VP of Engineering - "best of the best" = no more than 12 years experience?

Crap. I have 11 years experience doing some pretty awesome shit. I guess this is the last year I can get a legit job in a startup.

Is "no more than 10 years experience" more illegal than "at least 5 years experience"?

This is totally off topic, and might be considered a rant, but I see this from time-to-time in startup land.

Not understanding titles.

First, this is for a "vp of engineering" that is "hands on". Are you really looking for an architect that codes? Perhaps a Sr. Engineer/Team lead? Do the engineers directly report to this "vp of engineering"? What happens when the team gets to big?

Second, you are locking yourself into something prematurely. If you want someone hands on with management experience and capacity to grow into a future leader, state that and start looking. Make your interview quick on the technical assessment, heavy on the social and ask "what would you do in ..." or "how would you handle this ..." type of questions. See if the person has 1. experience 2. common sense or 3. good intuition on process/people.

Lastly, what does the rest of the company look like when the VP of Engineering clearly has an inflated title. Are all the C level/VP level people equally inflated?

Anyway, sorry for the rant. It seems a common occurrence in Startupsville to see people running around with titles that mean nothing for the sake of having the title.

"Oh, cool. I'm the VP of engineering at blah blah".

"nice, what do you do everyday."

"Oh, you know, code reviews".

Whatever.

This is going to probably bite me in the ass because I'm looking for work at the moment and occasionally apply to interesting YC companies but since this has come up, I'm going to share my story here because of the negative experience I had with the company in question.

I had a phone screen with 500friends recently. They were late calling me, and the person I was scheduled to talk with wasn't even on the call. They had pulled some poor engineer off of whatever he was doing, shoved my resume in front of him, and said "go".

The list of things that our "interview" contained:

    1) Late in calling me at our scheduled time.
    2) Scheduled person was not present on our interview call.
    3) Engineer that was put on the call was ill-prepared for the conversation.
    4) Questions asked of me were a combination of very basic and others being completely unrelated to the nature of the position being interviewed for. 
    5) The scheduled person appeared at the end of the call barely long enough to say his name before hanging up on me.
    6) Hung up on me suddenly.

#6 was what really got me. It was literally, "Hi this is , we're out of time, click."

If you advertise a position as requiring a certain set of skills, then ask prospective employees about those skills! Go through their experiences and see if they're a good engineer outside of the narrow scope of "solves logic puzzles well". You might be surprised that someone who doesn't normally write linked lists in javascript or implement 2500 year old prime-solving algorithms on a weekly basis actually has skills and experience to contribute.

My personal recommendation for anyone considering 500friends is to skip over them. There's much better companies more deserving of your time and consideration, and you'll certainly be treated better.

## Just to add on, I don't have a problem with logic problems. But too many people only ask them and don't do real interviews. Yes, I can do linked lists in javascript. Does that tell you anything useful about what kind of engineer I am? No, it doesn't.

Could also just be a publicity stunt