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Comment by voakbasda | Hacker News Reader

What?! Age discrimination in the software industry??? Say it isn’t so!!! Seriously though, your insight is astonishingly spot on: LeetCode is a perfectly legal means of practicing age/lifestyle discrimination. Yet another innovative Silicon Valley dark pattern. Why is this the first I’m hearing it characterized this way?

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That's just it, it's stuff you learn in computer science, then forget about because you don't use it in your day job.

Your day job is writing CRUD services. That's the job.

Our tech interview - ~8 hour take-home assignment, it was well-paid consultancy - asked people to basically demonstrate they could write a CRUD service. It had reading XML, some business logic / calculations, a REST/JSON API and a front-end.

Ten years later, I'm still working with that basic model. I mean sure, it's been broken up here and there by a different tech stack (Angular instead of React, Go instead of Java, native iOS instead of web) but the basics are still the same.

I haven't had to invert a graph or do a depth / breadth first search since college. The most algorithmic thing I do is implement a comparator function for sorting.

Hopefully you mean the 8-hour assignment was paid or that would be an unacceptable ask.

8 hour take-home ? Shesh that's terrible.

Yeah, this is so obvious once it's stated this way, but I'd never thought of it like that either. Every time I talk to prospective employers and they wax about their rapid fire technical challenges and 5-round interview processes that last six weeks, I wonder "how the hell do they expect someone with other commitments to do all of this?" And the answer is ... they don't!

They ask questions that kids are taught at 18/19. It's almost shocking; this is how you're selecting?

People that are in their 40s aren't confused by the question but are more confused by why it's the question as being able to answer it is so disconnected from any metric of competency or quality.

It'd be like saying "so you have an engineering degree, oh a masters from 20 years ago. Cool, remember Lagrange multipliers and Hamiltonians? I'm sure you do. Here's a problem. You have 10 minutes"

That's why we keep seeing the failures of the past repeat. Tech selects for people too young to know it and too arrogant to study it.

I feel like by the time you’re in your 40s, you should be able to leverage your network to bypass the technical interview. What are you doing at 40 going through the same hiring funnel as 18 year olds with no discernible reputation or experience? Maybe if you’re doing a career switch, sure, but if you’ve got 15-20 years under your belt then that’s a different story.

You are proposing substituting a nepotistic process as a substitute for a discriminatory process? Personally, I do not think that would yield any improvement.

No, I’m just saying at some point your reputation should precede you, otherwise what have you been doing for 20 years?

Not only do some companies strictly have the policy regardless but also some people (like me) want a consistent challenge as in going from say security research to hardware to web dev.

I don't advocate for a free ride nor am I saying the tests are hard (they really aren't), just that they have a very weak correlation with building strong teams of the right people

Being an introvert? Becoming a better engineer? Learning new skills? Doing things that actually matter for my job?

Speaking as an introvert, introverts need networks too. Build a network - skip to the front of the line. Or better yet, get a job specifically made for you. Otherwise get into the funnel like everyone else.

Networking is a non technical skill. Hard to say how well it correlates.

It’s possible for already wealthy people though. Poor people need $x per month. A bit more wealth and cashflow is not an issue and so you can look at $x per decade. In that scenario taking a gap year to bash leetcode and interviews is perfectly rational. Its a 10% tax at worst.

So you think it better to discriminate according to the size of a candidate’s bank account? From where I sit, you are saying the poor do not deserve the same chance. I think age discrimination would be less offensive to the masses.

The opposite. I’m observing why the rich can get richer, because they don’t need to make ends meet. But I am not saying it’s a good state of affairs.

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