The exact phrase is "We don't think you will fit in to our culture". I won't name names for two reasons. First, I'd likely get a law suit. Second, the attitude is pervasive. Recent post-graduates doing first level "filter interviews" asking questions from their recent algorithms class. The process is optimized toward new graduates. "What's the average order of mergesort?" kind of nonsense. In 41 years of daily programming I've never had to code a sort routine. I have spoken to Tarjan about computing the order of the Rete algorithm but I don't think the Rete is covered in the college courses... and who ever heard of Tarjan anyway?

Sadly, this means that we will continue to repeat the same mistakes "for the first time". Knuth's literate programming, Alan Kay's Meta insights, Chandy and Misra's parallel work, and other fundamental quality gains will have to wait for another generation, assuming that generation ever gets its chance.

What I see are languages without standards "evolving". That is, they are making all old inventions but badly (e.g. Python has "closures" but only 1 liners. What a joke.) They "abstract away" complexity but badly (e.g. Ruby has gems but you have no idea what the ruby stack is really doing.). This is much different from Alan Kay's abstraction. To quote Stroustrop "C++11 is a whole new language!" And MapReduce as an "invention". Oh, please. The list goes on.

The worst part is the stupid hiring games meme. Solve our puzzle! Take our quiz! Show us your blog! How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Make sliding colored blocks on web pages!

Experience is a valuable asset in most professions but is looked down upon in programming. Unless, of course, your experience is "exact"... "oh, we need an Oracle 10.3 database guru with stored procedure experience".

If you want to know what companies to avoid... look for the ones that emphasize "culture'.

I agree with everything you just wrote, and I'm 23.

Either something's wrong with me, or something's wrong with this profession.