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Comment by batmaniam | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: with all the talk about brain elasticity being super slow compared to a twenty year old, how the heck are 50+ year olds able to pass leetcoding? Interviewers expect answers within 30 min to 1 hr. I'd imagine older people would have better things to do with their limited free time than to waste efforts on the computer leetcoding.

To me, leetcoding is just another one of those gatekeeping tactics employed by the industry to keep old folks out.

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I hate to keep beating the same dead horse. But when I was looking for the next stage of my career after my (step)sons graduated and I could move anywhere, I knew there had to be some kind of way that I could show companies what I could offer them without going through the leetCode monkey dance.

By 2014, I was talking to CxOs , directors etc at smaller companies who were looking for experienced individual contributors who could get things done through a combination of technical experience and soft skills.

I “put myself out of a job” at three companies once I brought in the process improvements and upskilked the department and then landed a job at BigTech in the cloud consulting department where I still consult/implement “cloud native applications”. I didn’t write a line of code during my loop. I spoke to the interviewers about my experience and we spoke like experienced professionals.

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