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"25 years of innovation in key major products like the playstation network?"

So, I'm going to have to come off as the punk-nosed kid here, but I've gotta ask: What does that mean? That literally read like biztalk.

What algorithms did you develop? What code did you write? What systems did you architect? How did you make design tradeoffs?

I can't tell a "stakeholder" who did real engineering work apart from a "stakeholder" who got their name attached to the patent for political reasons.




As someone who's in their late 30s and has accomplished a lot, I can agree with the experienced dev above's attitude. But also having interviewed a lot of candidates at scale much of these tests are just filtering tests to reduce the amount of interviews team members must do. We always have the majority of our team members interview candidates so that everyone has buy in, but if everyone had to interview every single resume that looked good on paper (I'm assuming we all at least agree on filtering out bad resumes) this would get cumbersome.

It is frustrating as you get older to deal with the fear of ageism, I haven't experienced it yet, but I'm starting to expect it's arrival.

I actually think the testing you on problem solving is the right way, not necessarily knowing the Big O notation, but at least being able to attempt an answer to difficult questions and explaining your thought process is very telling to intelligence and ability. Definitely there is much cargo cult behavior going on at companies.


> I can't tell a "stakeholder" who did real engineering work apart from a "stakeholder" who got their name attached to the patent for political reasons.

Neither can most interviewers.


Lets say the dude invented something important? are you to have a better follow up question?

If your point is that they commenter is delusional, and at once over-estimating himself and under-estimating others, you should come up with a better way communicating it.

A proper punk-nosed-kid would certainly be more clever.


He asked some pretty straightforward questions, like what the poster's concrete contributions to the project were.


It adds nothing to the discussion. If the guy did something major (case#1), the discussion is over. It just makes the person asking the question look like an ass.

The other issue is that anyone who would have a reply of that caliber most likely wouldn't reply...why bother...? Thats the (#2) second case. Again, the discussion is over.

The third best case is that the guy is bluffing, and doesn't bother to answer the question. This is case (#3) but isn't really any different in motivating the discussion than case #2. Game theory says the bluff plays to look like the win, right? So just don't answer (and mimic #2).

So there are no rational replies to this question.

As an interrogation-style question its a failure.




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