>* The highest paying software companies employ LeetCode style interview. That is off-putting to a lot of people even though the money would be super sweet to have.
Not only off-putting but out of reach to older engineers with family responsibilities. I would also add that the value proposition for working at a FAANG isn't nearly as competitive if based outside the US.
What?! Age discrimination in the software industry??? Say it isn’t so!!! Seriously though, your insight is astonishingly spot on: LeetCode is a perfectly legal means of practicing age/lifestyle discrimination. Yet another innovative Silicon Valley dark pattern. Why is this the first I’m hearing it characterized this way?
That's just it, it's stuff you learn in computer science, then forget about because you don't use it in your day job.
Your day job is writing CRUD services. That's the job.
Our tech interview - ~8 hour take-home assignment, it was well-paid consultancy - asked people to basically demonstrate they could write a CRUD service. It had reading XML, some business logic / calculations, a REST/JSON API and a front-end.
Ten years later, I'm still working with that basic model. I mean sure, it's been broken up here and there by a different tech stack (Angular instead of React, Go instead of Java, native iOS instead of web) but the basics are still the same.
I haven't had to invert a graph or do a depth / breadth first search since college. The most algorithmic thing I do is implement a comparator function for sorting.
Yeah, this is so obvious once it's stated this way, but I'd never thought of it like that either. Every time I talk to prospective employers and they wax about their rapid fire technical challenges and 5-round interview processes that last six weeks, I wonder "how the hell do they expect someone with other commitments to do all of this?" And the answer is ... they don't!
They ask questions that kids are taught at 18/19. It's almost shocking; this is how you're selecting?
People that are in their 40s aren't confused by the question but are more confused by why it's the question as being able to answer it is so disconnected from any metric of competency or quality.
It'd be like saying "so you have an engineering degree, oh a masters from 20 years ago. Cool, remember Lagrange multipliers and Hamiltonians? I'm sure you do. Here's a problem. You have 10 minutes"
That's why we keep seeing the failures of the past repeat. Tech selects for people too young to know it and too arrogant to study it.
I feel like by the time you’re in your 40s, you should be able to leverage your network to bypass the technical interview. What are you doing at 40 going through the same hiring funnel as 18 year olds with no discernible reputation or experience? Maybe if you’re doing a career switch, sure, but if you’ve got 15-20 years under your belt then that’s a different story.
You are proposing substituting a nepotistic process as a substitute for a discriminatory process? Personally, I do not think that would yield any improvement.
Not only do some companies strictly have the policy regardless but also some people (like me) want a consistent challenge as in going from say security research to hardware to web dev.
I don't advocate for a free ride nor am I saying the tests are hard (they really aren't), just that they have a very weak correlation with building strong teams of the right people
Speaking as an introvert, introverts need networks too. Build a network - skip to the front of the line. Or better yet, get a job specifically made for you. Otherwise get into the funnel like everyone else.
It’s possible for already wealthy people though. Poor people need $x per month. A bit more wealth and cashflow is not an issue and so you can look at $x per decade. In that scenario taking a gap year to bash leetcode and interviews is perfectly rational. Its a 10% tax at worst.
So you think it better to discriminate according to the size of a candidate’s bank account? From where I sit, you are saying the poor do not deserve the same chance. I think age discrimination would be less offensive to the masses.
When I think of pros and cons of re-learning this crap I always re-evaluate what I have and what I want - and always come to the right conclusion - my time is better spent elsewhere - working on my own ideas or just more family time.
In the US, thats not generally true. It takes longer to prep from scratch if you have a young family. If you have an older family (and are even older yourself) that constraint is reduced. Realistically you can prep doing a few questions a week, it will just take longer. It’s not pleasant. But it’s more about the commitment, the plan, and enough research to justify it. If you can reasonably expect a 50%+ pay increase and that would translate into a better life, most people at most ages can make time. It’s about experience and practice with generally well known algorithms on well known problems. It’s not rocket science or intelligence nor nearly as much prep as many other high paying jobs (my MD took a decade of study for instance). Yes, annoying as hell. But not insurmountable.
Not only off-putting but out of reach to older engineers with family responsibilities. I would also add that the value proposition for working at a FAANG isn't nearly as competitive if based outside the US.