysadmin work, and I found that I could run circles around most sysadmins because I understood how the network functioned and could troubleshoot beyond a single box (hint: it's (almost) always a DNS problem... :) After you've stood up a few complete datacenters or soup to nuts web infrastructure for a few medium sized companies, you move into architecture, but you need to keep yourself relevant and current. Here is a rough timeline of what I was focused on:
1990-1994 - Novell Netware, WordPerfect Office (became Novell Groupwise) 1994-1999 - Network engineering at an ISP, got into UNIX. 1999-2005 - Solaris system administration (2001-2002 was rough and was out of work for about 9 months during the dot com crash) 2005-2008 - Linux system administration - got into storage administration and became a SAN/storage architect. Started going really deep on configuration management, CFengine, later Chef/Puppet - automate all the things! 2009-2013 - VMware and private cloud - my skills as a storage architect led me to a natural role as a VMware architect, and automated provisioning infrastructure as a service. 2013-now - public cloud/AWS.
Keep reinventing yourself, and you have to really enjoy learning new things, or you won't last long in this industry. I think that's probably true of any job, though, honestly. Would you want to see a doctor that hadn't learned anything since he left medical school? I sure wouldn't...
I don't at all find it hard to believe some interviewers would be biased against older candidates, especially for junior roles. However, given the person who posted seemed to have such a wealth of knowledge and experience, I was very surprised that they wouldn't have a very easy time finding a job even if places that refuse to hire older workers exist.
One key quote: “Were Brown to accept women and men at the same rate, its undergraduate population would be almost 60 percent women instead of 52 percent—three women for every two men.”