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I'm in my 50s, and I used to say that I never saw age discrimination. Then a couple of weeks ago, I interviewed for an Internet company, and my age and experi

I'm in my 50s, and I used to say that I never saw age discrimination. Then a couple of weeks ago, I interviewed for an Internet company, and my age and experience was commented on by the majority of the interviewers. Which is fine, since most of the comments were positive (e.g., we need people with more experience because we have so many new graduates), but it was still a bit strange. Then the technical interview came, and one of the interviewers was instantly hostile as soon as he saw me. It was weird. Weird to the point where the other tech interviewer started playing good cop, saying things like "he just covered that" and "no, that's true". Whiteboard coding is strange enough, but doing it with zero feedback and a hostile interviewer who keeps trying to push you in bad directions (inheritance over composition, singletons, etc.) is, well, interesting. The application came back with the inevitable "good skills but bad culture fit" euphemism. As with all discrimination, the unnerving part is just not knowing. Was it really age discrimination? Or maybe I just looked like this guy's hated father or ex-boyfriend or something. Or maybe he's just a bad interviewer with low skills, and really didn't understand the stuff I was telling him (I usually sneak in a couple of technical questions for the interviewer and he blew those questions); that's hard to judge when there's no follow-up questions. Or maybe at the end of the day it was just money and the company didn't want to admit it. Who knows? I'll never know, and I suspect the company won't either.

sre_ops 11y ago
> Then the technical interview came, and one of the interviewers was instantly hostile as soon as he saw me. It was weird. Weird to the point where the other tech interviewer started playing good cop, saying things like "he just covered that" and "no, that's true". Whiteboard coding is strange enough, but doing it with zero feedback and a hostile interviewer who keeps trying to push you in bad directions (inheritance over composition, singletons, etc.) is, well, interesting. The application came back with the inevitable "good skills but bad culture fit" euphemism. Wait, you think the companies that have to move fast have the coddling environment?
kagamine 11y ago
Sounds like a similar experince to one I had where interviewer nr2 clearly had made made up their mind before walking into the room. So 30 mins into an interview that was going swimmingly - in comes sour face and contradicts everything I say. It wasn't a "strategy", it was just some $$$$ in a bad mood who didn't like my name? age? some other factor? I hope I can just roll with it next time but I got really pissed at the time as I knew I was suited to the job, but wasn't given a fair chance. It gets you down when you are 'between jobs'. Funnily enough, I now work in a different division of the same company and this person was brought in on a project I was on. I don't think I was remembered and thankfully I had recovered my professional composure so I didn't mention our first meeting.
throwaway3453 11y ago
It's a bit indulgent but if I knew the guy wasn't going to perk up I'd just bring it forward. "I'm getting some hostile vibes. Have I upset you or am I mistaken?" It'll either give the guy a reality check or speed things along. No sense in us wasting our time.
- DanBC 11y ago
  "confrontational - poor culture fit"
  - roflc0ptic 11y ago
    Are you being tongue in cheek about a possible reaction, or does that behavior actually seem confrontational? I feel like the wording given spoken with an appropriate tone (somewhere between matter of fact and conciliatory) would be direct but very reasonable. If things deescalate, great - and if the employer reacts aggressively, it's a win as well - you found out early they don't tolerate people sticking up for themselves. Time to bounce.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      I was being tongue in cheek, but there is a problem of sexism where a man will talk over women. If those women assert themselves they're often not seen as assertive or powerful, but pushy and bitchy and shrill. When black people do it they're seen as aggressive. Stopping people talking over others makes life better for everyone - you don't want to exclude people (men or women) because they don't want to bother shouting down an over-confident asshat.
      - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        I understand this is a problem. But any unassertive person has these problems. And being called 'shrill' or 'aggressive' can be fine at work. Shouting down is not the solution. Its better done by expressing annoyance, immediately, when talked over. Maybe white males learn this early on the playground. But anybody can learn this.
BinaryIdiot 11y ago
I can't say I'm surprised. I've done my fair share of interviews before I was 30 and while I never cares about age I had several colleagues who would come to grab my for my turn interviewing and comments like "old guy in room 1 is ready for you" always made me think they viewed them negatively. Though bias is hard to shake. I'll admit I have some bias against PhD holders interviewing for engineering positions. Almost every single one I've ever interviewed couldn't even do very, very basic coding but could talk lots and lots of buzzwords so it kinda wore on me and it was hard to not go into an interview starting with a negative view if I knew they had a PhD. I feel like I still gave everyone their fair shake but it was hard to shake that feeling.
- OopsCriticality 11y ago
  Interesting… Why do you expect that a Ph.D. would necessarily be an above average coder?
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    Initially, before interviewing anyone, I kinda assumed a PhD candidate would be on par with other developers as far as coding goes (so not above average but also not below). But in my, only anecdotal experience, I actually haven't interviewed one yet who can do basic coding. That isn't saying PhD holders can't code or that even the majority can't code; only that those few experiences started to shape my own bias going into an interview viewing them as already negative. Like any person I have biases but I feel like I did well not to let them affect the course of the interview and ultimate outcome it was just a feeling shaped by my limited experiences.
    - OopsCriticality 11y ago
      I think your conception of a Ph.D. is off by quite a bit. Outside of their dissertation topic I'd expect a Ph.D. to be on par with an undergraduate, from the time period they graduated. You also said that you're hiring for an engineering position, but you seem to only care about coding. Perhaps I don't know what you mean by engineering, but I'm under the impression that there's a lot more to engineering than any single skill, even by the loose SV definition. How do your Ph.D. applicants do outside of coding?
lemevi 11y ago
I am turning 40 in a year and almost everyone I work with is 15 years younger than I am. My opinion is that you have it all wrong. I don't think younger engineers are hostile to old age, but culture fit is important. It's not about your age but how you carry yourself. Until you're in your 70's you can probably afford to make an effort to understand the culture of 20 somethings. You can look to speakers at tech conferences and many are probably as old as you and I but don't have any problems fitting in with their younger peers. You just have to be willing to adapt yourself to fit in with who you work with. If you aren't interested in making personal changes because you shouldn't think you need to just to earn a paycheck then well you're probably not a good culture fit. You need to make an effort. I enjoy the same things my peers do, we play the same games, we watch the same things and read the same websites. It's not fake with me. I'm not trying too hard. I'm just not getting stuck in old ways.
- falcolas 11y ago
  Culture is based as much by the outliers as it is the core group. Also experiences/opinions offered by those outliers can be quite useful to avoid the herd mentality. I've seen too many folks rejected as "cultural mis-matches" not because they don't get along with everyone else, but because they have different interests outside of work. That's just silly.
  - Vraxx 11y ago
    Maybe that isn't all the inaccurate of a dismissal, if the culture there is work to the bone, then somebody with non-work interests would certainly not enjoy the culture there. Not saying that I endorse that kind of culture, just that "culture mis-match" might just be the most accurate statement at that point.
    - falcolas 11y ago
      Most accurate, perhaps, but also quite likely the least relevant statement. You're not looking to move in with them, after all. If you'd like a really simplistic example of why that form of culture just doesn't matter, have a look at Adam Savage and Jamie Hineman(sic). They have never even had dinner together, yet they make for a very effective team at work.
S4M 11y ago
> I usually sneak in a couple of technical questions for the interviewer and he blew those questions That's interesting, how do you ask technical questions to interviewers without being too direct? I am genuinely curious about it.
- felixgallo 11y ago
  Just ask how they would do X. They'll either be appreciative of your engagement, or appreciative of an opportunity to show off. Never fails.
- DavidWoof 11y ago
  I momentarily "forget" something that's only tangentially related to the problem at hand. It's usually something like "I've been working primarily in the new (or beta) version for the past three months, do you remember if you could do it this way in the current version, or is that a new feature and I have to do it this other way?". The trick is finding something minor but indicative. Things related to testing frameworks or immutability are usually good IMO. Things that are incredibly important to good devs but afterthoughts to medium-level devs. Lately, I've been asking about C# read-only autoproperties, which just came out 2 months ago. That's a really minor nano-feature in and of itself and sounds like an overly-technical syntax aside, but if you're a c# dev and you care about immutability then the lack of that feature was a constant annoyance and you would be intensely aware that it wasn't possible. So if you just don't know or don't care, that tells me something about what's important to you (The usually caveats about ensuring exactly what is the interviewer's primary daily language apply, but that's usually easy to determine).
  - steven777400 11y ago
    I'm a C# dev and I had to lookup this new feature since it didn't ring a bell. I'm curious, why is this is a big improvement of just having "private set;" in the auto-property? I'm not being sarcastic, I genuinely want to know. (Incidentally, in terms of your filtering, I absolutely categorize myself as a "mediocre" or "medium-level" developer, but that doesn't mean I don't care about things. Just that their value may not be immediately obvious to me.)
falcolas 11y ago
> keeps trying to push you in bad directions (inheritance over composition, singletons, etc.) I hate to say it, but this kind of direction is also pushed frequently by inexperienced developers. It is also frequently made worse when they feel they have to prove their ability to developers with more experience. Just the other night I was having a conversation with colleagues from a side project - one is the CTO (he made the position a stipulation of employment when the founder was starting this side project), the other the founder, and I was trying to convince them both why deep inheritance and "shaking the tree" with every code commit creates code maintenance problems down the road. Unfortunately, the inheritance model was the CTO's design (after all, the data has very strict hierarchical relations, right?), and the only real answer I got to justify his plan was "so there's nothing technically wrong with it, your objection is purely fear based; keep tabs on that fear and let me know how it goes". I was concurrently scolded by the founder that "I'll never make deadlines, so you'll always have plenty of time to refactor the codebase". Needless to say, they decided that it was best for the development group to go forward with the deep inheritance hierarchy. So yeah, the lack of experience definitely inhibits communication, particularly when you disagree with them based on your experience.
- konradb 11y ago
  > "so there's nothing technically wrong with it, your objection is purely fear based; keep tabs on that fear and let me know how it goes" Wow, that seems quite patronising on the face of it, are they interacting in this way to get you to keep your distance? > "shaking the tree" with every code commit Out of interest what do you mean?
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    I'm guessing it means, with a finely-sliced tree of classes changes to any class usually changes the others in the tree. Changes are chased up and down the tree. E.g. adding a new parameter to a Read() method may require refactoring APIs at all levels.
  - falcolas 11y ago
    > Out of interest what do you mean? "Shaking the tree" in this context means re-building the entire inheritence model when a new object is added to the tree. Any time the new object is not a leaf node, or it requires behavior from two non-direct ancestors, the inheritance tree must be "shaken" to re-order the inheritance such that the new node gets the behaviors as its ancestors, while avoiding things like diamond inheritance. The (overly simplistic) example is placing the platypus in the inheritance tree to account for its characteristics in common with two otherwise distinct parent classes (birds/reptiles & mammals).
yati 11y ago
Very interesting. I'm 25 and last year, I had a similar experience with two much older interviewers. I was getting pretty hostile vibes from one of them, and he at one point gave me a problem with many possible solutions, of which my whiteboard program would print one. Then I was asked to modify it to print all possible solutions. When the second interviewer verified that it would work as expected, the other guy was like, "but you never used list comprehensions in that." -- I threw in a list comprehension to satisfy him (although at this point, I'd started questioning the worth of all this). Next, I was told that I'd used a (max 10 element) list for random access of items instead of a dict, and that "he'd never do that". At that point, I lost it and said some pretty blunt things to him. Of course, I was rejected. I don't know about other countries, but big services companies in India have a lot of incompetent senior programmers who simply hate any kind of opposition to their authority, and you simply have to blow them to survive. I am fortunate to have never worked at one of these companies.
- webjprgm 11y ago
  There's at least some level of tenured and management defending their privileges at any company. I was momentarily shocked when in a conversation with some managers at Apple who responded in a rather hostile manner about being too young to merit a window office. Yeah, I know they are limited, but it was the instant smack-down way of saying it that told me he was trying to make sure everyone knew not to even ask. At my current company a lot of things are based on tenure. Not the same as age, but at least slightly correlated. Sure, you gotta base it on something, but I would prefer it include more merit-based advances. (The reason for it, I think, is that this company hires swarms of recent graduates which tend to leave after a year or two, so basing things on tenure encourages people to stay longer. I'm not fresh out of college so sometimes I feel insulted by this. But they also don't have stock options which is the usual method for keeping people around.) BTW, I'm 30 and definitely in the upper percent age-wise of people working at this company. And with nearly 3 years I also am in the upper 25% of tenure on my team.
- sanmon3186 11y ago
  >> big services companies in India have a lot of incompetent senior programmers who simply hate any kind of opposition to their authority, and you simply have to blow them to survive. I am fortunate to have never worked at one of these companies. You seem to have strong opinion about senior programmers in big IT services company in India but you never worked in any of those. I served a stint in one of these and was surprised how talented some of the older technical folks were who also possessed domain expertise. Of course you won't find many but generalization without first hand experience is not fair IMO.
7Figures2Commas 11y ago
Am I the only one who finds it crazy that at age 50+, ostensibly after working in the industry for at least a couple of decades, a candidate would be subjected to inane technical interviews and useless whiteboarding exercises? I understand that folks have to do what they need to do to stay employed, so opting out isn't possible for everyone, but this is pure insanity.
- pinewurst 11y ago
  No, you're not crazy at all. My last technical interview(1) was the final straw. No one cared about my knowledge and experience which was actually a specialty in what the company was doing. Someone would enter the room, immediately ask for an irrelevant whiteboard exercise then leave. Rinse and repeat. I felt about 2 inches tall when I left and decided that I had to stop being a software professional if this is how it was.(2) (1)I hate that coinage as it's no longer a dialog, but a combination of hazing and interrogation. (2)There's also the meta-issue that if my work life is dedicated to arguments about git and inheritance philosophy, then I needed a new career.
  - pm90 11y ago
    Sounds like a Google interview
    - pinewurst 11y ago
      It wasn't. The Google "interview" involved being asked to regurgitate Linux header constants from memory.
      - eropple 11y ago
        Sounds fun. My last one (and probably my last one) involved being asked about inode structure in ext4 from memory.
  - geebee 11y ago
    This is such a serious problem. It took me a long time to understand why this happens. I remember going through the interview paces at a small company where I had a specialization I knew was very valuable to them. Instead, it was all technical quizzes, tree traversal, outer joins, swap two integers without creating a third integer, find the long term state probabilities in a markov chain. I remember thinking, wow, yesterday I was doing a demo of a large, mathematically involved supply chain system to clients at a huge manufacturing company, and here I am, getting paraded from room to room, where recent graduates are asking me how to find the least common ancestor of two nodes in a binary tree. There are a couple of factors going on here. First, a lot of big companies are in a state of constant recruitment, and they aren't really sure they know what they need you for. All they know is that if you can find the least common ancestor for two nodes in a binary tree, adapt merge sort to manage a search where there isn't enough memory to hold all the data at once, and prove that the dual of the primal is the primal of the dual, and you seem normal enough, then they'll have something for you. The other problem is IP - perhaps they view it as inappropriate to ask too much about what you're working on. Part of this problem flows from something very wonderful about our industry - we don't stand (too much) on formal credentials. People don't care all that much about how you learned nonlinear optimization or data structures and algorithms. As a result, the barrier to entry is… well, not low, because any entrance exam that requires proving things about convex sets and doing elaborate algorithms at a whiteboard is not a low barrier to entry, but low in the sense that institutions like law schools can't force everyone to go through three years at $45k+ tuition as a legally enforced barrier to entry (like, you'll be put in prison if you try to practice without the three year, $120K+ tuition degree that many people believe is excessive). The downside is that because software developers don't have a formal system for demonstrating competence in a way that is widely respected by our peers, we essentially have to take our entrance exams over, and over, and over. Actuaries (last I checked, the exams may have changed) have to take a test showing competence in differential equations, vector calculus, and linear algebra, but I don't think that actuaries with 15 years experience are suddenly asked to find the igon values (sorry, couldn't resist) of a matrix or saddle points in a nonlinear optimization problem with non-linear constraints on the spot during an interview. Physicians have to pass boards and exams, yes, but I don't think they're asked questions from their undergraduate organic chemistry midterm every time they interview for a job. Slowly, I am starting to think that it would help if software developers could, as a profession, take greater control over how competence is established. I've heard others here on HN say that while they aren't in favor of legally required licensing, they would be happy to study and sit a very formal exam if it meant they could finally be done with the whiteboard interview exams, at least for a period of time. I say this while acknowledging real fear of regulatory capture, but what we have now is really, really bad.
kazinator 11y ago
One part of the problem is that young programmers are given a sort of computing education without a historic context. The only historic perspective they get on anything is in their humanities courses, where it isn't about their profession. In their core subjects they are given a cartoonish summary their history of their profession, with distorted dates, which leads them to believe garbage like that object oriented programming was invented in the 1990's, functional is totally new and so forth. "Like, wow, you're in your 50's and you know about new stuff like inheritance over composition and singletons?" Only those know better who actually dig into the literature and look at the actual dates, and are surprised how far back some concepts were not only known academically but deployed in production systems. There is this axiom that, no matter what year it is, someone with gray hair knows mainly Fortran, and writes it in any other language. Be it 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015, doesn't matter. Never mind that the 1985 person of whom that was actually true already died, and this is his son, if not grandson.
- rnovak 11y ago
  can you watch out with the sweeping generalizations? When I studied, we had a class where we literally wrote our programs in FORTRAN/C, on punch-cards, and submitted them to one of several mainframes that my university maintained. (this was 2-3 years ago). I get that there's discrimination, but it seems like it goes both ways.
  - kazinator 11y ago
    > We had a class where we literally wrote our programs in FORTRAN/C, on punch-cards C on punched cards going into a mainframe? That class was clearly messing with your heads, I'm afraid.
    - rnovak 11y ago
      C was offered as an alternate to people who hadn't learned FORTRAN. Say what you will, I've worked with several people who told me that was a fairly accurate depiction of the way things worked. But it's certainly not the same as "OOP was invented in the 90's".
BurningFrog 11y ago
This is a sample of one anecdote that the HN readers who clicked on this story found appealing. That says something about this site and its readership but very near nothing about systematic age discrimination in the industry.
rcurry 11y ago
Sometimes, you just run into jerks. Consider yourself lucky you didn't get the job; if an employee is allowed to be a jerk to candidates, that's a pretty good indicator that their management sucks. An interview is also an opportunity to represent your firm to a complete stranger, and even if you don't hire someone you want to be in a position where they might refer a friend, or provide positive feedback out on the 'net, or whatever.
rachelgli 11y ago
Hi David, Rachel from Medium here. That's a really good point - that not knowing if or why in job interviews is really frustrating, but particularly in this case. It would be great to have this story as a response to the original story. Feel free to repost it in the responses on Medium. Thanks!

sre_ops 11y ago

> Then the technical interview came, and one of the interviewers was instantly hostile as soon as he saw me. It was weird. Weird to the point where the other tech interviewer started playing good cop, saying things like "he just covered that" and "no, that's true". Whiteboard coding is strange enough, but doing it with zero feedback and a hostile interviewer who keeps trying to push you in bad directions (inheritance over composition, singletons, etc.) is, well, interesting. The application came back with the inevitable "good skills but bad culture fit" euphemism. Wait, you think the companies that have to move fast have the coddling environment?

kagamine 11y ago

Sounds like a similar experince to one I had where interviewer nr2 clearly had made made up their mind before walking into the room. So 30 mins into an interview that was going swimmingly - in comes sour face and contradicts everything I say. It wasn't a "strategy", it was just some $$$$ in a bad mood who didn't like my name? age? some other factor? I hope I can just roll with it next time but I got really pissed at the time as I knew I was suited to the job, but wasn't given a fair chance. It gets you down when you are 'between jobs'. Funnily enough, I now work in a different division of the same company and this person was brought in on a project I was on. I don't think I was remembered and thankfully I had recovered my professional composure so I didn't mention our first meeting.

throwaway3453 11y ago

It's a bit indulgent but if I knew the guy wasn't going to perk up I'd just bring it forward. "I'm getting some hostile vibes. Have I upset you or am I mistaken?" It'll either give the guy a reality check or speed things along. No sense in us wasting our time.

DanBC 11y ago
"confrontational - poor culture fit"
- roflc0ptic 11y ago
  Are you being tongue in cheek about a possible reaction, or does that behavior actually seem confrontational? I feel like the wording given spoken with an appropriate tone (somewhere between matter of fact and conciliatory) would be direct but very reasonable. If things deescalate, great - and if the employer reacts aggressively, it's a win as well - you found out early they don't tolerate people sticking up for themselves. Time to bounce.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    I was being tongue in cheek, but there is a problem of sexism where a man will talk over women. If those women assert themselves they're often not seen as assertive or powerful, but pushy and bitchy and shrill. When black people do it they're seen as aggressive. Stopping people talking over others makes life better for everyone - you don't want to exclude people (men or women) because they don't want to bother shouting down an over-confident asshat.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      I understand this is a problem. But any unassertive person has these problems. And being called 'shrill' or 'aggressive' can be fine at work. Shouting down is not the solution. Its better done by expressing annoyance, immediately, when talked over. Maybe white males learn this early on the playground. But anybody can learn this.

BinaryIdiot 11y ago

I can't say I'm surprised. I've done my fair share of interviews before I was 30 and while I never cares about age I had several colleagues who would come to grab my for my turn interviewing and comments like "old guy in room 1 is ready for you" always made me think they viewed them negatively. Though bias is hard to shake. I'll admit I have some bias against PhD holders interviewing for engineering positions. Almost every single one I've ever interviewed couldn't even do very, very basic coding but could talk lots and lots of buzzwords so it kinda wore on me and it was hard to not go into an interview starting with a negative view if I knew they had a PhD. I feel like I still gave everyone their fair shake but it was hard to shake that feeling.

OopsCriticality 11y ago
Interesting… Why do you expect that a Ph.D. would necessarily be an above average coder?
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  Initially, before interviewing anyone, I kinda assumed a PhD candidate would be on par with other developers as far as coding goes (so not above average but also not below). But in my, only anecdotal experience, I actually haven't interviewed one yet who can do basic coding. That isn't saying PhD holders can't code or that even the majority can't code; only that those few experiences started to shape my own bias going into an interview viewing them as already negative. Like any person I have biases but I feel like I did well not to let them affect the course of the interview and ultimate outcome it was just a feeling shaped by my limited experiences.
  - OopsCriticality 11y ago
    I think your conception of a Ph.D. is off by quite a bit. Outside of their dissertation topic I'd expect a Ph.D. to be on par with an undergraduate, from the time period they graduated. You also said that you're hiring for an engineering position, but you seem to only care about coding. Perhaps I don't know what you mean by engineering, but I'm under the impression that there's a lot more to engineering than any single skill, even by the loose SV definition. How do your Ph.D. applicants do outside of coding?

lemevi 11y ago

I am turning 40 in a year and almost everyone I work with is 15 years younger than I am. My opinion is that you have it all wrong. I don't think younger engineers are hostile to old age, but culture fit is important. It's not about your age but how you carry yourself. Until you're in your 70's you can probably afford to make an effort to understand the culture of 20 somethings. You can look to speakers at tech conferences and many are probably as old as you and I but don't have any problems fitting in with their younger peers. You just have to be willing to adapt yourself to fit in with who you work with. If you aren't interested in making personal changes because you shouldn't think you need to just to earn a paycheck then well you're probably not a good culture fit. You need to make an effort. I enjoy the same things my peers do, we play the same games, we watch the same things and read the same websites. It's not fake with me. I'm not trying too hard. I'm just not getting stuck in old ways.

falcolas 11y ago
Culture is based as much by the outliers as it is the core group. Also experiences/opinions offered by those outliers can be quite useful to avoid the herd mentality. I've seen too many folks rejected as "cultural mis-matches" not because they don't get along with everyone else, but because they have different interests outside of work. That's just silly.
- Vraxx 11y ago
  Maybe that isn't all the inaccurate of a dismissal, if the culture there is work to the bone, then somebody with non-work interests would certainly not enjoy the culture there. Not saying that I endorse that kind of culture, just that "culture mis-match" might just be the most accurate statement at that point.
  - falcolas 11y ago
    Most accurate, perhaps, but also quite likely the least relevant statement. You're not looking to move in with them, after all. If you'd like a really simplistic example of why that form of culture just doesn't matter, have a look at Adam Savage and Jamie Hineman(sic). They have never even had dinner together, yet they make for a very effective team at work.

S4M 11y ago

> I usually sneak in a couple of technical questions for the interviewer and he blew those questions That's interesting, how do you ask technical questions to interviewers without being too direct? I am genuinely curious about it.

felixgallo 11y ago
Just ask how they would do X. They'll either be appreciative of your engagement, or appreciative of an opportunity to show off. Never fails.
DavidWoof 11y ago
I momentarily "forget" something that's only tangentially related to the problem at hand. It's usually something like "I've been working primarily in the new (or beta) version for the past three months, do you remember if you could do it this way in the current version, or is that a new feature and I have to do it this other way?". The trick is finding something minor but indicative. Things related to testing frameworks or immutability are usually good IMO. Things that are incredibly important to good devs but afterthoughts to medium-level devs. Lately, I've been asking about C# read-only autoproperties, which just came out 2 months ago. That's a really minor nano-feature in and of itself and sounds like an overly-technical syntax aside, but if you're a c# dev and you care about immutability then the lack of that feature was a constant annoyance and you would be intensely aware that it wasn't possible. So if you just don't know or don't care, that tells me something about what's important to you (The usually caveats about ensuring exactly what is the interviewer's primary daily language apply, but that's usually easy to determine).
- steven777400 11y ago
  I'm a C# dev and I had to lookup this new feature since it didn't ring a bell. I'm curious, why is this is a big improvement of just having "private set;" in the auto-property? I'm not being sarcastic, I genuinely want to know. (Incidentally, in terms of your filtering, I absolutely categorize myself as a "mediocre" or "medium-level" developer, but that doesn't mean I don't care about things. Just that their value may not be immediately obvious to me.)

falcolas 11y ago

> keeps trying to push you in bad directions (inheritance over composition, singletons, etc.) I hate to say it, but this kind of direction is also pushed frequently by inexperienced developers. It is also frequently made worse when they feel they have to prove their ability to developers with more experience. Just the other night I was having a conversation with colleagues from a side project - one is the CTO (he made the position a stipulation of employment when the founder was starting this side project), the other the founder, and I was trying to convince them both why deep inheritance and "shaking the tree" with every code commit creates code maintenance problems down the road. Unfortunately, the inheritance model was the CTO's design (after all, the data has very strict hierarchical relations, right?), and the only real answer I got to justify his plan was "so there's nothing technically wrong with it, your objection is purely fear based; keep tabs on that fear and let me know how it goes". I was concurrently scolded by the founder that "I'll never make deadlines, so you'll always have plenty of time to refactor the codebase". Needless to say, they decided that it was best for the development group to go forward with the deep inheritance hierarchy. So yeah, the lack of experience definitely inhibits communication, particularly when you disagree with them based on your experience.

konradb 11y ago
> "so there's nothing technically wrong with it, your objection is purely fear based; keep tabs on that fear and let me know how it goes" Wow, that seems quite patronising on the face of it, are they interacting in this way to get you to keep your distance? > "shaking the tree" with every code commit Out of interest what do you mean?
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  I'm guessing it means, with a finely-sliced tree of classes changes to any class usually changes the others in the tree. Changes are chased up and down the tree. E.g. adding a new parameter to a Read() method may require refactoring APIs at all levels.
- falcolas 11y ago
  > Out of interest what do you mean? "Shaking the tree" in this context means re-building the entire inheritence model when a new object is added to the tree. Any time the new object is not a leaf node, or it requires behavior from two non-direct ancestors, the inheritance tree must be "shaken" to re-order the inheritance such that the new node gets the behaviors as its ancestors, while avoiding things like diamond inheritance. The (overly simplistic) example is placing the platypus in the inheritance tree to account for its characteristics in common with two otherwise distinct parent classes (birds/reptiles & mammals).

yati 11y ago

Very interesting. I'm 25 and last year, I had a similar experience with two much older interviewers. I was getting pretty hostile vibes from one of them, and he at one point gave me a problem with many possible solutions, of which my whiteboard program would print one. Then I was asked to modify it to print all possible solutions. When the second interviewer verified that it would work as expected, the other guy was like, "but you never used list comprehensions in that." -- I threw in a list comprehension to satisfy him (although at this point, I'd started questioning the worth of all this). Next, I was told that I'd used a (max 10 element) list for random access of items instead of a dict, and that "he'd never do that". At that point, I lost it and said some pretty blunt things to him. Of course, I was rejected. I don't know about other countries, but big services companies in India have a lot of incompetent senior programmers who simply hate any kind of opposition to their authority, and you simply have to blow them to survive. I am fortunate to have never worked at one of these companies.

webjprgm 11y ago
There's at least some level of tenured and management defending their privileges at any company. I was momentarily shocked when in a conversation with some managers at Apple who responded in a rather hostile manner about being too young to merit a window office. Yeah, I know they are limited, but it was the instant smack-down way of saying it that told me he was trying to make sure everyone knew not to even ask. At my current company a lot of things are based on tenure. Not the same as age, but at least slightly correlated. Sure, you gotta base it on something, but I would prefer it include more merit-based advances. (The reason for it, I think, is that this company hires swarms of recent graduates which tend to leave after a year or two, so basing things on tenure encourages people to stay longer. I'm not fresh out of college so sometimes I feel insulted by this. But they also don't have stock options which is the usual method for keeping people around.) BTW, I'm 30 and definitely in the upper percent age-wise of people working at this company. And with nearly 3 years I also am in the upper 25% of tenure on my team.
sanmon3186 11y ago
>> big services companies in India have a lot of incompetent senior programmers who simply hate any kind of opposition to their authority, and you simply have to blow them to survive. I am fortunate to have never worked at one of these companies. You seem to have strong opinion about senior programmers in big IT services company in India but you never worked in any of those. I served a stint in one of these and was surprised how talented some of the older technical folks were who also possessed domain expertise. Of course you won't find many but generalization without first hand experience is not fair IMO.

7Figures2Commas 11y ago

Am I the only one who finds it crazy that at age 50+, ostensibly after working in the industry for at least a couple of decades, a candidate would be subjected to inane technical interviews and useless whiteboarding exercises? I understand that folks have to do what they need to do to stay employed, so opting out isn't possible for everyone, but this is pure insanity.

pinewurst 11y ago
No, you're not crazy at all. My last technical interview(1) was the final straw. No one cared about my knowledge and experience which was actually a specialty in what the company was doing. Someone would enter the room, immediately ask for an irrelevant whiteboard exercise then leave. Rinse and repeat. I felt about 2 inches tall when I left and decided that I had to stop being a software professional if this is how it was.(2) (1)I hate that coinage as it's no longer a dialog, but a combination of hazing and interrogation. (2)There's also the meta-issue that if my work life is dedicated to arguments about git and inheritance philosophy, then I needed a new career.
- pm90 11y ago
  Sounds like a Google interview
  - pinewurst 11y ago
    It wasn't. The Google "interview" involved being asked to regurgitate Linux header constants from memory.
    - eropple 11y ago
      Sounds fun. My last one (and probably my last one) involved being asked about inode structure in ext4 from memory.
- geebee 11y ago
  This is such a serious problem. It took me a long time to understand why this happens. I remember going through the interview paces at a small company where I had a specialization I knew was very valuable to them. Instead, it was all technical quizzes, tree traversal, outer joins, swap two integers without creating a third integer, find the long term state probabilities in a markov chain. I remember thinking, wow, yesterday I was doing a demo of a large, mathematically involved supply chain system to clients at a huge manufacturing company, and here I am, getting paraded from room to room, where recent graduates are asking me how to find the least common ancestor of two nodes in a binary tree. There are a couple of factors going on here. First, a lot of big companies are in a state of constant recruitment, and they aren't really sure they know what they need you for. All they know is that if you can find the least common ancestor for two nodes in a binary tree, adapt merge sort to manage a search where there isn't enough memory to hold all the data at once, and prove that the dual of the primal is the primal of the dual, and you seem normal enough, then they'll have something for you. The other problem is IP - perhaps they view it as inappropriate to ask too much about what you're working on. Part of this problem flows from something very wonderful about our industry - we don't stand (too much) on formal credentials. People don't care all that much about how you learned nonlinear optimization or data structures and algorithms. As a result, the barrier to entry is… well, not low, because any entrance exam that requires proving things about convex sets and doing elaborate algorithms at a whiteboard is not a low barrier to entry, but low in the sense that institutions like law schools can't force everyone to go through three years at $45k+ tuition as a legally enforced barrier to entry (like, you'll be put in prison if you try to practice without the three year, $120K+ tuition degree that many people believe is excessive). The downside is that because software developers don't have a formal system for demonstrating competence in a way that is widely respected by our peers, we essentially have to take our entrance exams over, and over, and over. Actuaries (last I checked, the exams may have changed) have to take a test showing competence in differential equations, vector calculus, and linear algebra, but I don't think that actuaries with 15 years experience are suddenly asked to find the igon values (sorry, couldn't resist) of a matrix or saddle points in a nonlinear optimization problem with non-linear constraints on the spot during an interview. Physicians have to pass boards and exams, yes, but I don't think they're asked questions from their undergraduate organic chemistry midterm every time they interview for a job. Slowly, I am starting to think that it would help if software developers could, as a profession, take greater control over how competence is established. I've heard others here on HN say that while they aren't in favor of legally required licensing, they would be happy to study and sit a very formal exam if it meant they could finally be done with the whiteboard interview exams, at least for a period of time. I say this while acknowledging real fear of regulatory capture, but what we have now is really, really bad.

kazinator 11y ago

One part of the problem is that young programmers are given a sort of computing education without a historic context. The only historic perspective they get on anything is in their humanities courses, where it isn't about their profession. In their core subjects they are given a cartoonish summary their history of their profession, with distorted dates, which leads them to believe garbage like that object oriented programming was invented in the 1990's, functional is totally new and so forth. "Like, wow, you're in your 50's and you know about new stuff like inheritance over composition and singletons?" Only those know better who actually dig into the literature and look at the actual dates, and are surprised how far back some concepts were not only known academically but deployed in production systems. There is this axiom that, no matter what year it is, someone with gray hair knows mainly Fortran, and writes it in any other language. Be it 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015, doesn't matter. Never mind that the 1985 person of whom that was actually true already died, and this is his son, if not grandson.

rnovak 11y ago
can you watch out with the sweeping generalizations? When I studied, we had a class where we literally wrote our programs in FORTRAN/C, on punch-cards, and submitted them to one of several mainframes that my university maintained. (this was 2-3 years ago). I get that there's discrimination, but it seems like it goes both ways.
- kazinator 11y ago
  > We had a class where we literally wrote our programs in FORTRAN/C, on punch-cards C on punched cards going into a mainframe? That class was clearly messing with your heads, I'm afraid.
  - rnovak 11y ago
    C was offered as an alternate to people who hadn't learned FORTRAN. Say what you will, I've worked with several people who told me that was a fairly accurate depiction of the way things worked. But it's certainly not the same as "OOP was invented in the 90's".

BurningFrog 11y ago

This is a sample of one anecdote that the HN readers who clicked on this story found appealing. That says something about this site and its readership but very near nothing about systematic age discrimination in the industry.

rcurry 11y ago

Sometimes, you just run into jerks. Consider yourself lucky you didn't get the job; if an employee is allowed to be a jerk to candidates, that's a pretty good indicator that their management sucks. An interview is also an opportunity to represent your firm to a complete stranger, and even if you don't hire someone you want to be in a position where they might refer a friend, or provide positive feedback out on the 'net, or whatever.

rachelgli 11y ago

Hi David, Rachel from Medium here. That's a really good point - that not knowing if or why in job interviews is really frustrating, but particularly in this case. It would be great to have this story as a response to the original story. Feel free to repost it in the responses on Medium. Thanks!