This only gets worse when you’re old enough to go in, sit in a room across two or three people and realize you have at least as much experience as all of them _combined_ - not necessarily in terms churning out of code in the language _du jour_ or their domain specifics, but in terms of people management and systems design.
There are multiple kinds of dysfunction at work here:
- When I was looking for purely technical gigs I breezed through phone screens and automated testing only to go up against the ageism wall on the first Skype call. Period.
- Recruiters reproducibly drop out of the blue without a clue as to what you actually do or your experience level. Adding “Senior” to my LinkedIn profile measurably decreased the amount of randos that reach out on a weekly basis.
- Puzzle-based screenings are a complete waste of time. It’s not about the prep, it’s about the likelihood you’ll ever encounter those problems. People are much more likely to have to address system design problems, but those cannot be tested for by the online questionnaire cottage industry, so you get mediocre engineers who know how to write fizzbuzz but have zero clue of how to design an order management system from scratch or where to look for issues in an old one.
- Companies often don’t understand what is involved in the roles they hire for--even if you’re a perfect match for the job description (if there is one), the hiring team has an agenda that seldom matches it.
- Engineering is not just about writing code. The second you start asking questions about how teams interact or if they have a strategy for X, the people in the room (or call) are seldom the ones that can get past canned replies.
- Startups tend to be extremely picky and hype-driven. The language _du jour_, their “triple mocha with a squeeze of raspberry” Agile flavor or someone’s pet organizational methodology (teams/tribes/packs/etc.) usually feature prominently in senior interviews, but even VPs _very seldom_ talk about how they manage people--just product and investors.
As a result, I’ve long stopped applying to “normal” engineering positions (and even senior management ones at startups). I drop out of the process (politely) as soon as I get the first hint of automated tests, ageism or VC hype, and prefer networking and getting to know the culture first.
Even so, I’ve had a few notorious duds--I would talk to a VP, have a great conversation, and then have “peer” discussions with people half my age that might as well have lived inside a bubble (and had obvious gaps in empathy and emotional intelligence), or simply have an “OK, boomer” moment whenever the conversation steered into how they managed people growth or I commented on their org structure.
Or I would go through the _whole_ thing and then be told that they wanted someone at “a different career stage”, even though you ticked all the boxes, talked to around a dozen people, and gotten consistently excellent feedback (that one smarted a bit, because it was in a very niche field I was particularly good at).
My key takeaway is that “vanilla” engineering jobs are most often not seen as being long-term hires that bring in outside experience: they are fresh cogs for an internal hype-driven, Rube Goldberg-like contraption that many tech companies cling to and want to preserve at any cost, and the hiring process (and lack of care in it) mirrors that.