Don't give up. Most established companies aren't run by 20-somethings. If the seniors are already in their mid-20s and lack professionalism, then most likely there are other issues going on at this company. You may have dodged the proverbial bullet.

Wish I could upvote this twice! Every rejection I've ever received came with an information-rich sideband that told me more about the prospective employer than an acceptance would have. In at least half of such cases I said to myself: "phew, that was a bullet I was lucky to dodge... imagine how it might feel to work with these people!"

Companies: DON'T DO THIS! I, for one, actively discourage smart friends from interviewing at places that treat candidates like shit.

I felt so humiliated, worthless and traumatized that I stopped interviewing for atleast 3 years after that. I now have (irrational) fear of interviews.

This experience has dissuaded many of my friends from applying there.

This should be the lesson for employers: an interview candidate who feels good about their interviewing experience, even if they aren't hired, can refer their qualified friends to your company. The alternative is that they might discourage good candidates from interviewing with your company by warning people on Hacker News about its hiring practices. Also, the candidate might be a good fit for a different position in the future.

That told me exactly what I needed to know. I'd be instantly rejected because of not going to a "good school".

Sample size of one, but I dropped out of a top public school, immediately started working full-time x 1.5, and ended up with a resume that my now-graduating colleagues are blown away by. A few top companies (Google and Yelp! included) have flat out refused to screen me based on no other conversation than "Oh, I never finished school because _____". Hell, I interned for a large bank and received a great job offer which was promptly rescinded after the right manager found out what everybody else already knew.

It's one thing if I fail the interview process. I get that. I know I have a lot to learn. But the way some of these companies act is just messed up. FWIW, none of my independent clients care.

Yeah, banks (and many big companies) are like that.

I once came across a job application that had TOP SCHOOLS ONLY emblazoned across the top.

Thanks for saving me my time in applying.

http://cs.stanford.edu/~uno/news.html#lectures

So don't necessarily count yourself out immediately. Take what I said with a grain of salt.

However, since they do have lists like that (they being unicorn-type companies, I think) they quite likely do use it as a metric- maybe not necessarily a requirement.

At some schools, the CS curriculum is focused on "pure" computer science. These curricula are packed full of theoretical CS and rigorous mathematical courses, and are great for people who hope to go into CS research or academia.

At other schools, the "CS" curriculum would be better called "software engineering." These curricula focus on programming and applied CS, giving more "practical" skills for people planning to proceed straight to industry.

At NC State, the undergraduate CS curriculum was a pretty good balance between both. You'll get a mix of both theoretical and applied CS, the downside being that you won't get very deep coverage of either. However, I feel that I was well-prepared to enter industry after graduation, and I've been pretty successful in my line of work.

Here's a small subset of what I studied as an undergrad at NC State:

    Theoretical                 | Applied
    -------------------------------------------------------------
    Discrete mathematics        | Java
    Automata theory             | C
    Computability & complexity  | x86 assembly language
    Linear algebra              | Software engineering

    Mix
    ----------------------------
    Data structures & algorithms
    Operating systems
    Computer graphics
    Artificial intelligence
    Database management systems
    Multimedia systems
    Human-computer interaction

Another benefit of NC State is that it's in the NC Research Triangle area, and the Research Triangle Park is only about 10 minutes down I-40 from campus. RTP is home to a TON of tech companies, so there are plenty of opportunities for relevant employment, both for students (internships, co-ops) and for recent graduates (full-time work).

Raleigh is also a great place to live and work. Plenty to do, great job availability, low cost of living, and traffic is never too bad. The only downside is that the public transportation story isn't nearly as good as, say, D.C.'s (the bus system isn't terrible, though -- I generally found that I could get where I wanted to go in a reasonable amount of time, and there are connecting buses that will take you to nearby Durham (Duke) and Chapel Hill (UNC)).

I very much enjoyed my time at NC State, and if I could go back and choose a university again, knowing what I know now, I'd choose NC State again.

I hope this helps! Feel free to ask me questions :)

Might be smarter to have a "Where did you hear about this internship?" question instead and have "on-campus event" as a choice.

Next time they do that, I hope the candidate says whatever profanities they feel obliged to say to the interviewer's face. And then walks out.

By all means, keep posting + telling your friends about this experience.

So, discrimination is rampant because it works so well. Its not fair, possibly not legal, but hard to stamp out.

If that's the filter they want to use -- the time to apply it is before inviting the candidate to take 3 days out of his/her life to fly across the country for an interview. If it's such a huge "ding" for them that a candidate doesn't come from a certain set of preferred schools -- fine, don't invite them for an interview. It's really quite simple.

Of it's a "ding", but they want to give the candidate a "shot" -- that's fine too, but there's no need to blatantly neg the candidate right to their face. It serves no purpose; it's just uncivil and unprofessional. (No purpose, that is, other than to give the interviewer an ego rush, and thereby provide a temporary defense of sorts against their own very deeply rooted insecurities. That, and to basically deep-six the candidate's performance, and nullify whatever enthusiasm they might have had for Airbnb during the rest of the, by that point, manifestly pointless "interview").

And the fact that such allegedly highly educated people would so quickly resort to numbskull behavior like this suggests that maybe's it's not such a good filter, after all.

But not knowing what exactly that [part of history] was about, of course we can only speculate.

Whereas you could have also looked at it this way: "They must have seen some big positives in me, being as they asked me to come talk to them, knowing full well about [past history]." You know, the glass half-full route.

But then again, I'm not you, and I wasn't there.

Now I look at what's happening with Theranos and laugh, and laugh :)

I was an internal referral there for an ml position. They rolled a fucking front-end developer who had never looked at my resume into my first interview just shy of 25 minutes late. And yes I'm sure about the time, because I was walking out at 25 minutes. Dude was nice and we had fun chatting (not about work, just a cool outdoorsy dude), but we had nothing in common in the work we do. I finally talked to one of their ml people and absolutely nailed that part of the interview. And talked to a weird founder (who always asks weird questions. That were not a good fit for a quantitative person.)

They then decided they weren't sure if I wanted to work there (apparently because, you know, I'm in the habit of wasting a day of my life interviewing for giggles) and made me have another conversation with an early engineer there. Who was really cool, but still, it was a strange process.

They also low-balled me on cash, and were strange about it when I turned them down and didn't negotiate at all. Someone else offered me $20k more and I figured it was a sign they wanted me so I went with them.

The whole thing was a strange experience.

That's not really fair though. Tons of people apply for jobs because they need a job. I've surely done it in the past. I've applied and accepted jobs I didn't give a damn crap about. I had to pay rent, feed 2 kids, and pay my wife's tuition. And even did so with multiple jobs at the same time. Anything else was secondary. I went into interviews, praised the greatness of the ideas of some shitty startups which were doomed to fail. I always showed up prepared and was "professional" (in so far as you can show up and not give a rat's ass, but not let it show), and always tried to show I was invested by having already ideas about their products, website, etc... But still, didn't actually care for that stuff.

So, I was motivated and a good "employee", but was I a good fit? Probably not.

And, on the other hand, I also actually did interview at times just for giggles. Or for practice. Or just in case. Or to get leverage.

And when I was the recruiting, while I surely wouldn't assume that the person in front of me would be "interviewing for giggles" (at first), I can totally understand the "weren't sure if I wanted to work there". Like I answered on another part of this thread: the onus / burden of proof is on you, you are the one who has to show you really want to be there (even though you actually may not).

It's screwed up, but it's how it is, because we also work for money. I know I did often. Still did my best in any job I got though.

(And you should not expect that either, actually. I'm similarly pissed by friends or colleagues who tell me "damn it's like these guys don't care about the job or don't give it all". Well, heck yeah, why would they?)

Then you are an asshole. Seriously you wasted how many people's time for your own amusement? If you want practice or informational interviews there are ways to achieve those without being completely inconsiderate and disrespectful of peoples time.

It fits that you are suspicious of other people based on your own questionable practices. Most normal people don't do this however.

I don't think anything is a better practice than an actual interview. Doing a rehearsal or workshops won't compare.

But thanks for the insult, random stranger.

Besides, if that was your only take away from my comment, I think you may have missed the main point. Maybe you were too infuriated by that point already.

And I think that when it comes to cumulative time-wasting, the culprit is usually more the interviewer (or the incompetent recruiting agency).

Also, would be interested in having data on the "most normal people don't do this" bit. I know plenty who do or did at some point, across several countries.

I was referred by a college classmate and close friend who used to work there at the time, who knows me extremely well, and is easily in the top 1% of engineers I know (Linux contributor, loved by every employer he's ever had, etc.). He told me I totally had the level to work there, and was better than most people he worked with. So I went along with it, and went to their holiday parties, where one of their execs schmoozed with me for a while, told me I sounded like a great fit, and a recruiter would be in touch with me.

I talk to the recruiter on the phone, get assigned a home coding challenge. I spend a Saturday on it, and get a perfect score on it. I don't know if it was by design or not, but it showed me the rankings of every person who ever did that challenge. I was tied for 1st place with 40 or so other past candidates, in a pool of a few thousand participants.

I do their onsite interviews (fortunately I was local to SF) - don't remember much, except that they felt very stilted. But it was the usual "here's a canned problem I know the best answer to, you have 40 minutes to figure it out while I give out cryptic clues". After 3 or 4 of them, I sit in the room alone for about 30 minutes - the recruiter then comes to me and tells me that they won't move forward, bye bye.

My friend met me outside for a smoke, and told me he had no clue what happened. Oh well. AirBnB definitely left a bitter taste in my mouth, but I got a much better gig at a much better company a few months later, so things worked out.

I have worked with, and currently worked with people who are amazing problem solvers and developers who went to community college or trade schools. Recently I worked with one of the smartest people I've ever known who had no college experience at all. He's so good at his job his makes over 6 figures with a high school diploma with no student loan debt.. how could you not call this person smart?

I definitely wouldn't say that people who come top schools aren't top talent, but it's no guarantee and I think it's silly when people require it.

My degree's not from a good school?

That's nothing; your shirt didn't exactly come off the best dressed mannequin in the Sears window.

From my own experience as an interviewer, "has a degree" was absolutely not even a factor when determining who was good and who wasn't.

Something is utterly, terribly wrong with their process if the coding exercise made them think that you were worth flying in for an interview and then they cut short the interview process because they thought it was going so badly.

There are other signs that the tech leadership at airbnb is confused. Witness this almost parody of a video of their devs describing how they worked their way through pretty much every javascript hotness de jour through the years. I honestly thought this was some sort of a parody initially...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMvvb6F8dgk

That's just nuts, what a horrible experience.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Airbnb-Interview-Questio...

GlassDoor didn't just put itself together one morning, or a free, open-source one would already exist.

Do you also spread the meme about "Viagra was invented by accident", as if all the clinical testing, information dissemnation, regulatory approval, chemical isolation, etc were accidents too?

I've had rejection emails from huge companies and tiny startups personally written by the hiring manager. It's not that hard.

Really really glad I didn't end up there.

So it looks a bit weird to them and the thought process is something like "this guy is talented, what is wrong with him that he's a walk on? I'm not willing to find out, pass."

Yeah, I dunno. I mean, some have poor soft skills, definitely. But I would argue that engineers in many companies are simply insulated more than other groups. The biggest reason for this is that Engineering is thought of as a cost center, which has a number of resulting consequences.

Other groups like Product are exposed to many other groups (Sales, BD, Exec, Engineering) and so naturally their networks are larger and more diverse.

More established companies will probably have 30 to mid 30 as the median age, and will have much more professional hiring process (relatively)

Also there is a saying that goes around: A's hire A's, B's hire C's

There are cases where you will be declined as "overqualified" or "no cultural fit" when they mean "will replace my job or at best make me look bad" and "too old" respectively.

I wouldn't give up yet. There are a lot of software architect positions if you have the relevant experience. Median age is higher than 30 I'm pretty sure.

But the "we don't have enough developers" is a blunt lie, "we don't have enough excellent developers" is also a lie. "We don't have enough rock star developers who are ok not being paid enough and have no aspiration to become team leads and just want to code all their career and work overtime" is probably more accurate.

Even after than many interviewers look at your resume like 10 minutes before the interview there is no chance that they would read through your code on github. github as your resume is overrated.

I am curious to know if people hire or get hired purely based on their github profile without a technical interview.

* If you don't provide a link to your github profile, I'm not supposed to look at it. This an HR requirement. Other companies may use this same policy.

* I definitely look at github, but it's not always easy to tell if a project is original or not. Quite often I'm presented with either 30 forks, or a few projects that seem like they started as some boilerplate.

* Don't just provide github, also provide a specific project to look at. Even better, point out a particular section that you are proud of.

* Even with a well-stocked github, I will still ask you to code. This likely isn't to tell if you can code, but to figure out what it would be like to work with you.

Also, asking someone to code in front of you is a terrible way to figure out what it would be like to work with them.

1) It's an artificial non-cooperative environment.

2) It doesn't tell you anything at all about how they present and communicate their ideas.

3) The absolute best-case scenario is you figure out one degree of conscientiousness, which isn't enough to build a working profile model of them.

I'd be curious to know if you know the personality profiles of the people you already work with, which profile framework you use, if you know what composite mix of profiles will lead to meeting your institutional success criteria, and then how you go about assessing a person's profile to fill the gaps that you have in that composite.

FWIW, we follow-up on what candidates thought of the interview process and it is overwhelmingly positive. I don't think it is overly stressful. Although, I'm not sure it's possible to make an interview not stressful at all! :)

EDIT: It's simple if you think of it in terms of a single project. But, if you think of it in terms of many, most of which are no contribution or a small bug fix, it can represent a large time investment. That's why I recommend candidates point out a specific piece of code.

You'd more or less need to get feedback only from people who are already happily and gainfully employed who are also close to neutral on the 'agreeableness' spectrum.

At any rate. You can remove the stress from an interview mostly the same way a therapist can remove stress from iterative therapy. By building an ad-hoc environment of trust, safety, cooperation, and goal alignment.

Hiring is probably the most important thing you can do in/for any company. It should be a time investment on your part. If you don't feel like you're given enough time to do hiring correctly, then I'd suggest setting different expectations with your leadership about how to use your time or what quality of candidate to expect given the time you have.

Seeing a bunch of bug fixes across many projects tells you a lot about that person. So rather than going into the process looking for an extremely narrow thing (like some big project they are the sole maintainer of); go into it looking for anything that's there and see what kind of information is there to help you construct a useful narrative/model of that candidate.

Lots of bug fixes across many projects may not indicate that they can own a singular vision from start to finish (though you can assess that from getting them to tell you a story about literally anything), but it does tell you that they can read other people's code, supply feedback in the way of working alternatives, will take the initiative to solve a problem themselves rather than wait for the maintainer or someone else to get around to it, and focuses on getting things working rather than design-paralysis.

First time I'm hearing about such a policy. Can you explain the reasoning?

It's most likely an overly broad means of protecting against employment discrimination.

For example, I know that where I am it's against the law to ask if someone is married during the hiring process and that's pretty clear on many Facebook pages.

In the specific case it is probably overblown, but HR fears aren't entirely rational.

But, noone gives a shit about that they would rather have me reversing a binary tree on a whiteboard.

As for GitHub, I've downloaded libraries from it, but I have a pretty healthy dislike of Git, which is awful, and refuse to use it for any personal projects. (I only use it at work because I have to-- in any case, work repos are of course private.) I used to have a few projects publicly available on Google Code, but now that's shut down, so there's really just nothing. I do have private repos for my hobby work.

In case it matters, most of my development is in C#.NET.

I believe usability is the most important trait for a software product, and not only does Git have terrible usability, but its designed in such a way to make it nearly impossible for anybody else to improve its usability. (Although they can improve it's accessibility somewhat-- not everybody is capable of using a CLI interface.)

And it's in a product space (revision control) where the average product's usability is already bottom-of-the-barrel. It's kind of impressive in a way they managed to deepen the barrel a bit.

I'm forced to use (struggle with) Git at work, over my objections. There's no way in hell I'd use it for a hobby project where I have a choice.

I see just sharing my opinion of Git is enough to get voted-down on this site. Oh well. Vote me down. "Person dislikes something popular!" is obviously worthy of derision.

So far, there hasn't been one candidate that had anything resembling a portfolio online, but we don't hire all that often and i've only been doing it for a bit over a year.

Is that more or less useful than a github profile?

Just curious.

It shows something slightly different than a github profile since it doesn't typically show full projects but both can show off competence pretty well IMO.

Someone with a well written technical blog or good github portfolio is definitely going to have an advantage in any hiring I do.

Last time this happened I was informed that Russian and Indian are races. Talking about my coworkers by their country of origin (I was saying how refreshing it was to work with a broad array of people in SF vs what I normally work with [white male] in Oklahoma.)

Russian is a race. Seriously.

HR employees are worthless in my experience (~35 years in the labor force).

Or your belly, for that matter.

It wasn't intended as a slant against white men, it was more a happy dividend that I didn't realize I was missing (diversity). SF is rather diverse, but in IT competency still matters far more than gender, race, etc.

What exactly are you, as an individual, missing in terms of diversity?

> "the broad array of cultures and experiences brings different opinions to the table"

Technical opinions? What does this mean exactly?

This is the bad implication I was talking about, that a group of white males is somehow deficient relative to any group of people.

Clearly I didn't read what you wrote, otherwise I'd be agreeing with you already, right?

Or you're just spouting mindless diversity soundbite rhetoric..

Probably that's exactly why you were ignored. The guy was scared of competition. (Maybe they were looking for a tech lead and he felt threatened by your expertise.)

http://www.hrdusa.com/As_hire_As.html

Funnily enough, often people who clearly are top rate don't think so (impostor syndrome). Dunning–Kruger appears to be very healthy in development circles.

I'm actually a mediocre software engineer. Making an accounting system do XYZ for the 4000th time isn't interesting anymore. Doing it in Angular with all the new whizbang whistles and shit is more annoying than fun.

I'm looking at a career switch or something different. I can't keep creating the same nonsense over and over and watch IT run by people that largely wouldn't be good as managers of a McDonald's much less an entire organization's IT department.

The first way to see if a company actually understands the importance of IT is to see whether they have a CIO or a Director of IT / VP Engineering / Other less than CIO role. If they can't even commit a C role, what do you think their thoughts are on IT?

</rant former IT Director> :-)

Or being moved down in the stack ranking and cut.

I can certainly still program, but interviewing...I'm tired of it. Tired of being asked picayune questions like I just graduated. Maybe I should I change my CV title from 'Senior Software Engineer'... that actually implies 30-something, late 20s. but what? "Part time CTO and dog's body for a few small startups/companies"?

I know I can do most anything I put some effort into, the relearning process is not hard. But everyone wants a warm body they can immediately plug in. I get interest due to my CV, but they want to stick me into jobs I'm too senior for. I need to figure out what to change... or tell recruiters, no absolutely not, no more front end work, ever!

well, my advice is start planning your career change now - I wish I had 10 years ago, instead of merely idly thinking about it.

There are no shortage of companies that need someone your age who have been around the block and can bring professionalism in addition to a wealth of experience. Don't sell yourself short. Even if they called you back after a month of ignoring you would you really want to work for them? Probably not. Generally ding dongs like that are only capable of hiring other ding dongs(confirmation bias), hold out for working with adults. You age is an asset not liability.

Unfortunately, this seems to be par for the course these days - I have a lot of friends who complain about the same thing. It's just indicative of a total lack of professional courtesy, and you should consider yourself lucky that you didn't end up working with people like that.

Keep a record of the behaviour - they are burnt for the rest of time.

You know, the thing is there's nothing new, you're just seeing today what the illusion of the paycheck prevented you to see before. Take this as an opportunity to move your life forward : no matter how exciting your next job is, give to yourself a deadline to bootstrap a SAAS business as a nightjob and have enough customer within 6 months to - at least - replace your salary.

Also, in these cases, I'd recommend you simply call back yourself. Think of it as the opposite of the judicial system (for the US and most of Europe, at least): the burden of proof is on the prosecution. In this case, it's on the job-seeker. You're the one who has to show you want the job and that you're the best fit. The company's role is to find a good fit (and to do so by using their resources in a reasonable way).

That being said, I wouldn't advise on doing "homework" assignments that are exceedingly long.

For the record, when I am on the recruiting side of the fence, I always do a phone screening first, with live coding in a shared editor. Only then might remote homework or on site coding come up, and I always tried to make sure the effort is minimal. It's hard to find something that fits all people and minds though. Try to design a recruiting scheme, and let me know how it works out and if it doesn't piss anyone off. :)

The courtesy thing is another issue entirely, of course, and obviously a lot less defendable...

That is correct. The market is so flooded with workers that ageism is easily affordable.

You can keep trying if you want but the suggestion "it will all work out if you just try harder because the system is ultimately rational" is inaccurate and unproductive. If you glance around the work place and count the percentage of people 10 years older than you, you can guesstimate the odds of continued employment.

dfraser992 advice is, unfortunately, they way the world really works: neither ageism nor the flood of workers is going to be widely admitted to let alone addressed in the foreseeable future.

I'd say in this particular case the guy felt threatened and/or you were too expensive(or assumed to be too expensive)

Maybe it depends on the company, but for smaller companies and startups it's not only if you can do what they need it's if you fit in and the other employees like you and want to work with you. You don't want to hire or work with a jack ass, especially smaller teams. You could be the best developer/programmer/engineer in the world, but if no one wants to work with you, well, they probably won't contact or hire you.

It could be for the better and I'm not saying you are a jack ass. You might start there and after a month or 6 decide you don't fit in, feel miserable, and don't like the environment and decide to leave and have to go through this all over again.

Keep at it. Eventually you will find a company that wants your expertise and you enjoy working for and like people you work with. Both sides have to ultimately decide on a good balance. Technical abilities are not the only factor and I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that it's an age issue.

As an aside I have not come across any issues with age and I'm in my lower-30's. I think it has less to do with age and more to do with how your present yourself, act, work, and communicate. No one believes I'm even nearing 30 when I interview or am being interviewed for example and it's never actually been brought up or mentioned for me that I recall.

My current company was getting some poor candidates who passed the phone screen (the phone screen was the usual 1 hour code something in a google docs while we both look at it) type of screen. So we added a homework problem that takes a couple of hours to pull off. I found when I interviewed I had no interest in coding or following each companies stupid and arbitrary interview process. I do worry that it's too much of a pointless pain - but we have been able to reject a few people at the "homework" stage because they were just atrocious.

If someone has been a public github contributor, that should be even better than a homework problem.

Indeed, I agree

When they have someone hiring not based on what's best for the company but what's best for their own career goals, you know you're going to have issues.

Welcome to the world of tailoring yourself for the job. I'm in my 40s, so it gets worse. Can't wait until I'm over 50!

It seems like someone could get a pretty good staff if they targeted all the late 30+ people.

Many years ago there was a limited demand for remote work, which probably tapered the supply, but in my experience from every 3 leads you followed (granted you had the experience), 2 were promising and 1 was almost always an offer. Now a days it's more like you need to follow 30 leads to get one 'meh' answer. I don't feel it's an age issue, it's just a general market condition.

With more companies acceptance of remote work, mixed in with the "we can't find local talent" mantra, the hiring process has turned more hands-off which in turn is producing these insane hiring procedures and cycles.

To make matters worse, everything from the smallest start-up to the largest tech company is adopting the same 'exclusive hiring practices' while they sit back wait for the resumes to roll in and/or send in work samples. All of this is hands-off trying to get candidates to 'fill slots' costs them next to nothing until the final phases. But for candidates it's just a time consuming PITA.

My only advice is to treat the process as any business transaction. Try to gauge how much they are invested in the hiring process, if they are asking you for hours or days on end while they appear to invest a couple of minutes of 'human time' RUN! These are lottery-like odds of landing an offer and unfortunatly this is endemic in large companies as well as unknown startups.

So true. I've found myself back on the market recently and what I'm finding is a large number of companies resorting to HackerRank pre-screens where they pick out anywhere from 3-6 puzzle-type coding challenges, give you an hour or so to complete them and if you don't nail them all, you're out. And that's just for the initial screening - there's no guarantee you'll make it past the N phone screens and in-persons you'll have after the initial screening.

Insanity, indeed. I hope someone writes a book on the crazy hiring practices in our industry, compared to other fields. Maybe I will someday - have to land a job first, lol :-/

Alternatively, give them your hourly rate and expectation that you will be paid for all work performed, including "hiring homework". That should weed out much of the illegitimate prospective employers.

I would have asked them to look at that code and ask me any question they have about it. If they are not willing to do that I wouldn't have bothered continuing the conversation with them.

> the mid 20-something lead developer

Okay I am going to do something I don't like to do which is judge somebody on their age but a "lead developer" at around 25? Sorry but unless that person is some rockstar programmer (conceived with a copy of K&R in the womb) I find it very hard to believe somebody 3-4 years out of uni has the experience to be a "lead" at very much.

> told me he thought I was a better programmer than him.

Well that is something I guess, at least he didn't think he was God's gift to the programming world!

> Now, what do you suppose happened next? I never heard from them again and all of my attempts at communication were ignored.

Yes drives me insane. It is so fucking rude.

> I'm starting to think my age is becoming a factor (mid 30s)

Could be, hopefully not but a company that puts a mid-20-something as the "lead" developer might only be interested in getting young and therefore cheap employees.

> and also these kids have no sense of respect and professional courtesy.

Very true. That is partly why I don't think a mid-20s person can be a "lead" for much as they don't have the professional experience to lead. A lead developer isn't just a great programmer but also a great leader. Somebody for the regular staff to look up to and rely on for mentorship.

> I'd like to say this was an isolated incident, but that would be a lie.

It happens to us all. Some companies (IT and other) are shit. It is just the way of the world. Don't dwell on it too much, it is just more mental energy wasted and they already wasted a whole Saturday of your life yet were not even respectful enough to call and say "you were great but we prefer this other person". I mostly hate having that conversation (giving and receiving) but it has to be done, it is about respecting that persons time and even though you are not offering them a job you can offer them feedback so they do not walk away from the process empty handed. Sometimes that feedback is all they need to better themselves in the future.

> Stupid me just spent his Saturday doing another such project, though at least this one presented a more interesting problem.

Live and learn. In the future if you already have demonstrations of your work then ask them to look at that first and if they want to continue the process then you look at doing something specific for them. At least you seem to have found a small positive from it in that the problem was interesting :)

> The fact that so many employers treat candidates like this tells me that the whole "it's hard to find good developers" line is a lie.

A lot of the problems with finding a good dev is just finding a good employee for the company as a whole. You might have a good developer who is an asshole and will only cause issues.

Anyway just move on and forget about them. It is cliché relationship advice but you deserve better than them.

Yes, over half my team members are older than me. However, most of them come from electrical engineering backgrounds and have less professional programming experience than I do. There is no friction, though. They're great guys, and they don't demonstrate any sort of ageist attitudes. There's definitely a level of mutual respect and trust, and I try to foster open communication throughout the team.

Three years out of university, I got an offer to be a senior software engineer and technical lead. It came with a 50% pay raise. I'll admit I had some reservations before taking the position. What if I'm not good enough? What if I fail? The thing is, the people who hired me (I was interviewed by no fewer than 7 different people at the company, all in one day), thought that I had the skills necessary to succeed (otherwise they wouldn't have offered me the position). I took the position and I'm glad I did.

It has been the best job I've ever had. Until now, I'd never worked in an environment that placed so much trust in, and demonstrated so much respect for, its employees. There's a good bit of freedom, and the company is very good at rewarding its employees for good work. My only complaint is that the development environment is less than ideal (Oracle Grid Engine, all work done in the cloud, Perforce, SAP, lots of shitty products to deal with in the development workflow). I'm only willing to put up with that because the nature of the job (and the people I work with) is so good otherwise.

Maybe you're right that the term "lead" is thrown around too much in our industry, but I don't think it's insane to put a young person in such a position as long as they're otherwise qualified. As an aside, if you're ever doubting yourself, listen to what your peers are telling you!

Now, on one hand, I dropped out and been in the industry (gamedev) for the last ten years. On the other hand, I've actually been on designer and producer positions for the first 6. But then again, on the third hand, I was programming non-stop since 8 and turned in MIX emulator (from Knuth's books) as a school project at 15.

So, may be we can at least agree that any broad statements about professional level of huge groups of people united only by their age, race, country of origin or other unrelated stuff are unlikely to be true for everyone in that group, because people are unique and deserve to be judged individually?

What annoys me is I often see companies promote an inexperienced (due to age) developer to lead or architect or some other title when they are really not that at all. The company does it to keep the person happy [read: shut them up] with a title rather than pull out the company wallet and pay more. I know dozens, maybe even in the hundred+, people who were duped into that. Often because "it will look amazing on your CV!" or "we promise we will review your pay if things work out in 6 months" in the hope you forget about it or don't want to bring it up.

The problem I have with this is that it devalues the actual lead, architects, whatever the current trendy title is.

I look at it this way - A lead developer could be lead on a very important bit of software that somehow fits into something that could cause loss of life. If it were a structural engineer they wouldn't just be promoted to a lead architect after a couple of years in the game. Same with a surgeon or registrar or a judge or detective or ... the list is very long! Except in IT for some reason.

I do not mean to belittle anyone who is a lead developer and under 30. Good for you if you really are skilled and experienced enough to truly deserve that title, my problem is over the years I would say a good 90% of those "lead" somethings under 30 are not deserving of the title.

Hm, actually I haven't seen it. For me, "lead" has a very exact meaning: a developer who is personally responsible for code that developers people write, and has authority appropriate to that responsibility.

What else can it mean?

So there are a few buzzwords in that but that is pretty much my personal experience of what a lead developer should be.

I think part of the problem is that there is no industry standard definition of what a lead developer is. It has been my experience it is abused in the ways I mentioned in my previous post.

Again this is all just my personal experience. We are all shaped by our history and though we try and not judge people automatically it will happen from time to time.

Yeah, this is so true it hurts

Not only kids mind you

Don't do these take homework projects. Don't work for free.

Two hours of messing about on Instagram trying to get an authentication token for their API I eventually figured it out, only to realize I was authenticated in some sand boxed mode, so only meta-data was being returned. I needed to have the acccount approved before I could use it properly.

That was a waste of two hours of my life.

If you told me to do this take home assignment I would've politely smiled and said 'sure let me do it right away'. Then I go home, research more about your product and the market, try out your demo product, figure out how things work and release an open source version and make it free. Surely, that is a much better indicator than 'Build a CRUD using Yii'.

A few years ago, I did this to one company I interviewed at who were super arrogant and condescending. I just checked their website and it returns 404. Looks like people prefered my free open source version instead of paying them for it.

Don't fuck with me.

It's not a lie, you just forgot the last half of that sentence. "It's hard to find good developers, who are willing to work for the peanuts I'm offering."