[fatnoah]

>You won't be able to work at a FAANG unless you are have such innate talent that you are basically god's gift to programming.

EDIT: I misread your comment, and realized you were referring to the newly-minted programmer in their 40's. I apologize, and fully agree that person will have a VERY hard time landing an entry-level role.

Keeping my original post below for posterity:

I like to think that I'm good at my job, but I can assure you that I am in no way god's gift to programming. With over 20 years of experience under my belt, whiteboarding was easy (fun, even), though I did have to practice the leetcode a little bit to make sure I was well-versed on the "smell" of problems and "tricks" required to get to O(n) or O(log n) complexity. That took about 10 hours or so.

Ageism is absolutely a thing, and it's something I worry about, but getting into FAANG at 40+ is 100% doable. There is such a massive shortage of experienced engineers that I spend an hour or two each week helping our recruiters find lots of other experienced folks.