As someone who's conducted dozens of interviews over the last few years, I can tell you that there's no way to infer from someone's age or resume if they can co

As someone who's conducted dozens of interviews over the last few years, I can tell you that there's no way to infer from someone's age or resume if they can code or not. Plenty of people with stellar resumes and 20 years' experience come in and absolutely bomb on relatively simple coding problems. Maybe they used to know how to code but have gotten rusty since they've been doing more management or hands-off architecture recently, but for whatever reason they can't solve problems that any recent grad ought to be able to solve. Some of those people can talk a good game when discussing higher-level stuff or when they're doing a lot of hand-waving, but they just can't translate it into code effectively. My point is not that "older" people can't code: when you do find someone with 20 years experience who can code well, they're generally incredibly valuable. Rather, it's that you always have to be skeptical and can't take someone's resume or stated experience and skills at face value. Those questions are there to filter out people that won't be successful in our company because their coding skills are below par, regardless of age, experience, or education. If someone asks you to do something that seems "beneath" you or trivial, just do it as well and as quickly as you can so you can get it over with and talk about more interesting things, or use the problem itself as an excuse to start a conversation about something more interesting than the problem itself ("the interesting thing here, is that if you write it this way it's easier to test" or "if you used a language like X, you could write this more easily," or "realistically, I think this function would be more useful if you changed it to behave like this, so that it would then be useful for doing Y and Z as well as X.") It's nothing personal, it's just the interviewer's job to be skeptical about your stated skills until you prove to him or her that they shouldn't be.