Selecting Against Experience - Do Employers Know?

IBitOBear asks: "A couple days ago I did 'the interview loop' at that leading online retailer. Over the course of six hours I was repeatedly introduced to a guy in his early twenties, who would then ask me to write out code on a white-board for a problem that you might find in the study guide for a 200-level computer science class. I have 20 years of experience in programming and systems design. And in several cases the interviewers were vague, semantically incorrect, or self-contradictory. Interviewer blunders included not understanding that non-normal forms in databases -can be- more correct or efficient when the domain of a data is extremely limited; or choosing a leader among N candidates -is- a byzantine agreement problem. In short, the loop would have been perfect to weed out some guy getting his first job fresh out of school, but it definitely exerted selection pressure towards excluding experienced candidates. So employers, what are you doing to make sure that you are not culling out candidates with the low-ball? Job seekers, what do you do when you find yourself trapped in a sophomore study group?"

Say it with a sneer

[nizo]

...what do you do when you find yourself trapped in a sophomore study group?

Make sure to make fun of any bogus information in a way that makes it clear any braindead moron should know better. Follow up with a story about a previous co-worker who got fired for thinking that exact same thing. Lastly make it clear that you are glad you have an interview at a competitor later and look forward to helping to crush their inept company. Adding that you will enjoy buying some of their used furniture at the firesale is a nice touch.

Re:at "that" online retailer, they probably know

[plopez]

this 'for loop' of which you speak. is it like iterating over a collection or perhaps like usinng a row fetch cursor? I vaugely remember something like that from... fortran... but haven't touched it in a while... :)

Re:My experience

[uradu]

> I explained that my solution was asymptotically faster

Wow, you probably had them at "asymptotically", at which point they probably all rushed out of the room to consult dictionary.com.

Re:at "that" online retailer, they probably know

[boron boy]

We won't kill you, but if you ever want to see your garden gnomes again you'll give us the source code.

Re:My experience

[Achromatic1978]

Now now, that's not right. After all, working at "that leading search engine", they'd have all rushed out the room to consult "define: asymptotically".

Re:20 years? So what?

[drsquare]

Experience is overrated, old people are generally stuck in their ways, you only have to read the posts on here from experienced programmers telling everyone how awkard and difficult they are.

It makes sense that a company would target younger workers who are more cooperative and pliable, they have more potential than the old beard in a crusty sweater who wants to sit in his cube and grumble about how he's not allowed to write everything in machine code with ed.

Re:at "that" online retailer, they probably know

[Haeleth]

And yet these guys have probably been writing successful software systems for years, what's going on?

Here's a clue. [thedailywtf.com]

Re:Your expierience didn't pay off

[greg1104]

This reminds me of my worst interview ever. It was for a C programming job, ten years ago. The main programmer at the company asks "how you can write a function that [some operation on an arbitrary string requiring memory] without allocating memory at run-time inside the function?". I said "you can't without relaxing some part of the requirements". He disagrees; I ask for his solution. He shows a function using a static buffer, so the memory is allocated at compile time. I point out that a) this puts a limit on the size of strings it can handle, which he accepts and b) you'll be screwed the minute you introduce that code into a multi-threaded environment like the one they deploy their code into, because your static variable will inevitably get clobbered one day by two calls to this utility function. After some argument, he comes to recognize my point, and I ultimately got offered the job.

Three months later I was fired for arguing with him all the time about how code should be built.