3 ms·

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

by 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.
- yati 11y ago
  > ... generalization without first hand experience is not fair IMO. Totally agreed. Maybe I went a bit too far there. Of course there are some brilliant people in those companies, no doubt. I have interviewed at a bunch of them, and I don't see why a company would not send some of their best programmers to interview people.

by yati 11y ago

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.

yati 11y ago
> ... generalization without first hand experience is not fair IMO. Totally agreed. Maybe I went a bit too far there. Of course there are some brilliant people in those companies, no doubt. I have interviewed at a bunch of them, and I don't see why a company would not send some of their best programmers to interview people.