I find that people get weird when interviewing those with more experience. Managers tend to be okay because they've accepted that they're not the specialists, but when you get a tech lead with 9y exp interviewing someone with 15y exp, it's weirder. Some put you on a pedestal, some get insecure and treat you like some dragon to be slain.

Lots of people are T-shaped engineers, so they tend to interview in their domain of expertise and disregard someone else's T-shaped skill. Like you could be an amazing TDD implementer with an efficient code base, and then someone will grill you on how many bugs tests actually catch and bring up the myth of zero defect. Then they fight the candidate on home ground and ask questions on implementing encryption, because that's the Blub they know.

This goes on and they have "trouble finding talent" until they finally find someone who has a very similar skill overlap to the interviewer. The team ends up T-shaped, when it should be square shaped, with different people making up for the weakness in these teams. In this economy, companies can be pickier, so the problem is worse.

Your T-shaped experience is very much an advantage. I don't have a solution for this, other than making it clear what you're bringing to the team. Finding a job through a network might be one solution.

My bona fides: I am old and have done it all. I will now tell you how it worked out.

Like you, I am a person who can do pretty much anything. I had nothing but success. Jobs came to me. Then, at around 45, the company I worked for went down and I found myself unemployed.

Like you, my resume was unusual. I broke it into skill groups. It was obvious that I had a lot of accomplishments and, if hired, could help with almost any need. Nobody hired me.

I did freelance work, started a company that didn’t work. Eventually needed a job again. Kept looking.

Finally, I ran into a headhunter who told me the magic: Decide what you want to do and remove everything from your resume that does not apply to that specific topic. Do not allow even a hint of general-purpose skill to appear.

She made me understand that nobody had a requisition for a ‘jack of all trades’. They have a requisition for a sales agent, bookkeeper, programmer, database guy. Specific stuff.

I was broke and did what she said.

In my case, my education and fundamental skill was programming. Gone were all of my proud accomplishments in favor of all the things I knew about PHP, MYSQL, LAMP of all sorts (this was in the ought). Also some things where I had helped a project team. It made me sad because I have done some very cool stuff that went by the wayside. But it was the resume of a professional programmer, dedicated to the craft.

I have never been unemployed since.

I work for myself, so I don't interview for jobs, but I do interview for projects or interim positions.

Being a generalist myself, my CV is also all over the place. I tailor my 'CV' to the company/project I'm interviewing for, so it appears less confusing. I have several versions where different skills and projects are highlighted, downplayed or even removed. I also write a tailored text for the position or project, making it explicitly clear why I would be a good fit, to make sure the person views me the way I want to be viewed. I try to ensure that my CV leaves no room for their personal interpretation. (many are often skeptical of a broad skillset, or lack the experience to properly value it)

That said, it could also be the current economy that works against you.

I have similar age and bio and I also live in Germany.

"I need to find people / companies who can see this as an advantage."

My opinion on this is, that it is good to have diverse experience, even more so in times of crisis. Specialization is for insects.

However, I am convinced that you never ever should present yourself as a generalist. In German there is the saying: "Geh gleich zum Schmied und nicht zum Schmiedl.", meaning no one takes the almost expert if they can have the real expert.

Our superpower is not being generalists, it is that we can be experts in more than one discipline.

I’d recommend spinning story. It seems that while you’ve changed environments all jobs revolved about communication. That’s a great skill. So instead of „I had many different jobs” maybe use „I’m people person with experience in various settings”.

This is the same as with software engineering. You can spend year developing games, year developing fintech, year developing funny car website but no one cares as experience seems focused around code.

I'm in my early 40s, however I don't have such impressive range of experiences like yours. I do have some experiences that are outside of the field and I think I can give you a piece of advice:

1. you are not under obligation to disclose each and every experience in your CV, I was given this advice by proffessional CV writer and also have seen it given on this very forum; probably anything older than 10 years is not relevant, that's why I started removing some of my older experiences

2. I was in the shoes of tech lead who was hiring and was presented with variety of applications, and when dealing with more experienced people I always was concerned if they will stand in line and respect they are not in charge; I was looking for signs of this during interview, like- is the applicant digressing when answering my questions, is applicant talking a lot about his past and how unique she/he is and simillar. When interviewing it's best to not do that; and from my past experiences some more experienced people I hired had difficulties with authority, this presented valuable lessons to myself what behaviors to look for in me so I don't repeat those mistakes

3. I'm also believer in networking; my network is not great however those limited contacts I have always get warm welcome from me and I always strive to be helpful when chatting. I have tendency to start lifetime relationships- I'm friends with some people I worked with 15 years ago, we jump on occasional phone call just to talk about life, and sometimes they call with hard tech questions (sometimes about systems I had not worked with for 15 years too...); try to embrace your network :)

4. My strategy for job hunting (when I'm not referred through my network) is to shortlist interesting applications from LinkedIn as well as from my local job portals and call recruiter to have quick chat; I always preferred quick prelim chat as I got fast feedback letting me to avoid given application

I suspect this has more to do with Germany's economy rather than your CV. You didn't have issues finding gigs before. You are not alone on this. My suggestion is to consider starting your own business creating and selling something you make. Based on my own observations, if you really can't land a job in these circumstances, there is a good chance that you can't possibly land a job. I stopped wasting my time applying for jobs and using this time to create something.

Slightly unrelated- what you describe yourself sounds pretty much like a “scanner-personality”, maybe reading into this might help you. When I read about it the first time it was a pretty exciting moment seeing my personality matching and also seeing my struggles with staying motivated/interested after I learned what I wanted as a reason of it

I see myself in your description, I also love to learn and it's sometimes a negative trait because I have this urge to just move on to something new as soon as I gain enough understanding on the topic.

I have no masters, no education at all. I just dropped out of school and started helping at a web hosting company back in 2004, and my career took off from there.

The only advice I can give you is to specialize on something that matters. Like provisioning, kubernetes, cloud services, or whatever. I never got a job that wasn't interested in some specific thing I had experience in. None of them had any interest in me being a jack of all trades.

Start building stuff at home, publish the code and infrastructure definitions on github. Start writing about it in a blog, show in every way possible that you have a passion for it.

I think that if you want to work for somebody else, such broad experience can be a bit of a burden.

HR people want to pigeonhole you in a 2 line paragraph to know which profile you fit. So I try to make it easier for them… I work out industries /roles I can realistically target, and prune / rearrange / focus experience to match their checklist. Almost spell out in neon lights which is my profile.

Once you pass the first round you can loosen up a bit and make space in your story for additional relevant experience.

Also, make sure it’s relevant experience. If the role is multi country, I highlight international exposure (even if the actual content is not relevant for the role)

Good luck !

I'd say that startups are a good target for JoMT-type folks. They may be a bit crazy to work at, but they actually have a need for folks that can pivot to many different areas.

I sincerely wish you the best. In my case, I just gave up looking, but I also have the luxury of being able to.

My experience, also being 40+ with a somewhat weird CV, is that SRE positions are good option. SRE/Operations, especially consulting, is a great place for weird CVs, because you need to be a "jack of all/many trades".

Based on your experience I'd definitely look for small to medium size SRE/operations consulting companies. I think most of those would see your CV as a positive.

Skills are threatening in a layoff market.

"Dumb it down" as my recruiter said. I eliminated 99% of skills from my CV and now I get a lot of interviews.

I don’t think I have a same level of experience you do in terms of work because I’ve only had two different careers, thought I’ve done multiple jobs within those careers. However, I’m a perpetual student, and I collect degrees. Not just for the sole purpose of collecting degree’s but I like learning, and find it rewarding, and I find that doing it in a formal setting provides me with the structure I need to learn effectively. As such, I have a long list of “qualifications” I can put on my CV and I have figured out, if I list every qualification, I almost NEVER get an interview. Whereas before, when I had just two degree’s I’d find I’d almost always get an interview. I’ve figured out, if I only list one or two qualifications relevant to the job I’m applying for, I have a better success rate.

This makes me think that in terms of job searches, too many qualifications are a disadvantage. If the initial short listing is automated, then I assume too many qualifications means that you’re not slotting into the right niche that gets through the automated process, and if it’s humans doing the shortlisting, I wonder if they assume that someone with multiple qualifications doesn’t know what they want to do, gets bored easily (which for me is true), or they’re intimidated.

So ultimately, my experience is that your CV doesn’t have to list everything you’ve studied, or every job you have done. You can tailor it and only list qualifications, skills and experiences that are relevant to the job you’re applying for. But remember, if you do that, at the interview, you need to also only draw on the experiences you’ve listed in the CV because you can’t really throw in other work experiences that are not listed in the CV or they’ll ask why you didn’t list them. Overall, it’s easier to keep things simple. I generally find most humans prefer simplicity, so perhaps just package yourself up as something simple, but be excellent in the stuff you choose to focus on. That’s my current strategy for myself anyway. Not sure if it’s that helpful, but just another perspective anyhow.

Been sometime since I looked at these services (YMMV on chrome), but these folks handle engineer placement: https://www.aerotek.com/

Also, could look for a local city Union position to gear down your workloads... as collective bargaining is the only real mitigation for institutional "culture fit"/bigotry, and massive influxes of qualified desperate people.

One should know what you need by now, but ikigai may help guide you into an area that increases well-being:

https://themindfool.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Ikigai_do...

Regulatory capture of the training/certification for technology has always been a serious problem. It does create fungible staff, but provides no economic advantages for most firms.

Best of luck, =3

If you'd like to post your actual CV, we might be able to give more specific advice.

> My cv is pretty weird

Perhaps it’s not what you’re selling that’s wrong, but how you’re pitching it?

I think you either need to find someone who needs a JoaT but likely doesn't know it (ex: smaller, newer companies, places where SW and IT are not a core focus) and educate them, or aggressively personalize your resume and focus on specific roles and positions. Smell test: you have a huge resume that's not padded but required to describe all your experiences & skills. AI could help you narrow down and focus. I'd also suggest pulling anything more than ~10 years old and remove content where the dates hurt you more than the specifics help.

I think, in Germany, only small companies (sole proprietorship businesses) will see your diverse skillset as an advantage.

Or one of those companies who are really desperate to hire someone for whatever reason. Perhaps you can _take over_ such a business (search for "Nachfolger gesucht unternehmen")

It is not clear what your problem is. Has the freelancing side-business dried up, or is the "main day job" gone, or both?

It is also not clear what you are looking for.

My CV is pretty weird too. The two things that have really helped me are open source work and going to (coding) conferences. And I don't mean going there to grease palms, just to make friends. But there's nothing wrong with telling your story either and admitting you are looking for work.

This applies to software pretty exclusively though, can't comment on anything else.

Simple fix, tailor your resume to the role, highlight relevant experience and brush over "out there" previous roles.

I don’t have anything to suggest for OP, just want to express thanks for asking and everyone else for responding. Many nuggets of wisdom to be found here.

Talk to everyone you have ever worked over, under and beside (and your students as well). Your relationships with the people who know your work is the most important job search resource. Good luck.

There are two key issues you have the moment as I see it.

The first is that the software engineer field in Germany has been swamped with applicants from waves of layoffs and turned it into a buyers market.

Second is the German culture itself. Germans are (generally) very static in their career paths. Chopping and changing career directions is still seen as a negative. Whilst career switching (Quereinsteiger) is becoming more common, it’s still not easy.

Careers within highly technical traditional subjects (chem, biotech, engineering) now seem to require a PhD or at least a masters by default in order to be competitive.

I would focus on the fact that you’re not really doing anything wrong. The market conditions just suck. Pull on your networks which you just have built up freelancing. It’s easier to find something ironically if you have something than when you don’t. Good luck.

Have you ever worked for SGS?

I'm 60, and my career path has been anything but straight. I've held positions ranging from 3 to 6 years, which count among the longest I've ever had. My resume reads like an adventure story or disaster map, depending on who looks at it: I've been an au pair, worked in bookstores, been a welder, machinist, assistant DBA and front-end programmer, technical diver, industrial rope access technician, and worked at an engineering firm in the entertainment industry. I've also been a project manager, field installer, director of civil works, stage machinery builder, and controls and operations manager, both in the US and internationally.

Back in the 80s and 90s, I was already designing circuits with relays, then moving to microcontrollers like Basic Stamp and PIC chips, long before Arduino became popular. I bought my first computer, a Commodore PET 2001, back in 1977 and taught myself programming from BASIC to assembly, then onto C, Pascal, Lisp, and more. My curiosity led me to self-study artificial life, artificial neural networks, genetic programming, and genetic algorithms during a time when these fields were nascent.

I foresaw the trajectory of technology and its financial promise, but I chose not to settle into a "cube farm", where I felt my intellectual curiosity would be stifled or would not be fair to my employer. Instead, I've run my own companies and worked for others, always learning and adapting. Now, at 60, I find it's tougher to market my broad skill set in an era where tech has become highly specialized. Age can indeed color first impressions too, but remember, your diverse background makes you a macro thinker, which is still highly valued. And you have 15+ years on me.

I keep myself fit, unlike many of my peers, allowing me to take on demanding roles like those long hours on a construction site in Saudi Arabia. You might train anyone to dive or work at height, but the real challenge is what they do once they reach the problem - fixing motors or hydraulic lines under pressure. In 2003/4, I built my own CNC table, an 8x4' router, and developed software to turn black and white photos into bas-relief carvings, inspired by an old NASA algorithm for interpreting single-perspective images of celestial bodies. I wrote it in Blender's Python API. I was one of the first contributors of funds to make Blender opensource.

I don't regret my eclectic choices, but I recognize the need to perhaps find a more stable focus for the next chapter to support my family. Success, for me, has always been about showing up - waking up early, getting ready, and being present. That's 90% of it. The other 10%? It's the unique contribution you make to any team or company. My work history shows few sick days; I once went three years without one, now averaging about two a year. My father, similarly, didn't take a sick day for over 15 years. I think this is easier when you are passionate about your job. At least that's how it works for me.

So, if you're feeling discouraged by an unconventional career path, remember, your journey isn't just about the jobs you've held; it's about the insights, resilience, and adaptability you've gained along the way. Keep moving forward, and let your rich tapestry of experiences guide you. Good luck, and please update us on your progress!

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