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Sarah Stegall wondered: <<Dunno about Canada, but about the worst
thing you can do in Northern California is brag about (or even
mention) being "long-in-the-tooth". Kiss of death out here.>>
Age discrimination is illegal in both Canada and the U.S., but proving
discrimination is next to impossible unless the employer is foolish
enough to actually state that you're too old in front of witnesses.
The perfect defence is always "we chose a reasonably well-qualified
candidate who had much lower salary demands", and that's tough to
defeat unless you're willing to work for beginner wages -- which most
of us aren't willing to do.
The only solution I can think of is to transition to freelance/
consultant status, since then you don't have to tell the employer how
old you are, or even list your years of experience (other than perhaps
"more than 10 years" -- just enough to instill confidence) if your
portfolio is good. You can bid on contracts based on a total cost per
job rather than quoting a salary or hourly rate, and in theory, if
you're more productive than a newcomer, you can actually come out with
a competitive bid. Or you can justify a higher price based on higher
quality.
Tough times. I'm glad I went freelance when I did (5 years ago), while
I had time to establish my clientele before they started getting
annoying about bean counting.
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Geoff Hart (www.geoff-hart.com)
ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca / geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com
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Effective Onscreen Editing: http://www.geoff-hart.com/books/eoe/onscreen-book.htm
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Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices. http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/
Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/
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