[zeptomu]

So if they tell you you are too old in your early 30s/40s/50s/etc. their hiring policy is fucked up in the first place, so do not worry about that, as you do not want to work for such a company anyway.

My advice is to think about the $domain (news, social-media, medical devices, bioinformatics, vision, gaming, earth-observation, automobile, chemistry, education, ...) you would like to work in and the $activity (software development, software testing, marketing, sales, support, devops, technical documentation, talking-with-humans, teaching, ...) you would like to spend most of your work time onto.

If you have clear answers to these questions it might be simpler to find potential work employees and companies and you can also make a more specialized cold-email application.

[innomansland]

Just to be clear, I was never told that I am "too old" but simply wasn't a "culture fit". Note that particular reason was given probably 1 out of every 10 times and the other 9 times, it is usually along the lines of "we did not find you a good fit for the role".

Funny enough, I do have a particular industry (actually two) that I am extremely interested in - FinTech and Cloud Computing/Hosting. Neither which I have any commercial experiences in and only ever dabbled on my own free time.

And yes, I have tried cold emailing companies that I am interested in but no dice. :(

Thanks for your reply though! Did get me thinking.

[zeptomu]

> Funny enough, I do have a particular industry (actually two) that I am extremely interested in and that is fintech and cloud hosting.

Fintech and cloud hosting are very broad terms, but assuming you like the domain of financial tech, the question remains what you would like to spend your time on: Programming? Writing market analysis reports? Talking to customers?

[innomansland]

Customer Support or Operations.

I see where you are going with this! I always thought I knew exactly what I want to be in but what may be specific for me may be vague to someone else.

[abpavel]

wow... With that eloquence I can't imagine you looking for a job, but, please, if you would ever consider a startup as your future challenge, with highly scalable business model with target of 200x on the current stock option plan price, interesting technical NODE.JS/ArangoDB scalability challenges, solving worldwide network infrastructure stability, with a good salary and 30 days paid vacation in Prague, CZ, please, do let me know at pavel at ipfabric dot io.

[innomansland]

Hey Pavel, not sure if you reply was for zeptomu or myself but i just checked out ipfabric and it looks really interesting! I hope it is ok if I send you an email about this?

[webmaven]

"Culture fit" can indeed be code for ageism and sometimes sexism, but more often it is just superficial cultural signifiers, such as dressing too formally / not formally enough, the wrong sort of facial hair, too much / not enough makeup, being the wrong kind of health fanatic, too many / too few positions in your job history, a percieved difference in appetite for financial risk, and so on.