Well enough, apparently. I had to go through this at Facebook pretty recently. I was 51 at the time, and there were a half dozen guys of similar age in my sub

Well enough, apparently. I had to go through this at Facebook pretty recently. I was 51 at the time, and there were a half dozen guys of similar age in my subsequent bootcamp class. (It's interesting that my age cohort was all guys even though the class overall seemed pretty balanced, but that's another topic.) Two things definitely helped with this. (1) I've always been a bit of an algorithms guy. I've met many people who were better at debugging, a few who were better at systems design or straight-out coding, but if you need someone to pick the exact right algorithm and tweak it a bit to suit a particular situation then I'm all over it. (2) The interviewers were obviously well trained. The problems were well chosen and presented, and I was allowed to think through things my own way at my own pace. The followup questions clearly indicated that the interviewers were looking at more than just whether I could solve this particular problem - how I broke it down and handled edge cases, how I handled changing requirements, testability, communication, and so on. Having written before about how such interviews are usually an exercise in ego and a total waste of time (or worse), I was pleasantly surprised. I think a lot of older programmers do avoid such interviews. They'd never admit fear is a factor, but it is. I'll admit I hesitated before going through it myself, but then I realized that even if I "failed" it didn't diminish me. It just meant there was a difference of opinion about what mattered or made someone a good fit for a job. I can live with that.