There are plenty of engineers and software developers with great credentials available for work in this area. But the problem is employer narrowmindedness. No one is looking at engineers who are older than 50, even if they have a proven record of accomplishments.

There are business units in this region in which all of the engineers are foreign and under 35 and if you are American and over 50 they won't even look at you.

The requirement of doing your own projects assumes you have the time and money for that - which the unemployed don't have.

You don't have to be a rah rah cheerleader to be enthusiastic about technology. What you want is people who get results out the door on time, not people with well-modulated voices and rah rah persona. And older workers will tend to be more reserved - that doesn;t mean their work is bad.

There are ridiculous laundry lists in which people can't get get hired unless they have done exactly the same job before. What about behavioral hiring rather than laundry list hiring? Look for people who are smart and have a work ethic. HR people refuse to accept the idea that people can learn on the job and be productive, but many people can pick up their fourth or fifth programming language very rapidly.

Don't buy the baloney that there aren;t good engineers and software developers available - a search on LinkedIn for 5 minutes will dispel that fact in any field. It's just an enormous snobism and prejudice against older workers and against anyone who is unemployed.

So I would say to the companies, try the real people in your own neighborhood who graduated from a decent school and have a few years of experience. Stop having recruiters look all over the world for "perfect candidates" when there are plenty of qualified people in our own backyard.

Really? When you're unemployed you don't have time to read? Or contribute to open source projects? Funny, but it seems many currently employed engineers somehow make the time do do those things outside of work. Perhaps that's why we are employed.

Really? You think open source is how someone without a paycheck is going to spend their time? Your turn is coming, dude. You won't be under 50 forever.

Age discrimination is very real in engineering. I learned that when I was a student co-op doing EE at a few high-tech companies on the Eastside. When the quarterly round of layoffs came around, it was always the 50-year-old guys who were shown the door. It made me think long and hard whether I wanted to really pursue engineering as a career. I finally opted to go with a stable job in government rather than risk having my life turned upside down at age 50.

Hmm, we have plenty of > 50 yr olds where I work. They are all awesome engineers too! We really only discriminate against lazy engineers, whether over 50 or not. If you want a job then get off your ass and prove you can do something for the company. You are not entitled to a job just because of your age or your experience or anything. You need to provide value to the company. I think you are misrepresenting the fact that young, energetic people often get the job over older, lazier people because they have drive. Same goes for layoffs. And I've seen it play out over and over again in my 30 years of engineering experience. Older engineers get complacent and then laid off and then sit around wondering or complaining their discriminated against. Hogwash! By the way, our interview process pretty much merely requires candidates to actually write down some code and explain details about what and why they are doing things the way they did. 90% of our candidates, both old and young, fail that step! It's pathetic. Maybe the government would run more efficiently if they hired motivated people.

Good thing our state leaders decided to cut funding for higher education.

The programming tests often focus on programming tricks like recursion, which is bad software practice in my field. A function call takes up too many cycles and in some intentive numerical applications you want to put tasks inline and avoid function calls. Also it is more difficult to profile a program to know how many cycles it took to run when there is recursion in the code. So what they ask on the exams has nothing to do with the actual work you would be doing on the job. It is better to ask candidates to discuss the work they did in their previous job than to give tests that have no relation to the actual work that has to get done. I would be more synpathetic to the idea of tests if they focused on the task at hand rather than on arcane programming tricks that are irrelevant.

Would love to get the chance to prove what I can do. I got laid off because I was out of favor due the desire for change for change's sake as part of management shakeup. Director, chief engineer, and others let go too. I was plenty productive. I could pass any reasonable code review no problem. Last interview I had I was told I was the only one who passed all questions. Many passed none. Never discussed salary. Never got a call back. The engineers response was positive in interview. Management didn't like my grey hair.

Software engineering, and engineering in general, is a path for the lower class to rise to the middle class and for the middle class to remain middle class. But it is not the pathway to the upper class. Considering the resources required to remain current in the field, your effort is better spent concentrating in areas to lead to the upper class, currently the financial industry. The financial industry enjoys govenment subsidies that no technology or manufacturing industry enjoys. Just some advice from an engineer of thrity years who has observed the success of other engineers who made the switch.