[haldujai]

> When it comes to value, when my wife interviews for a job (she’s a physician) they fly her out and spend a day taking her to see the sights, so they convince here how great the city is. Then they take her out to a fancy dinner and woo her some more.

Interesting, are these in underserved areas? I just went through interviewing for a new job and despite being in an in-demand subspecialty with desperate employers the most I got was a dinner after the 2nd round interview but no one covered my travel. Do you mind if I ask what kind of physician she is? I clearly picked incorrectly.

> When I interview at a new job as a very senior engineer (and relatively well known I in my area), I get to jump through 7 rounds of interviews where someone asks me the equivalent of medschool exam questions.

> If I’m lucky my connections might let me whittle the interview rounds down to 5.

Why do you think that's the case? Is it a compensation issue or is there age-ism/an assumption that only a 25 y/o engineer can be "10x". I periodically see posts about the challenges facing older developers on HN but I didn't last long enough in tech to understand it.

[sarchertech]

>Interesting, are these in underserved areas? I just went through interviewing for a new job and despite being in an in-demand subspecialty with desperate employers the most I got was a dinner after the 2nd round interview but no one covered my travel. Do you mind if I ask what kind of physician she is? I clearly picked incorrectly.

Pediatric Emergency Medicine. All in cities large enough to have a children’s hospital, so basically minimum metro populations of 500k or so.

>is there age-ism

I’m sure there is, but not really at the principal engineer level from what I’ve seen. Mostly there’s an assumption that staff plus engineers will skew a good bit older.

I think the issue is that everyone cargo cults FAANG interviews. They get so many applicants that they can afford to treat very senior people like new grads, and that attitude trickles down to most other companies.

From what I observed early in my career, there was definitely a time when higher level engineers escaped the FAANG style hazing process. But slowly more and more companies have started putting everyone through the whole thing.

I’ve been at companies where leadership tried to force very well known engineers with decades of experience, hugely popular open source projects, multiple famous talks/blogs/podcasts etc… to do weed out take home assignments.

[haldujai]

> Pediatric Emergency Medicine. All in cities large enough to have a children’s hospital, so basically minimum metro populations of 500k or so.

Interesting, pediatrics is so underfunded and poorly respected in Canada that I'm genuinely shocked (and pleasantly surprised) to read about a paediatrician not being treated like refuse.

Kudos to your wife though, that's a very challenging field and anecdotally my interactions with peds ER physicians have been overwhelmingly positive. They all seem to have a very well-developed sixth sense about when something is "off" despite many of their patients not being able to talk.

> They get so many applicants that they can afford to treat very senior people like new grads, and that attitude trickles down to most other companies.

Is it just during the interview process or do you find bias against older engineers in hiring decisions and the work environment as well?

[singleshot_]

Because technology has no educational pathway. Sure, you can go to a college and study algorithms or math for a while, but plenty of people with "good degrees" can't code. Plenty of people with no degree can.

It's also kind of challenging to tell an eye surgeon whom you are interviewing to do an eye surgery if you're really not sure he knows how to do it or not.

[nradov]

In the corporate world it's routine for employers to cover travel expenses for job applicants coming to interviews that farther than driving distance. Did you ask about that? Sometimes if you don't ask, you don't get.

[haldujai]

> Did you ask about that? Sometimes if you don't ask, you don't get.

I did not. I think I'm so conditioned to being treated poorly by hospitals I just assume I'm going to be taken advantage of but you're probably right and I should have asked.

[moneywoes]

Curious if you could add some color to the switch from tech to medicine