The problem is that it's hard to bring your years of experience on an interviewing table. Some older people I worked with (I'm 40 now) were well respected by t

The problem is that it's hard to bring your years of experience on an interviewing table. Some older people I worked with (I'm 40 now) were well respected by the others, because they prove time and time again that their experience is really valuable on all kinds of stuff, both low level details and high level strategies. To show this in an hour is difficult. Although I was once able to do it, and was hired. They asked me a typical OO inheritance questions with a base class Animal, and derived classes Dog and Cat, and then let them "bark" and "meow". I knew were it was going, so I said "There will probably come more animals after this, so what I would do is drop the inheritance and move into a data-driven approach, where the specific animal behaviors can be defined in a config file, without needing to go through programmers have to compile a new exe every time". They liked that response, although that was probably not the standard answer that they were looking for when interviewing juniors. And basically such things are your job as a senior anyway, to look into the future and steer the short sighted solutions that juniors come up with.