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Comment by psyc | Hacker News Reader

I can't be sure yet, but I'm starting to be concerned. I turned 40 recently. My current job search has lasted about 5x longer than any previous job search. I've been turned down for nonsensical reasons, such as not having enough experience in a specific language that I have a lot of experience in. (That was an assertion by the interviewer, not the result of technical questioning.) I've been interviewed several times by managers and directors 10 years younger than myself. I've noticed a distinct pattern where they'll ask very basic questions, I'll give a detailed answer than I know to be correct and insightful, and they'll say it's wrong - and I'm just dumbfounded, like what can I say? I'm not going to argue with them.

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I was recently rejected by a big tech company for not knowing Java 8. I code in scala in my day job and haven't kept up with changes in java. My coding exercise language options were nodejs,java, python, I submitted solution java 7.

Interviewer said to my face( well..on the phone) that they won't be "moving forward" because I don't keep up with changes in technology and they are a 'fast moving' tech environment.

Sounds like you dodged a bullet.

There are a lot of those kinds of bullets to dodge. That's kind of the point behind the concern over age discrimination. These "bullets" are more or less cover for age discrimination.

That almost reads like a joke. The guy using Scala is criticized by Java evangelists (no other word when you reject somebody because they don't know one specific language) for not keeping up with changing technologies.

Hope you found another position and can look at this experience thinking that you're better off not working there.

This may not have been an age thing, and more of being threatened by your experience thing. Could also be that they were so clueless that they couldn't put together that you could obviously do java 8. A lot of places writing pretty basic software really do think they are Google and have weird impossible to meet interview standards that no one working there could ever pass.

I've recently been thrown into the position of interviewing many candidates for both more senior roles than I have, and job functions I know nothing about. So I'm totally guilty of this, sorry.

We had a candidate a while ago with lots of experience in many different stacks, but none in the ones we use. I suggested to the hiring manager that ageism might be a factor here, as he clearly could learn new stacks based on his past experience, so it was reasonable to expect he could learn ours and not need as much specific experience up front. We didn't hire him, and I feel that was a bad decision when I look back. We recently started hiring grey haired men again, but only after it was needed by the sales team.

> but only after it was needed by the sales team.

Money trumped affirmative action and ageism in one fell swoop. They needed experienced sales people.

> I'll give a detailed answer than I know to be correct and insightful, and they'll say it's wrong

Wow, do you have an example?

The worst example was as follows. I've been a 3D engine programmer for >15 years. I was a senior engine programmer at EA, and shipped very famous things. Recently I was interviewed by two recent college grads, who asked me to summarize the rendering pipeline. I did so. Their feedback was that I "failed to demonstrate expertise."

I hope you tore them a new one and let them know the err of their ways since you clearly are experienced.

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