Was wondering if you could elaborate on this a bit:
> I set up a small company, so I could buy toys, and started following my own muse.
This is the first time I've heard of using a personal retirement account to pay business expenses without tax penalties, and I'm not finding any relevant hits on Google.
Kind of a pain in the butt, and not many accountants know of it. There's a lot of fairly strict rules. You can't paint outside the lines.
There's a company that specializes in this kind of thing. I don't really want to go into detail, here, but feel free to get in touch (my HN ID has contact info).
For those following along at home, the accounting term seems to be [[ Rollovers as Business Startups (ROBS) ]]. The IRS website has some unusually direct guidance[1][2] on tax compliance risks associated with ROBS.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/rollovers-as-business-s...
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust#U...
I interviewed senior engineers (for a marquee corporation), for 25 years. I have some actual experience, here.
I never made any technical mistakes. Everyone I hired was technically, up to snuff.
The mistakes tended to be in how they worked in the team.
> it would be discrimination if someone else was subjected to a different interview process than yours.
And I really have to take exception to this. Every interview I ever did, was tailored to the applicant. There's absolutely no legal basis for this stance. There's a few "obvious" discriminatory things ("All our girls start in the typing pool," etc.), but people aren't cookies, and "cookie cutter" interview processes are for "cookie" positions. Our HR was very clear on what did, and did not, count as legally discriminatory behavior. HR was run by the Corporate General Counsel, and we managers were required to understand the legal ramifications of our duties.
The OP was talking about senior staff. These are folks that will have Responsibility for significant projects, will need to act as leaders and mentors, and will be the ones to take "point" on the corporate brand and public profile.
Treating them as "cookies" is, in my opinion, less than wise.
If you pit me against some kid, right out of college, that has been spending three hours (of their current employer's time), every day, for the last month, practicing leetcode, you'll get someone that is very good at doing quick, meaningless tests. It won't tell you much about how they'll perform in the breach, or when asked to architect a large-scale, heterogenous system (which is what I'm fairly good at). Not sure how un-discriminatory the process is, there...
In any case, it's all water under the bridge, now. A few companies didn't get me. I doubt that anyone is crying in their beer over it, and things turned out well, for me. All's well, that ends well, eh?
This itself would be a huge red flag in any interview process. If you think you never made any technical directions.
It's a false dichotomy to believe either tailor make the interview process or treat everyone like a college hire. Senior staff / staff positions also have a particular process, including writing exercises, explaining complex decisions, writing code, talking about system design and the various trade-offs.
> Every interview I ever did, was tailored to the applicant.
How do you make sure that your / someone else's biases don't creep into the interview if it's being tailor made.
What kind of diversity did you have at your previous job where the interviews were tailor made?
I did well enough, so some very tough people kept me in my position for a long time.
When they finally rolled up my department, the person with the least tenure had a decade.
These were all senior-level C++ algorithm engineers. We did image processing pipelines for one of the most famous imaging companies on earth.
But feel free to judge me. You won't be alone.
You seem to be accusing companies and younger people of ageism, but I'm yet to hear a concrete example. From reading what you wrote, I can say it seems you seem to be exhibiting an adverse reaction to young people doing well.
> If you pit me against some kid, right out of college, that has been spending three hours (of their current employer's time), every day, for the last month, practicing leetcode, you'll get someone that is very good at doing quick, meaningless tests.
Not sure how you got to the conclusion that younger engineers are stealing time from their employers to leetcode.
I wish you the best, and hope you get a chance to analyze your biases.
It's not really device control, but it does involve a fairly robust iOS app, talking to multiple servers, and synthesizing relationships.
I won't go into a whole bunch of detail in public. Like I said, it serves a fairly narrow demographic, and won't really make a huge splash.
I've been writing software for this demographic for decades.
I can always chat about it offline.
That basically meant that I had to come in the front door to places I was interested in.
I was a bit "picky," because I wanted to do stuff that interested me. I didn't really care about making a lot of money, or beanbag chairs, or whatnot. I wanted to do work that engaged me.
I'm a very experienced Apple native developer, and I'm good at writing stuff that talks to other stuff (like client/server systems, device control, realtime video, etc.). I'm good at writing APIs and SDKs. Making devices sit up and beg is something I've always enjoyed.
So places that did stuff like that, interested me.
In my experience, I was treated like absolute crap. After a few rounds of "interviews" (which seemed to be opportunities for relatively young engineers and managers to patronize and condescend me), I just said "bugger this for a lark," and decided that I was retired. I set up a small company, so I could buy toys, and started following my own muse. I found some folks doing non-profit stuff, that couldn't afford people of my caliber, and started working with them, for free.
It was the best decision I've ever made. In the last five years, I've probably done more work than I did in two decades previously, I've learned more, every day, than I have, since my twenties.
[UPDATED TO ADD] If you want "senior" people, they are likely to come with a rather fetching shade of grey to their well-coiffed pompadours, and I'd suggest that it would be rather self-destructive to treat them badly. There seems to be considerable resentment towards us older folks. I'm not one to judge whether or not it is merited (in my case, it is definitely not), but it may interfere with efforts to recruit more experienced folks.