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hiccup | 12 years ago

I talked with a man who worked in a client's company. He's 60+ years old and doing front end development in Javascript. I asked him how he managed to work in an office where the average developer age is probably 26.

Here's what he said to get his career rebooted:

1) Never think about your age

2) Use the language you want to work in. He did a lot of little project for non-profits. Great experience, but also covered the employment gaps in his resume.

3) Become an expert - answer questions on ExpertExchange (he started 8 years ago, pre StackOverlow). He became one of the top JS guys on that site

4) Put up resources on a personal site - his EE posts would link to his personal site with CSS, HTML, and JS examples. I checked it out and a lot were still applicable. Date formatting and regex's never go out of style.

5) Hustle for that first job - he literally opened the phone book and called around for work. After his expertise became better known and the market for frontend work got hot, recruiters sought him out. All those EE links to his personal site helped his Google ranking.

So go do it. Don't blame your age. Work harder.

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