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> The FAANG gang will never see your resume or application as their automated screeners will silently reject you I'm an interviewer at a FAANG company. I've in

by mabbo 6y ago

> The FAANG gang will never see your resume or application as their automated screeners will silently reject you I'm an interviewer at a FAANG company. I've interviewed plenty of candidates who were over 30, over 40, and never once seen anyone rejected based on age. I've worked with guys hired in their 40s, generally very solid devs. The key thing I have seen is that if you've been in the industry for 20+ years, we expect you to be at a senior level. If decades of experience doesn't make you any better than a college grad, what have you been doing for 20 years? I'd love to have a senior dev with 20 years experience join my team.

solresol 6y ago
Let me tell you one day about the interview questions I got at a FAANG last year which were supposed to determine whether I was operating at a senior level...
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  We're in a pandemic. tell us today
eastendguy 6y ago
Thanks for being honest. I get your point. But in other words, you reject equally qualified candidates just because they are older. So the old guy has to be _better_ then the young guy to get hired. That pretty much confirms what the OP said.
- scarface74 6y ago
  I just got finished posting about ageism not being as big of a deal as people say it is. But, after reading this, I can see how it’s more nuanced. If your experience doesn’t match what it “should” be for your age, yeah I could see discrimination happening.
  - tinyhouse 6y ago
    I wouldn't call it discrimination. If a company is looking for a principal engineer let's say (very senior in the FAANGs I know). They want to see you have experience showing operating at a principal level based on their expectations. If you worked for 20 years at the same company as a software engineer and never got promoted let's say, you wouldn't be considered. (maybe you're amazing and they are making a mistake, but unless someone at the company who worked with you can recommend you, they will prefer to focus on candidates that look more promising on paper. They cannot interview everyone)
    - scarface74 6y ago
      It seems like he is applying for the same roles that are typically sought after by much younger people. I don’t think he is trying to apply for senior roles. He said that they say he has to be really good or young.
      - tinyhouse 6y ago
        That's a problem then. I already mentioned those places are a bit like the army. They usually don't consider experienced people for junior positions. Academia is the same. What I've seen happening sometime is interviewing someone experienced to a senior position and then giving them an offer to a less senior position since they did well on the interview but not well enough (the thing that changes is the title they are given (less senior level), which affects responsibilities and salary).
      - nonines 6y ago
        I quit applying to youngster-roles (I can now smell them with quite an accuracy) and focused on SRE/Devops roles. They come with a tolerance for grey hair (or at least they claim to) albeit they are so broad and deep at the same time that is insane.
        mech422 6y ago
        Yeah, I can't see working entry/lower level positions unless you're prepared to compete with recent grads on salary and hours as well as knowledge.
- kyran_adept 6y ago
  In a FAANG you need to be competitive. If you are junior and 40+, you probably had different priorities and struggles in life, so you might not be willing to have the dedication required. It also creates problems for both you and your peers - you will have a very ambitious 28 yo giving guidance, from a management or senior position, to a 40+ yo. You might feel bad in that situation and it's not going to be easy for the younger person having to guide you.
  - hunter2_ 6y ago
    Anyone remotely woke would realize that they are to ignore the unusual age difference of their manager (rather than feel bad, etc) to precisely the same extent that they are to ignore all other differences of protected classes.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    Do either of these two things you’ve outlined come from things you’ve personally experienced or is this theory and speculation? The first seems to preclude the possibility that someone could be pivoting out of one career and into tech, and the other just sounds like that 28 yo needs to jettison their ego. Actually no wait they BOTH sound like someone needs to jettison their ego.
  - mondoshawan 6y ago
    It's amazing the amount of prejudice and wrong data being spewed in this one sentence: > In a FAANG you need to be competitive. I've worked at Google since 2006 and have done well over 250+ interviews here, competition is assureadly not a quality we select for. In fact, as an interviewer, I tend to bias against that behavior. > If you are junior and 40+, you probably had different priorities and struggles in life, so you might not be willing to have the dedication required. "probably" and "might not" are strong words when talking about assumptions and prejudices. What "dedication" are you talking about? The interviews FAANGs use are amongst the most gruelling in the industry -- if a candidate expresses through them that they have the skills and are interested in the job, and the corp needs it filled, it should be filled regardless of age, sex, gender, background, race, creed, or color. Full stop. I'll also note, most of Google's upper management is 35-40 years old, if not older, and the younger managers are trending closer to 35 these days, and actually not as prevalent as they used to be. I've managed older folks underneath me in the past -- I never had a problem with guidance or behavior. In fact, they were often the most hands off because they usually already knew what was needed next.
- LMYahooTFY 6y ago
  Is there not a distinction here? If someone has spent 20 years working at a trade, and is indistinguishable from a fresh graduate, is this 'ageism'?
  - OzzyB 6y ago
    We're not talking about someone who says they have 20+ years experience and therefore wants to be considered for <Top Wizard Role>. It's rather that, if you spent the last 20 years building CRUD apps (some even made ppl money and were successful!) and some kid also built a CRUD app, you're fucked, because as you get older you're expected to be some kind of brilliant outlier -- afterall, what have you been doing for the last 20 years?! This is what ageism really is, and it sucks because you can easily spend/waste a decade on some project/startup that goes nowhere, or worse still, some tech stack that's now defunct or deemed archaic. This is why I like to joke that I'm a Senior Flash Developer with over 20 years experience, hire me please xD
    - mech422 6y ago
      If a master cabinet maker's work is indistinguishable from an apprentice's work is there not a problem? If you spend 20 years doing the same work, do you have to be a 'brilliant outlier' to have insights a junior person doesn't? edit spelling/punct.
  - novocaine 6y ago
    It's a structural problem. If everyone expects 20 years of experience people to be principal engineers, and only 5% of roles are principal jobs, then after 20 years 95% of engineers need to leave the industry. And so, the industry is mostly populated by inexperienced people and many of its pathologies and adverse outcomes are due to this.
    - rabidrat 6y ago
      I agree with the sentiment, but in this industry which has exponential growth, the number of people in it doubles every 5 years, I think. So if you've been working 20 years, there are now 16x as many people as when you started...so you are in the most senior 6% of people if you managed to stick around.
- solidasparagus 6y ago
  If you spent 20 years to be at the same level as a college grad, you are not equally qualified. The ability to grow and improve matters. When hiring you project growth and if someone has proven they have limited upside, they aren't as good of a candidate. Also the old person probably has higher salary expectations.
- mabbo 6y ago
  It's more nuanced than that. I was on an interview loop the other day with a 30-something year old candidate. He had worked for nearly a decade in another industry, but got bored and got a CS degree in his spare time. He was applying as a new grad, and he was treated as a new grad. We hired him because he was pretty darned good- for a new grad. We hired him at a junior level, the same as any other new grad. It's not about age it's about [growth / years of work]. It's about predicting the future of a candidate and asking if they will grow further. Like I said, if you've spent 20 years in industry and haven't grown, what have you been doing? Edit: A candidate who has not grown in 20 years is not equally qualified as a candidate who just graduated and can do the same things.
  - rabidrat 6y ago
    Up or out, amirite? Likewise, if they've spent 20 years in industry and haven't saved enough to retire, what have they been doing? There's a lot of growth that can happen in 20 years that will be invisible to you in an interview loop. Things like patience, humility, perspective, compassion, ability to teach/mentor, etc. Focusing on technical ability at the junior level with leetcoding, and technical growth at the senior level, means you will filter out all but the most exceptional (or one-dimensional) senior candidates. In your opinion, is it acceptable to have grown for the first 10 years of your career, hit a personal snag (burnout, parental healthcare, medical condition) and then reluctantly chosen to coast on your career and skills for 10 years? If this is not 'equally qualified' as a candidate who has been "only" been working for 10 years, then what are you saying about older candidates? Because this kind of stuff happens to a lot of us--and I might even be as bold to say it happens to most of us. And as far as "predicting future growth", does this mean you wouldn't hire a 60-year-old who planned to retire in a few years? Keeping in mind that most hires leave before a few years anyway.
    - mabbo 6y ago
      > In your opinion, is it acceptable to have grown for the first 10 years of your career, hit a personal snag (burnout, parental healthcare, medical condition) and then reluctantly chosen to coast on your career and skills for 10 years? God I hope not- that what I've been doing, lol. But seriously though, if you've spent 10 years growing as a developer, you're probably at the level of a senior dev. Those soft skills are also interviewed for- we don't just ask technical questions. I've been on interview loops where at the end, we've said "This person's soft skills are out of the park good, but they're technical skills lacked. Are there other roles we could consider this person for, like a project manager?" because soft skills are king. I've also been on loops where we said "This person's technical skills are out of the park, but there are too many worrying signs in our soft-skills questions to go forward". > does this mean you wouldn't hire a 60-year-old who planned to retire in a few years Hasn't happened to me yet. Most folks with 30+ years in the industry aren't looking for junior level dev jobs.
- catlifeonmars 6y ago
  It’s a bit more complex than that, in my experience. This is a contrived example, but if someone has 20 years of experience, it’s unlikely that they’ll be willing to accept a job offer appropriate for someone with 5 years of industry experience, even if the interview reveals they have that level of proficiency.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > in other words, you reject equally qualified candidates just because they are older Not quite - they said been in the industry for 20+ years, not 20+ years older than other candidates.
- harpratap 6y ago
  No it doesn't. Humans aren't a constant box of skill, your intelligence grows or reduces. A young candidate with X amount of skill is more likely to reach 2X skills in 10 years than an older candidate who has stayed at X for past 10 years. Growth potential is what counts, and you saying that you have been at skill level X for past decade just proves that your ability to grow is reaching nil.
  - growlist 6y ago
    Or, a person is being unfairly passed over for opportunities for any number of reasons outside their control. Bad companies do exist, and not everyone has their pick of jobs.
    - username90 6y ago
      It was in their control, they could have gained solid skills in those 20 years to set them apart from a college grad. 20 years is a very long time, you could master several disciplines during that time, so if you fail to master even your main occupation it tells us something about you.
      - growlist 6y ago
        > you could master several disciplines during that time ...if you were given the opportunity.
  - withinboredom 6y ago
    I don’t think that should be a factor. How many people stay at a job longer than 5 years in their 20’s these days?
    - harpratap 6y ago
      How does staying at a single company improve your skills? You can switch 5 companies in 5 years or stick to 1 company for 5 years, the amount of skills you gain is not tied to duration of your employment but your inherent ability to learn and desire knowledge.
- chucksmash 6y ago
  I must be totally missing the point here, I don't see the problem at all (as a non-FAANG developer in my mid-30s). I've read that companies like Google evaluate employees in an up-or-out manner up to a certain level; before level X, if you've been a satisfactory junior engineer for Y years but have not been promoted to the next tier on schedule, your performance reviews will nonetheless begin being judged against the next tier's performance criteria and the "meets expectations" junior level work you've been doing will become unsatisfactory (even though you're still a junior engineer). You either grow according to expectations as you gain experience or you are managed out. Happy to be corrected if I've misunderstood the system. Given that, if companies require current employees to progress in their careers to stay with the company, why should prospective new hires from outside the company with umpteen years of experience (for which they will be compensated with higher-than-new-grad pay) get a pass on that same expectation of showing growth throughout their career?
nonines 6y ago
I don't want to turn this to a flame war but please. I've went through all FAAG (no engineering for N in EU). The interviews apart from never-ending seem to be stacking odds towards fresh graduates. Why else do all of them insist so much on grad level things such as complexities, basic algorithms etc? Regardless. I refreshed all that and more. But still there always seems to be a guy somewhere in this long way that will throw the odd question (open 'the Linux programmer interface' at a random page and shoot). I mean it is very easy to find a quirky question to ask and then use my flawed or 'I don't remember this off hand (but I can damn sure find it and understand it in 5 mins if you let me) to throw me out of the window. I've seen the same play at least 6 times (wannabe startups emulate this hiring process - if google does it then it must be correct). OTOH dunno - perhaps I just don't cut it. Perhaps the competition has been turbocharging while I was working. Dunno.
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  Or there were 30 people applying, it was hard to differentiate, so they kept asking marginal questions.
  - nonines 6y ago
    That's the good scenario but after so many times one starts to wonder.
- jakearmitage 6y ago
  > but I can damn sure find it and understand it in 5 mins if you let me Precisely this. That's one of the key things from our "experience" and "seniority". We've seen things, we know how to be pragmatic and learn/relearn X to finish Y and deliver value. I'm yet to see an interview that covers this. I'm clinging to my current job because I'm not sure I can face the job market in my current age.
  - urthen 6y ago
    I've done coding interviews for nearly 10 years now where I present a coding problem, but I never expect syntax correctness. I'll explicitly say I don't care if the function signatures are right or you remember the exact method to call on a given class or whatever; so long as I can tell what you're trying to make the program do. I have to look basic stuff up online every day anyway because nobody can remember it all, I'm not going to knock a candidate for that. Other than basic filtering questions so I can see if someone is trying to fake their way through an interview, I never ask functional specifics. Even then it's usually just to make sure they at least basically know everything they claim to on their resume - if you don't claim to know JS, I'm not going to ask you about what bind() does, but if you rate yourself a 10/10 JS expert, you should probably have a good answer. Interviews should be about your thought process and how well you can solve real world problems, not trivia about how well you've memorized an API. I don't understand why so many other interviewers (Even at companies I've worked for) ask coding "gotchas" and reject candidates because they don't remember the semantics of some obscure language feature.
Infinitesimus 6y ago
I understand every interview is different, but what happens if someone with 20+ years of experience fails a leetcode-type (say, LC hard or medium trivia problem) but aces system design? My understanding is that you probably won't get the job
- nonines 6y ago
  Yes. But the definition of fail is quite broad. My bitter experience shows that even simple syntactical errors (which are easy to make on a whiteboard especially if you are multilingual) were reason enough to throw me out.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Then don’t play that game. Three of the 5 big tech companies (not including Netflix) have cloud divisions where they are hiring consultants - no LeetCode or algorithms required.
  - wyclif 6y ago
    What are those divisions?
    - scarface74 6y ago
      AWS, Azure and GCP. They all have consulting and solution architect roles.
tinyhouse 6y ago
I agree with this. In FANNG old and young people don't usually compete. No one will interview someone young to a senior position and vice versa. It's a bit like in the army... There are way more junior positions than senior which skewed these companies towards the young. Also, for senior positions the interviewers must be senior too, which means they are not young either. In other companies that's not always the norm. I worked in companies with senior folks in their late 20 / early 30s while a few 50+ developers were software engineers (not senior).
- rb808 6y ago
  This is the crux: > No one will interview someone young to a senior position and vice versa. Actually grad tech roles pay 200k and lots of senior people would like that. If you think that "No one will interview" someone like that you're right and that is blatant age discrimination.
frequentnapper 6y ago
So basically someone who has been a developer for 20+ years has to have 20+ years of React experience?
- krapsna 6y ago
  Exactly, what a crock!
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  no. has to have 20 years of understanding algorithms and breaking up a solution into its sum to explain it. React or other current fad has nothing to do with it, nor will come in interviews at beginning. You live or die by your whiteboard skills.
  - frequentnapper 6y ago
    And who decides if you have 20 years worth of understanding of algos? A developer with 5 years worth of experience? What less experienced people don't understand is that development is not necessarily a one way path like at FAANGs where you move from level 1 to 2 to 3 to lead to manager to director within 10 years or you're worthless. For most of the developers, it's not a video game where you just level up. It involves working on projects small and large. A lot of time doing business analysis or some part of project management or documentation or various other things. Many of us work at small or medium sized businesses that don't have problems of scale, but rather problems of complexity. Also maybe react or some other fad like Kafka or microservices won't come at the beginning, but at a later stage of interviews, even for a junior position, if you have 10+ years experience, I bet you'll be expected to know those things, otherwise "what have you been doing for 10 years?" Solving actual business problems and not inventing things to do so I can put them on my resume, thanks.
    - unnouinceput 6y ago
      If a quantum physics specialist comes to you and starts explaining what it is and you understand, even if you have zero years of experience in it, I'd say he passed the interview. Same applies for this as well.
zerr 6y ago
But your interview process is tailored for youngsters - most seniors won't allocate time for leetcode/competitive programming preps.
rswskg 6y ago
Also, he's talking about 50+.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
downerending 6y ago
> If decades of experience doesn't make you any better than a college grad I doubt there is any such person. Even fairly crappy programmers with 20 years of experience have seen a lot, both technical and otherwise, and occasionally it makes a big difference. It helps to have people on your team that can hear the faint hoofsteps of impending disaster.
slumdev 6y ago
> I've interviewed plenty of candidates who were over 30 Am I in the Twilight Zone?
robjs 6y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with this comment. An industry mentor of mine who runs a R&D for a large, and successful software/hardware business unit once explained their approach to building teams in a really interesting manner to me. They explained that they wanted to have experienced folks on the team, so that they didn't re-learn lessons that the team should already have learnt, and instilled the culture and best practices of good developers -- but they wanted junior engineers on the team to drive a healthy disregard for what was asserted to be impossible, or written off as folly based on prior experiences. Their experience was that this balance helped grow great engineers from the junior folks, whilst keeping the senior folks on their toes -- seeing that their bias against an idea wasn't always the right thing. Something that stuck with me from this conversation: We naturally become more conservative in terms of what we view as possible as we become more experienced -- after all, we tried X before, and it really didn't work out -- let's not waste our time doing X again...! I interviewed 10s of candidates at a FAANG last year. A significant number of them were older than me. A non-trivial proportion of those were interviewing for positions that were more junior to me. Of those folks we hired a good number of them. If you see age-bias in the interviewing process, it's already a red-flag as to the team not clearly understanding how to make the best of the pool of engineers that they can potentially hire, and I'd avoid them for that reason. I'd also love to hire experienced folks into my team. A great thing about the FAANG that I'm at, is that we're explicitly empowered in the hiring process - and hiring managers really _have_ to care about what interviewers think. I would encourage not writing this class of company off as being only youth-focused. :-)
quickthrower2 6y ago
Defining “better” is complex. I mean software is a team game at most places so having all the same sort of people can be a disadvantage. So a team lacking an experienced dev can need one more than a team lacking a graduate. Then there is what are you working on and does it depend more on “knowing React now” or general good brains. After 20 years you may go in circles - most places don’t offer Alan Kay style work, so you process invoices for company A and create api integrations for company B etc. You always learn but I don’t think it’s an exponential rise for most. Can it be?

by mabbo 6y ago

solresol 6y ago

Let me tell you one day about the interview questions I got at a FAANG last year which were supposed to determine whether I was operating at a senior level...

texasbigdata 6y ago
We're in a pandemic. tell us today

eastendguy 6y ago

Thanks for being honest. I get your point. But in other words, you reject equally qualified candidates just because they are older. So the old guy has to be _better_ then the young guy to get hired. That pretty much confirms what the OP said.

scarface74 6y ago
I just got finished posting about ageism not being as big of a deal as people say it is. But, after reading this, I can see how it’s more nuanced. If your experience doesn’t match what it “should” be for your age, yeah I could see discrimination happening.
- tinyhouse 6y ago
  I wouldn't call it discrimination. If a company is looking for a principal engineer let's say (very senior in the FAANGs I know). They want to see you have experience showing operating at a principal level based on their expectations. If you worked for 20 years at the same company as a software engineer and never got promoted let's say, you wouldn't be considered. (maybe you're amazing and they are making a mistake, but unless someone at the company who worked with you can recommend you, they will prefer to focus on candidates that look more promising on paper. They cannot interview everyone)
  - scarface74 6y ago
    It seems like he is applying for the same roles that are typically sought after by much younger people. I don’t think he is trying to apply for senior roles. He said that they say he has to be really good or young.
    - tinyhouse 6y ago
      That's a problem then. I already mentioned those places are a bit like the army. They usually don't consider experienced people for junior positions. Academia is the same. What I've seen happening sometime is interviewing someone experienced to a senior position and then giving them an offer to a less senior position since they did well on the interview but not well enough (the thing that changes is the title they are given (less senior level), which affects responsibilities and salary).
    - nonines 6y ago
      I quit applying to youngster-roles (I can now smell them with quite an accuracy) and focused on SRE/Devops roles. They come with a tolerance for grey hair (or at least they claim to) albeit they are so broad and deep at the same time that is insane.
      - mech422 6y ago
        Yeah, I can't see working entry/lower level positions unless you're prepared to compete with recent grads on salary and hours as well as knowledge.
kyran_adept 6y ago
In a FAANG you need to be competitive. If you are junior and 40+, you probably had different priorities and struggles in life, so you might not be willing to have the dedication required. It also creates problems for both you and your peers - you will have a very ambitious 28 yo giving guidance, from a management or senior position, to a 40+ yo. You might feel bad in that situation and it's not going to be easy for the younger person having to guide you.
- hunter2_ 6y ago
  Anyone remotely woke would realize that they are to ignore the unusual age difference of their manager (rather than feel bad, etc) to precisely the same extent that they are to ignore all other differences of protected classes.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  Do either of these two things you’ve outlined come from things you’ve personally experienced or is this theory and speculation? The first seems to preclude the possibility that someone could be pivoting out of one career and into tech, and the other just sounds like that 28 yo needs to jettison their ego. Actually no wait they BOTH sound like someone needs to jettison their ego.
- mondoshawan 6y ago
  It's amazing the amount of prejudice and wrong data being spewed in this one sentence: > In a FAANG you need to be competitive. I've worked at Google since 2006 and have done well over 250+ interviews here, competition is assureadly not a quality we select for. In fact, as an interviewer, I tend to bias against that behavior. > If you are junior and 40+, you probably had different priorities and struggles in life, so you might not be willing to have the dedication required. "probably" and "might not" are strong words when talking about assumptions and prejudices. What "dedication" are you talking about? The interviews FAANGs use are amongst the most gruelling in the industry -- if a candidate expresses through them that they have the skills and are interested in the job, and the corp needs it filled, it should be filled regardless of age, sex, gender, background, race, creed, or color. Full stop. I'll also note, most of Google's upper management is 35-40 years old, if not older, and the younger managers are trending closer to 35 these days, and actually not as prevalent as they used to be. I've managed older folks underneath me in the past -- I never had a problem with guidance or behavior. In fact, they were often the most hands off because they usually already knew what was needed next.
LMYahooTFY 6y ago
Is there not a distinction here? If someone has spent 20 years working at a trade, and is indistinguishable from a fresh graduate, is this 'ageism'?
- OzzyB 6y ago
  We're not talking about someone who says they have 20+ years experience and therefore wants to be considered for <Top Wizard Role>. It's rather that, if you spent the last 20 years building CRUD apps (some even made ppl money and were successful!) and some kid also built a CRUD app, you're fucked, because as you get older you're expected to be some kind of brilliant outlier -- afterall, what have you been doing for the last 20 years?! This is what ageism really is, and it sucks because you can easily spend/waste a decade on some project/startup that goes nowhere, or worse still, some tech stack that's now defunct or deemed archaic. This is why I like to joke that I'm a Senior Flash Developer with over 20 years experience, hire me please xD
  - mech422 6y ago
    If a master cabinet maker's work is indistinguishable from an apprentice's work is there not a problem? If you spend 20 years doing the same work, do you have to be a 'brilliant outlier' to have insights a junior person doesn't? edit spelling/punct.
- novocaine 6y ago
  It's a structural problem. If everyone expects 20 years of experience people to be principal engineers, and only 5% of roles are principal jobs, then after 20 years 95% of engineers need to leave the industry. And so, the industry is mostly populated by inexperienced people and many of its pathologies and adverse outcomes are due to this.
  - rabidrat 6y ago
    I agree with the sentiment, but in this industry which has exponential growth, the number of people in it doubles every 5 years, I think. So if you've been working 20 years, there are now 16x as many people as when you started...so you are in the most senior 6% of people if you managed to stick around.
solidasparagus 6y ago
If you spent 20 years to be at the same level as a college grad, you are not equally qualified. The ability to grow and improve matters. When hiring you project growth and if someone has proven they have limited upside, they aren't as good of a candidate. Also the old person probably has higher salary expectations.
mabbo 6y ago
It's more nuanced than that. I was on an interview loop the other day with a 30-something year old candidate. He had worked for nearly a decade in another industry, but got bored and got a CS degree in his spare time. He was applying as a new grad, and he was treated as a new grad. We hired him because he was pretty darned good- for a new grad. We hired him at a junior level, the same as any other new grad. It's not about age it's about [growth / years of work]. It's about predicting the future of a candidate and asking if they will grow further. Like I said, if you've spent 20 years in industry and haven't grown, what have you been doing? Edit: A candidate who has not grown in 20 years is not equally qualified as a candidate who just graduated and can do the same things.
- rabidrat 6y ago
  Up or out, amirite? Likewise, if they've spent 20 years in industry and haven't saved enough to retire, what have they been doing? There's a lot of growth that can happen in 20 years that will be invisible to you in an interview loop. Things like patience, humility, perspective, compassion, ability to teach/mentor, etc. Focusing on technical ability at the junior level with leetcoding, and technical growth at the senior level, means you will filter out all but the most exceptional (or one-dimensional) senior candidates. In your opinion, is it acceptable to have grown for the first 10 years of your career, hit a personal snag (burnout, parental healthcare, medical condition) and then reluctantly chosen to coast on your career and skills for 10 years? If this is not 'equally qualified' as a candidate who has been "only" been working for 10 years, then what are you saying about older candidates? Because this kind of stuff happens to a lot of us--and I might even be as bold to say it happens to most of us. And as far as "predicting future growth", does this mean you wouldn't hire a 60-year-old who planned to retire in a few years? Keeping in mind that most hires leave before a few years anyway.
  - mabbo 6y ago
    > In your opinion, is it acceptable to have grown for the first 10 years of your career, hit a personal snag (burnout, parental healthcare, medical condition) and then reluctantly chosen to coast on your career and skills for 10 years? God I hope not- that what I've been doing, lol. But seriously though, if you've spent 10 years growing as a developer, you're probably at the level of a senior dev. Those soft skills are also interviewed for- we don't just ask technical questions. I've been on interview loops where at the end, we've said "This person's soft skills are out of the park good, but they're technical skills lacked. Are there other roles we could consider this person for, like a project manager?" because soft skills are king. I've also been on loops where we said "This person's technical skills are out of the park, but there are too many worrying signs in our soft-skills questions to go forward". > does this mean you wouldn't hire a 60-year-old who planned to retire in a few years Hasn't happened to me yet. Most folks with 30+ years in the industry aren't looking for junior level dev jobs.
catlifeonmars 6y ago
It’s a bit more complex than that, in my experience. This is a contrived example, but if someone has 20 years of experience, it’s unlikely that they’ll be willing to accept a job offer appropriate for someone with 5 years of industry experience, even if the interview reveals they have that level of proficiency.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> in other words, you reject equally qualified candidates just because they are older Not quite - they said been in the industry for 20+ years, not 20+ years older than other candidates.
harpratap 6y ago
No it doesn't. Humans aren't a constant box of skill, your intelligence grows or reduces. A young candidate with X amount of skill is more likely to reach 2X skills in 10 years than an older candidate who has stayed at X for past 10 years. Growth potential is what counts, and you saying that you have been at skill level X for past decade just proves that your ability to grow is reaching nil.
- growlist 6y ago
  Or, a person is being unfairly passed over for opportunities for any number of reasons outside their control. Bad companies do exist, and not everyone has their pick of jobs.
  - username90 6y ago
    It was in their control, they could have gained solid skills in those 20 years to set them apart from a college grad. 20 years is a very long time, you could master several disciplines during that time, so if you fail to master even your main occupation it tells us something about you.
    - growlist 6y ago
      > you could master several disciplines during that time ...if you were given the opportunity.
- withinboredom 6y ago
  I don’t think that should be a factor. How many people stay at a job longer than 5 years in their 20’s these days?
  - harpratap 6y ago
    How does staying at a single company improve your skills? You can switch 5 companies in 5 years or stick to 1 company for 5 years, the amount of skills you gain is not tied to duration of your employment but your inherent ability to learn and desire knowledge.
chucksmash 6y ago
I must be totally missing the point here, I don't see the problem at all (as a non-FAANG developer in my mid-30s). I've read that companies like Google evaluate employees in an up-or-out manner up to a certain level; before level X, if you've been a satisfactory junior engineer for Y years but have not been promoted to the next tier on schedule, your performance reviews will nonetheless begin being judged against the next tier's performance criteria and the "meets expectations" junior level work you've been doing will become unsatisfactory (even though you're still a junior engineer). You either grow according to expectations as you gain experience or you are managed out. Happy to be corrected if I've misunderstood the system. Given that, if companies require current employees to progress in their careers to stay with the company, why should prospective new hires from outside the company with umpteen years of experience (for which they will be compensated with higher-than-new-grad pay) get a pass on that same expectation of showing growth throughout their career?

nonines 6y ago

I don't want to turn this to a flame war but please. I've went through all FAAG (no engineering for N in EU). The interviews apart from never-ending seem to be stacking odds towards fresh graduates. Why else do all of them insist so much on grad level things such as complexities, basic algorithms etc? Regardless. I refreshed all that and more. But still there always seems to be a guy somewhere in this long way that will throw the odd question (open 'the Linux programmer interface' at a random page and shoot). I mean it is very easy to find a quirky question to ask and then use my flawed or 'I don't remember this off hand (but I can damn sure find it and understand it in 5 mins if you let me) to throw me out of the window. I've seen the same play at least 6 times (wannabe startups emulate this hiring process - if google does it then it must be correct). OTOH dunno - perhaps I just don't cut it. Perhaps the competition has been turbocharging while I was working. Dunno.

texasbigdata 6y ago
Or there were 30 people applying, it was hard to differentiate, so they kept asking marginal questions.
- nonines 6y ago
  That's the good scenario but after so many times one starts to wonder.
jakearmitage 6y ago
> but I can damn sure find it and understand it in 5 mins if you let me Precisely this. That's one of the key things from our "experience" and "seniority". We've seen things, we know how to be pragmatic and learn/relearn X to finish Y and deliver value. I'm yet to see an interview that covers this. I'm clinging to my current job because I'm not sure I can face the job market in my current age.
- urthen 6y ago
  I've done coding interviews for nearly 10 years now where I present a coding problem, but I never expect syntax correctness. I'll explicitly say I don't care if the function signatures are right or you remember the exact method to call on a given class or whatever; so long as I can tell what you're trying to make the program do. I have to look basic stuff up online every day anyway because nobody can remember it all, I'm not going to knock a candidate for that. Other than basic filtering questions so I can see if someone is trying to fake their way through an interview, I never ask functional specifics. Even then it's usually just to make sure they at least basically know everything they claim to on their resume - if you don't claim to know JS, I'm not going to ask you about what bind() does, but if you rate yourself a 10/10 JS expert, you should probably have a good answer. Interviews should be about your thought process and how well you can solve real world problems, not trivia about how well you've memorized an API. I don't understand why so many other interviewers (Even at companies I've worked for) ask coding "gotchas" and reject candidates because they don't remember the semantics of some obscure language feature.

Infinitesimus 6y ago

I understand every interview is different, but what happens if someone with 20+ years of experience fails a leetcode-type (say, LC hard or medium trivia problem) but aces system design? My understanding is that you probably won't get the job

nonines 6y ago
Yes. But the definition of fail is quite broad. My bitter experience shows that even simple syntactical errors (which are easy to make on a whiteboard especially if you are multilingual) were reason enough to throw me out.
scarface74 6y ago
Then don’t play that game. Three of the 5 big tech companies (not including Netflix) have cloud divisions where they are hiring consultants - no LeetCode or algorithms required.
- wyclif 6y ago
  What are those divisions?
  - scarface74 6y ago
    AWS, Azure and GCP. They all have consulting and solution architect roles.

tinyhouse 6y ago

I agree with this. In FANNG old and young people don't usually compete. No one will interview someone young to a senior position and vice versa. It's a bit like in the army... There are way more junior positions than senior which skewed these companies towards the young. Also, for senior positions the interviewers must be senior too, which means they are not young either. In other companies that's not always the norm. I worked in companies with senior folks in their late 20 / early 30s while a few 50+ developers were software engineers (not senior).

rb808 6y ago
This is the crux: > No one will interview someone young to a senior position and vice versa. Actually grad tech roles pay 200k and lots of senior people would like that. If you think that "No one will interview" someone like that you're right and that is blatant age discrimination.

frequentnapper 6y ago

So basically someone who has been a developer for 20+ years has to have 20+ years of React experience?

krapsna 6y ago
Exactly, what a crock!
unnouinceput 6y ago
no. has to have 20 years of understanding algorithms and breaking up a solution into its sum to explain it. React or other current fad has nothing to do with it, nor will come in interviews at beginning. You live or die by your whiteboard skills.
- frequentnapper 6y ago
  And who decides if you have 20 years worth of understanding of algos? A developer with 5 years worth of experience? What less experienced people don't understand is that development is not necessarily a one way path like at FAANGs where you move from level 1 to 2 to 3 to lead to manager to director within 10 years or you're worthless. For most of the developers, it's not a video game where you just level up. It involves working on projects small and large. A lot of time doing business analysis or some part of project management or documentation or various other things. Many of us work at small or medium sized businesses that don't have problems of scale, but rather problems of complexity. Also maybe react or some other fad like Kafka or microservices won't come at the beginning, but at a later stage of interviews, even for a junior position, if you have 10+ years experience, I bet you'll be expected to know those things, otherwise "what have you been doing for 10 years?" Solving actual business problems and not inventing things to do so I can put them on my resume, thanks.
  - unnouinceput 6y ago
    If a quantum physics specialist comes to you and starts explaining what it is and you understand, even if you have zero years of experience in it, I'd say he passed the interview. Same applies for this as well.

zerr 6y ago

But your interview process is tailored for youngsters - most seniors won't allocate time for leetcode/competitive programming preps.

rswskg 6y ago

Also, he's talking about 50+.

deleted 6y ago

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downerending 6y ago

> If decades of experience doesn't make you any better than a college grad I doubt there is any such person. Even fairly crappy programmers with 20 years of experience have seen a lot, both technical and otherwise, and occasionally it makes a big difference. It helps to have people on your team that can hear the faint hoofsteps of impending disaster.

slumdev 6y ago

> I've interviewed plenty of candidates who were over 30 Am I in the Twilight Zone?

robjs 6y ago

I wholeheartedly agree with this comment. An industry mentor of mine who runs a R&D for a large, and successful software/hardware business unit once explained their approach to building teams in a really interesting manner to me. They explained that they wanted to have experienced folks on the team, so that they didn't re-learn lessons that the team should already have learnt, and instilled the culture and best practices of good developers -- but they wanted junior engineers on the team to drive a healthy disregard for what was asserted to be impossible, or written off as folly based on prior experiences. Their experience was that this balance helped grow great engineers from the junior folks, whilst keeping the senior folks on their toes -- seeing that their bias against an idea wasn't always the right thing. Something that stuck with me from this conversation: We naturally become more conservative in terms of what we view as possible as we become more experienced -- after all, we tried X before, and it really didn't work out -- let's not waste our time doing X again...! I interviewed 10s of candidates at a FAANG last year. A significant number of them were older than me. A non-trivial proportion of those were interviewing for positions that were more junior to me. Of those folks we hired a good number of them. If you see age-bias in the interviewing process, it's already a red-flag as to the team not clearly understanding how to make the best of the pool of engineers that they can potentially hire, and I'd avoid them for that reason. I'd also love to hire experienced folks into my team. A great thing about the FAANG that I'm at, is that we're explicitly empowered in the hiring process - and hiring managers really _have_ to care about what interviewers think. I would encourage not writing this class of company off as being only youth-focused. :-)

quickthrower2 6y ago

Defining “better” is complex. I mean software is a team game at most places so having all the same sort of people can be a disadvantage. So a team lacking an experienced dev can need one more than a team lacking a graduate. Then there is what are you working on and does it depend more on “knowing React now” or general good brains. After 20 years you may go in circles - most places don’t offer Alan Kay style work, so you process invoices for company A and create api integrations for company B etc. You always learn but I don’t think it’s an exponential rise for most. Can it be?