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> you don't actually have a clue what the finances of your interviewers are like, and you don't actually have a clue what the finances of your competitors are like

The point isn't about the wealth of these people, it's about their background, and the resulting confidence and comfort with which they can negotiate the social structure of interview and employment at these companies.

> The other interviewers and I can tell when the candidate is crusty and/or resentful

Like that, for example.

>The point isn't about the wealth of these people, it's about their background, and the resulting confidence and comfort with which they can negotiate the social structure of interview and employment at these companies.

This is simply not true, and imagined. You've been biased by a small subsample of the industry I believe. Programming is one of the few white collar industries that can be entered without a degree. Those rich kids you're interacting with are less likely to have been rich before their tech jobs than those in most other industries.

I personally know multiple self taught "rich kid" programmers who lived in third world countries and dirt floors as children.

The big company is half of rich privileged kids and half of people who just moved in to the most expensive city in the world and don't know if they can pay rent the next month.

You'll meet both types of people in the interview panel.

Interviewers are just people who happen to be here at the moment, they have nothing special. They have the power to grant you the job or not but that doesn't mean anything about their personal life.

> The reason being is that, not only are you almost certainly wrong, but it doesn't matter.

I've noticed that, in this field at least, everyone does come from a much more wealthy background than I do. I once talked about my experience of working at McDonald's as a youth once and got a lot of weird stares. Kids of doctors, professors, etc...I think it is mostly because they went to good schools in the first place, there aren't that man poor kids that go to CMU or Stanford. Heck, it is much worse at the PhD level.

The other points are valid: given the talent shortage in our field, they mostly don't care about your background. It is much more relevant during promotions in dysfunctional orgs.

>> Interviewers don't care about how much money the candidates have because...

No, hang on, I get what the OP says and it's a reasonalbe assumption. In large companies with rigid hierarchies, people will often be sort of subtly flash (!) with their money, because it basically marks their position in the hierarchy. You can see this in the clothes people wear, their cars obviously, their phones also obviously, the other tech they proudly display, discussions about where they're going for holidays, or for the weekend etc etc.

If you're getting hired in a company with that sort of culture as a recent graduate, say, coming from a less affluent background, then it's easy to feel somewhat excluded.

Some of my coworkers have this disgusting habit of putting where they’re going for vacation in the shared Outlook PTO calendar.

> No, hang on, I get what the OP says and it's a reasonalbe assumption.

It's definitely an assumption, which is a problem to begin with, and it's not a reasonable one. Interviewers often go through training to avoid pre-judging candidates, and candidates would be wise to do the same.

An interview candidate gets to talk to a couple of recruiters and have at most 2 conversations with 3-6 engineers at most. I would be pretty suspicious if any of those conversations were about the interviewer in any significant way to begin with, let alone about what they drive, where they're going on vacation, or what they make.

So I get what you're saying, and there's certainly people like that anywhere that pays their people exceptionally well, but making assumptions about the character of your future-coworkers before you've actually gotten to know them is a recipe for a bad time.

>> You can see this in the clothes people wear

A company-branded t-shirt and jeans?

He’s talking about culture fit.

Where does your average Stanford, Berkeley, MIT grad come from? A: A collection of a couple hundred high schools. Those schools aren’t where middle America comes from.

From what I can see, the Valley kicks that up a notch. I considered working for a big 4 after seeing what seemed like a fantastic salary offer. Then I started looking at the cost side of the equation. Forget it — unless you have cash, it does not compute.

I read the problem as being a cultural one, not a financial one.

Interviewers get a perk? That's news to me. I can see recruiters getting a perk, but wouldn't it be a perverse incentive to give interviewers a perk?