antipattern

This is my favorite question of all time. I seem to be getting it all the time during interviews. The younger the startup, the more common the question.

But I am a bit at a loss of words to answer this question.

Now you see, I've been around in Silicon Valley for a long time. Yes, that means I am an older dude that worked on a lot of projects.

Nothing to be ashamed of, right?

I am just wondering what is going on in the mind of the person who asks me this? Does he really know what he is asking?

But can you code?

OK, just suppose I can't. Lets work this through.

This means I've been working at all these software companies for a really long time, and somehow did ... nothing?? Nobody discovered that I am an imposter software engineer. Somehow I got paid a lot of money, had fancy engineering titles, and my Linkedin got longer and longer. I must be really talented to have done this for decades without being able to code.

This is logical, right? According to any sane reasoning, I must be able to code to exist in Silicon Valley. The guys that can't code tend not to stay such a long time here.

Before you go, can we do some coding on the whiteboard?

WTF?

Did we not go over the all of this already?