My automatic “red flag” was btree tests. As soon as I saw one of those, I knew I was wasting my time.
I was especially annoyed by recruiters that couldn’t do math. They loved all my experience, but ghosted me, as soon as they realized it came with gray hair. I guess the place is crawling with 35-year-olds with 30 years of experience.
As it turned out, I ended up giving up, and just retiring. I had the means, but wanted to keep working for at least another decade. I really enjoyed adding value. I was especially interested in helping small companies get on their feet, as my particular skillset would have been almost ideal for that, and my “nest egg” gave me a pretty good risk tolerance, along with a willingness to take a lower base.
Turns out that these were the exact companies that didn’t want me, though.
Also turned out that I really loved being retired. I have been doing more work in the last eight years, than in a couple of decades previously. I just don’t get paid for it, and I’m fine with that. In fact, I actively resist pursuing a paycheck, as I don’t want to deal with knuckleheads, anymore.
I just had to have my hand forced. I would not have voluntarily done this.
Basically, any test that involves binary trees (sorry - "btree" is a somewhat different thing).
Realistically, most programmers never see another binary tree, after they leave school.
It's a "youth-pass filter." People right out of college will ace them. Us oldsters are less likely to do as well (unless we cram for them). In forty years of programming, I never encountered a single one, in the wild, and a lot of our image processing algorithms involved a decent amount of data crawling, so they had some relation to binary trees (shows why they teach them), but the way they were handled was much different.
I was especially annoyed by recruiters that couldn’t do math. They loved all my experience, but ghosted me, as soon as they realized it came with gray hair. I guess the place is crawling with 35-year-olds with 30 years of experience.
As it turned out, I ended up giving up, and just retiring. I had the means, but wanted to keep working for at least another decade. I really enjoyed adding value. I was especially interested in helping small companies get on their feet, as my particular skillset would have been almost ideal for that, and my “nest egg” gave me a pretty good risk tolerance, along with a willingness to take a lower base.
Turns out that these were the exact companies that didn’t want me, though.
Also turned out that I really loved being retired. I have been doing more work in the last eight years, than in a couple of decades previously. I just don’t get paid for it, and I’m fine with that. In fact, I actively resist pursuing a paycheck, as I don’t want to deal with knuckleheads, anymore.
I just had to have my hand forced. I would not have voluntarily done this.