I wonder how prevalent the whole ageism thing is. It makes good articles because half the engineers are afraid of it, but how widespread is this? Could be just a dozen isolated cases that the media latches on?
A lot of us more experienced folk haven't done this in years. We can solve more complex, multifaceted questions, but those aren't asked. It's about speed with things from college. It's important we understand those, and we do, but that crisp sharpness is no longer there.
I will beat someone younger on hard problems which also involve threading, distributed systems, customer requirements, memory hierarchies, code simplicity, testability, business requirements, math, etc. but those aren't the interviews.
Even ML seem to be spot checks of trendy techniques rather than deeper questions about mathematical maturity.
On a tangent: which city are you looking in?
I think the bigger problem is none of the other skills I have seem to even matter for Google/Amazon/Facebook hiring. I would rather practice those skills and find niche openings which value people like me than do prep for a broken process. Plus I have family, consulting, etc, so I don't want to just drill. I'm not desperate. I could be wrong (no offers yet, but just started on sites so don't expect any yet) but I think I have better options elsewhere.
If I weren't actively looking, I wouldn't even consider those types of jobs, and this is the first time in my life actively looking. In other words, Google has no chance of poaching someone like me. I think the word for that is implicit bias or disparate impact.
Boston area.
How do you and yours look for jobs? In other words, where would I need to advertise to have you find me and apply?
Here I posted an ad for a principal engineer, and it drew zero responses [1]. What could I do differently to get attention of (someone like) you and your friends?
My friends are mostly at Amazon, Google, or Facebook with incomes from $250k up to over $1 million. The others are at startups solving big hard problems with big dreams.
If there is no particular complexity, I'd outsource to India, Ukraine, Pakistan, or similar. If there is, I'd describe the hard problem.
The minimal qualifications aren't a draw either. I want to work with smart people. Microsoft stack reeks of low end employment.
Midwest, rural, Deep South, etc. beats Seattle too. Lower cost of living draws many developers of the sort you want. Problem is a minimal living salary broke $200k in Boston, SF, NY, etc. You don't want a low end job.
Thanks for feedback!
My personal email is in my profile.
They cry that the market is dry, that the GAFAS bough all the best and that only fizz-buzz worth students remain.
I doubt the whole industry would refuse to hire an expert based on age when they are so much desperate for one.
But I'm young so I have to way to check this yet.
Interestingly, I landed my current gig with only phone interviews. I didn't even see my co-workers until 2 months after I was hired and we all met at a central location for a 2 day "summit".
Google for example takes hiring decision away from interviewer - the committee receives interview feedback in written form and makes a decision based on that, not seeing the candidate. You do lose a few bits of information that what, but it takes like half the bias off the table (the other half is allowing the interviewers to ask more difficult questions and being more nit picky in grading answers).