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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

> the deluge of recruiter spam on LinkedIn hasn't slowed down yet

Recruiters spamming you is not a correlative metric for companies hiring you.

SV is worse than other locations, but even the midwest company I work for (I'm also over 40) much prefers to hire people straight out of college. They're cheaper, willing to work longer hours, and easily molded into an image the company wants.

EDIT: To provide a small anecdote about recruiters - I regularly get Google and Facebook recruiters hitting me up on LinkedIn, even though I know I would never be hired by them. I don't live in a state where they have an office, have no plans to move, and don't meet some of their publicly announced filters. I'm up front about this to the recruiters, yet I still get spam from them.

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I’m 45, and was last in the job market in 2018 and before that in 2016. I’m in Atlanta. The last two times I looked for your standard senior/lead enterprise dev roles it took less than two weeks to get an offer just by using local recruiters.

Edit:

There is a huge difference between random spam from recruiters who throw a big net and working with local boutique recruiters who have relationships with local firms. I ignore the former.

I'm in my 40s in the SF Bay Area and recently landed a new software development job. The process took several months.

My initial interviews were disastrous; it had been many years since my last job search and I didn't know I wasn't prepared for the "leetcode era". Drilling on "leetcode medium" problems with a time limit got me to the point where I was at least in the game that's being played nowadays.

It wasn't pretty, but eventually I got around to progressing and getting an offer instead of getting "nope'd" at the early stages. The job-interview repertoire has definitely changed in the last 15 years though, and it takes some work to get conversant with it.

I'm 40 and a developer for 15 years and didn't make it past Amazon's initial code assessment. One of the problems was a floodfill algorithm, which I've never used before. Couldn't quite figure it out on my own, but found the answer in Google in about 5 minutes, which is what I would do in real life faced with this problem. I don't understand the purpose of asking people to memorize a bunch of algorithms they will probably never use in the job and could research if needed. I don't see it as any reasonable evaluation of my engineering skill.

Those tests aren't really about engineering skill. The interviewer is checking to see how much you want the position, how hard of a worker you are, and how smart you are.

If you really want the position, you will put a lot of effort into researching what the interview will entail.

If you're a hard worker, you will intensively study for the interview.

If you're smart, you'll be able to apply the material you studied to the problem, and you'll probably realize the game you're playing.

None of these things is about 'engineering skill', which is much more difficult to discover, and only really valuable if the person is a smart, hard worker, who sticks around.

*edit: I am not saying that I like this style of interview, and when I interview job candidates, I never engage in this type of 'test'

If Trivial Pursuit: Code Monkey and Engineering Edition is the interview game, that's not a place a sensible person would want to work.

A sensible knowledge and performance evaluation would involve pair coding on limited scope, immediate, real problems, not BS trivia.

Interviewing is a two-way street.. the signals given-off in the interview process should be taken in as a totality by the interviewee as well. If they see bad signs, they should run in the opposite direction rather than get sucked into a bad environment.

Well, I think it depends on what the rewards are for getting the job. If the pay, benefits, and accreditation (resume boost) from holding a position at a given company are sufficiently valuable, it is definitely rational to play the game.

Full disclosure; I have never done an interview like this, or tried to land a job at a major 'tech' company, though I do have a degree in engineering.

I think I might have found a hack - a way to work for $large_tech, not to have to move to the west coast, work remotely and not be required to do leetCode - work in the cloud consulting division of either Microsoft or Amazon. I’ll know by the end of May if it works.

This is one of the reasons I haven't applied to work at Amazon, even though I'm sure I could do the work. The signal they're sending by interviewing this way says "We want people who are willing to put up with bullshit".

This comment implies leverage that the OP probably doesn't have though. Everyone is picky to the extent that they can be.

I had the same attitude pre-Covid. My local market (Atlanta) has completely tanked. There are still jobs out there, but salaries have imploded and I don’t think they are coming back for a couple of years.

If I didn’t have any other option besides the standard r/cscareerquestions “Learn leetCode and work for a FAANG” , I would.

Yep. When I interviewed at Google the recruiter suggested I study up on algorithms, data structures, sorting, graphs, recursion. They even offered a Candidate Coaching Session where you could do practice interviews. It felt like they were optimizing for people that were willing to put a lot of time into preparation .

But if you're capable and smart, you wouldn't normally waste lots of your time memorising details you could easily look up and use in moments if you ever needed them.

Are those interview processes really optimising for candidates who are willing and able to spend silly amounts of time creating an illusion of being super-keen?

It's amazing that it just took one startup to sway the majority opinion that trivia-as-job-interview is a good barometer of job success.

Not even five years ago this style of interviewing was looked down upon by most.

While I will say that flood fill is probably too hard for a screener question, I have used it multiple times at work. Sometimes incorrectly, but knowing it helped me realize it was incorrect.

It is true that I use a hard algorithm maybe 8 times a year. But I need my coworkers to be able to understand them when we do. So that's one part of it.

Another major part is having you go into detail about complexity and tradeoffs. Believe it or not most of my co-workers can derrive these things on the fly, not memorized. Others require a little think.

The third is algorithms boil down to simple interviews where only a few things can go meta wrong. There are other types of question but they have a lot more failure modes and are even harder to train people to give.

If the questions are relevant to the job then I think that's fine. In this case, the code assessment is provided even prior to being able to apply to a specific position. From what I gathered, this assessment applies to everything from a team lead/management position to a front-end developer to a firmware engineer.

I understand that for a big company they need something standardized to process a large number of candidates.

I got cut from an Amazon phone screen by not being able to cough up various Minesweeper algorithms off the top of my head. (Also something I've never used before or since.)

Thankfully, at the same time (this was in 2011), I was also in the process of interviewing for a startup that treated me like a real person with individual skills and experiences of value. That interview process went a lot better, and did result in me getting hired.

(And Amazon recruiters still pester me to this day, despite me having little interest in working for them.)

Yeah, SF is probably the problem here... get out to a cheaper state... come down to florida and sling some code for insurance companies... it will be boring but alcohol exists.

No appreciable percentage of employers outside of SV, and maybe NYC, give a shit about LeetCode or probably even know what it is.

SV is an outlier among outliers in almost every respect, even among other large metro areas with big tech industries like NYC, Chicago, or Austin. To the point where advice should always clarify whether it pertains to SV or non-SV, because it's usually one or the other.

Edit: typo

The leetcode grind is very real these days. My advice for people is pick a language you want to get more familiar with but have a decent understanding of already. It will help you learn some of the standard but not always used libraries. For example I’m doing some in Python now and had never used the defaultdict class, even though I’ve been using python for 10+ years.

Pro tip: get out of SV....

> I’m 45, and was last in the job market in 2018 and before that in 2016. I’m in Atlanta. The last two times I looked for your standard senior/lead enterprise dev roles it took less than two weeks to get an offer just by using local recruiters.

I think I should have tried the local recruiter approach back when I was in Dallas and getting bupkis for hits. Unfortunately, I bought too heavily into the "lol recruiters r trash" meme and didn't consider the type of recruiter before dismissing them wholesale.

recruiters may suck but they're also free (for you) and have contacts. fortunately or not, most of my gigs came from them... especially when I was hoping to work on short notice

42 here. Triplebyte seemed mostly alright, but I got weird vibes (deception?) when they said I "scored almost the highest ever." I bet they tell everyone that, which would come across as patronizing.

Also, I left the workforce because I don't find working for Darwinian corporations or without equity to be a valuable or fair use of my time or meritocratic compensation.

> They're cheaper, willing to work longer hours

So now we've hit the real root of the problem. If you expect significantly more money than competitors in your role- than ageism may not be why it's getting harder to find jobs.

It isn't 'ageist' to disagree on the value of prior experience.

The real problem is looking at compensation in isolation and not as a function of productivity.

If someone aged 42 is only as productive as someone aged 22, it's perfectly reasonable to offer them only the same salary for the same job.

Of course, unless the person aged 42 has wasted 20 years of their careers (which, I concede, some have) it is highly unlikely that their productivity is really still the same.

A 42-year-old developer who has 5x the productivity of a 22-year-old developer and much more general business experience as well but only wants 3x the salary is a steal, unless you're only looking at the $$$.

Salaries over time are rarely based upon prior experience or knowledge; they are the function of normal annual salary adjustments combined with 5-20% increases when job hopping. Which is, if you perform well, roughly equivalent a 4% annual compound interest.

As they say, compound interest is king - companies are just not willing to swallow the fact that the compound interest is in this case working against them. And yes, it’s working against employees as well: after all, no amount of technical experience can fight against 20+ years of compounded interest.

EDIT:

A $60k starting salary, compounded annually at 4% for 20 years, will be $131k. At the age of 50, they’re knocking on the door of $200k. 60 brings them to around $290k. Just by doing their job.

If anyone is to blame for the “unnaturally high” salaries of those over 40, it’s the companies themselves, plus a bit of math.

Are you taking inflation into account? A $60K starting salary in 1980 is equivalent to a $190K starting salary today.

Salary isn't a function of time- it's a function of perceived value and leverage.

The only way your salary won’t go up on a yearly basis is if you’re constantly on the road to being fired. Cost of living increases (2%), as well as small yearly increases to keep you motivated and content (1-2%), are just a fact of life when working for a company.

The only part that’s tied to your perceived value and leverage are bonuses or new job salaries (and most of the time those are tied to your previous salary). I’m not counting bonuses, and getting over a 20% increase when switching jobs is a startlingly rare event reserved for CEOs and the Guidos of this world.

Also, if you have concrete examples to the opposite, I’d like to hear them. Simply claiming repeatedly that they are merit based does nothing to sway me to your position.

IBM, for example, doesn't do yearly raises- you either have to go out of your way to negotiate (i.e. threaten to leave) or you have to apply to go to the next band. I've also seen this at Cisco, and I've heard that Amazon does this as well.

In fact- at Amazon I've heard the opposite of what you're claiming (I've heard this sort of culture referred to as 'up or out')- after a few years you've exhausted your signing incentives (primarily stock options that vest over those few years) and if you stay in the same role for a long time, your total comp will actually decrease

> If you expect significantly more money than competitors in your role

Out of curiosity - don't companies take a pass on older candidates because they expect them to ask for a higher salary than the younger ones?

That's certainly true. A better way to say that would be that "I can find work when I look for it, despite my age!"

Also, even my current employer has historically preferred young hires. But as they've grown as a company, and their clients' needs have expanded, they've found value in experienced developers as well.

On the flipside, my current company as a rule doesn't hire below 3-5 years of experience. Especially if their degree is in something like IT or MIS/BIS I've found a junior dev working 60-65 hours a week is noticeably less productive, even to managers and non-tech executives, than a senior dev working 35. Even the person with 5 years of industry-relevant experience will be less productive (though not as noticeably) than someone with 20. We're not in a spot in the market where we can afford the drop in productivity from the seniors, and leadership hasn't yet decided to make the investment required to hire enough to overcome that (e.g. hiring "extra" seniors so we have enough slack to train cheaper juniors and mids).

Have you actually tried applying, though? Rules are general, locations can be hypothetical or ideal, remote work is a thing.

(To be sure, I get your point. But I think this anecdote might be a little bit your own barriers to that route as well as recruiters just spamming people that match keywords.)

Anybody know if it's possible to block Amazon recruiters on Linkedin?

If not, I'm going to ask the next one to flag me in their system, if that's possible.

Why would you burn bridges in such a way?

They're basically spam at this point. I'm just asking to not be cold-called.

And I really have no desire to work for that type of company. Love it as a customer, but not my cup of office.

> They're cheaper, willing to work longer hours, and easily molded into an image the company wants.

There's no intrinsic reason why older workers are more expensive than younger workers. If you think your experience warrants a compensation premium, then it's up to you to persuade your prospective employer of that; you can't just unilaterally insist that you deserve more pay. If you demand extra pay because of your age and no one is willing to give you that, then your compensation expectations are just out of line with the market. The employers who won't pay you more money aren't discriminating on the basis of age (illegal and unethical), they're discriminating on the basis of salary expectations (legal and perfectly reasonable).

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