My Friend's CV Is Losing to a $20 Subscription
He's 52. Experienced. Commited. No longer needed.
A friend of mine, 52, got laid off four months ago when his employer hit financial trouble:
- Senior Software Developer
- Shipped multiple multi-million projects
- Led teams of software engineers
- Drove the critical infrastructure and solutions a business actually runs on
- Active in the community
- Committed to the company, no questions asked
And now?
He’s been applying steadily since, with no success. I’m writing this down because there’s a way out of this — not just for him, for anyone stuck in the same spot.
IT has always run young — a business that quietly prefers the twenty-five-year-old over the fifty-year-old — and what’s happening to him is happening to a lot of people at his stage of a career: gone from a stable job, and discovering that being good at it isn’t what gets you the next one.
What his CV is competing against
I’ve talked to him about this several times over the past few months, and I finally said the blunt version out loud: Your CV reads like a feature list for Claude Code or GitHub Copilot.
Solution design. Code reviews. Unit testing.
Those used to be the résumé. Now they’re a menu of things a coding agent does for about 20 $ a month.
How he wins
This isn’t a CV problem. Rewording it won’t fix what’s actually missing. So I told him what I think the two new superpowers are:
Network, on the job and off it. Not selling anything — meeting people, keeping in touch, no pitch attached. That doesn’t pay off in the next application cycle. It’s a mid-to-long-game move, and it’s the same thesis behind the career-network tooling I built for myself.
Build something real, end to end. He’s going to build an iOS app and put it on the App Store, running it himself with a virtual team of agents as the team lead. Not primarily to have something to point at — to actually learn what agent-team leadership takes, and to know he can do it, not just claim he can.
The age no one puts on a CV
He’s 52, and I don’t think that’s a liability. I think it’s his advantage.
A young engineer, no matter how hard they work, usually has two things: know-how, and AI skills. What they don’t have yet is an established network, or years of real experience. He has both.
Experience, plus network, plus the ability to run an AI team himself: that combination is hard to match. Not someone AI made obsolete — someone positioned to win because of it.
Where it stands
I don’t have a tidy ending. He’s four months into a search that hasn’t turned yet — but after a few weeks of actually networking, he’s started getting invitations to assessments, first round. Nothing offered, nothing decided, but it’s the first real movement since the layoff, and it came from the network, not a rewritten CV. He has started the app. I’ll update this once there’s more to report.
PS: He knows about this post, we wrote it together.