I was flown into NYC for an interview. It was a quick meeting with HR, followed by five (or was it six?) 45-minute whiteboard sessions with engineers. I had a lunch break with another engineer.

I'm terrible at those things. In fact, I'd never done anything like it except for meetings on systems design. My brain froze up in the middle of the first one, and I never really recovered.

If you're an older developer, the process can be quite alienating. First, I'm not sure if you summed the ages of any two people I met, it would equal mine. The guy they sent me to lunch with (my turn to ask questions and learn about the culture) was younger than my son! He was a great guy, but perhaps some senior person in HR with grown kids should try this sometime.

Second, the brain-teaser at the whiteboard approach just wasn't the way we learned to tackle problems (I started coding in the early eighties). There are already enough criticisms of this hiring strategy: the irrelevance of these kinds of questions to the real requirements of getting systems running in production, and the "brogrammer" culture it fosters elsewhere, so I won't go into it.

Criticism notwithstanding, you can't argue with their success.

Only once all day was I asked to talk about something I had accomplished.

Everybody I met was likable and nice. Much to their credit, the interviewers were understanding of the brain-freeze-at-whiteboard problem, and I never got a smart-alecky smirk in five hours. The lunchroom was outrageous, and I would have stuffed myself if I hadn't had three interviews left.

This interview model is endemic in the industry. If you are over fifty, good luck out there.

The usual (I've since learned) "career cup" type interview questions. I can't remember the particulars: brain-teasers painted with a coding question patina.