[accountatwork]

I believe you're overestimating what it takes to get a job at Google (or Facebook or whatever other company you might be thinking of).

As someone who's approaching middle-age and has done a wide variety of interviews, it's my experience that large companies like Google have less age discrimination than trendy startups. If you don't want to work at Google because you don't think it's a good fit, I think that's a totally valid reason. But if you don't think you can get a job there because you're too mediocre at actual programming, I think you're simply wrong. For all I know, you actually are a mediocre programmer. That doesn't matter.

It's not possible to be too mediocre a developer to get a job at Google because the interview process doesn't measure how good a developer you are. It is possible to be too mediocre at whiteboarding algorithms and answering the brand of design questions they ask, but those are learnable skills.