> if you've hit 40+ without having built up enough expertise and contacts to bypass those types of interviews then finding a programming job is going to be real

> if you've hit 40+ without having built up enough expertise and contacts to bypass those types of interviews then finding a programming job is going to be really hard. This I think is true in most professional fields and doesn't answer the question posed. The interview-fail of the software industry is all about knowledge gaps: - the knowledge gap of most practitioners in this field of the most basic fundamental findings, constructs, etc. of their field; - the knowledge gap of discerning actual skills based on presented CV credentials; - the knowledge gap of the interviewers themselves -- who are of course paid members of the same under-educated industry -- resorting to popular trends as substitute for the ability to distinguish between capable and incapable candidates; When an arts and crafts "industry" [has] pretensions to being "engineering" or "science", this is what you get. Throw in a healthy dose of age discrimination, and voila.