If somebody has been programming since the Reagan administration at companies like Microsoft and AMD and Facebook, they will do fine wherever they are hired.
Not true in my experience. I've worked with many seasoned greybeards who were incredibly mediocre, horrifically bad even. Guys with very impressive resumes, too.
I don't know if it's all fields, or if programming is special, but you really can't trust YoE or a resume. You have to ask people to in some way demonstrate - leetcode or otherwise - that they can actually do the thing.
And again, in my experience, many - a sickeningly large amount - simply cannot do the thing. Even when the thing is something like "reverse a string".
I'm getting to be a greybeard myself, I can't keep count of the awful people I've interviewed or worked with. I'm talking about people who are now in their 60s, with resumes that would make your eyes pop out. ex-SGI, ex-NASA, earlyish (late 80s) Apple/Microsoft guys.
Point being, people get hired and hang around in the industry for all kinds of weird reasons, you never know what someone can really do until you test them.
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Not true in my experience. I've worked with many seasoned greybeards who were incredibly mediocre, horrifically bad even. Guys with very impressive resumes, too.
I don't know if it's all fields, or if programming is special, but you really can't trust YoE or a resume. You have to ask people to in some way demonstrate - leetcode or otherwise - that they can actually do the thing.
And again, in my experience, many - a sickeningly large amount - simply cannot do the thing. Even when the thing is something like "reverse a string".
How many are we talking about here? How many years of experience did they have?
I'm getting to be a greybeard myself, I can't keep count of the awful people I've interviewed or worked with. I'm talking about people who are now in their 60s, with resumes that would make your eyes pop out. ex-SGI, ex-NASA, earlyish (late 80s) Apple/Microsoft guys.
Point being, people get hired and hang around in the industry for all kinds of weird reasons, you never know what someone can really do until you test them.