I believe you&#x27;re overestimating what it takes to get a job at Google (or Facebook or whatever other company you might be thinking of).<p>As someone who&#x27;s approaching middle-age and has done a wide variety of interviews, it&#x27;s my experience that large companies like Google have less age discrimination than trendy startups. If you don&#x27;t want to work at Google because you don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a good fit, I think that&#x27;s a totally valid reason. But if you don&#x27;t think you can get a job there because you&#x27;re too mediocre at actual programming, I think you&#x27;re simply wrong. For all I know, you actually are a mediocre programmer. That doesn&#x27;t matter.<p>It&#x27;s not possible to be too mediocre a developer to get a job at Google because the interview process doesn&#x27;t measure how good a developer you are. It is possible to be too mediocre at whiteboarding algorithms and answering the brand of design questions they ask, but those are learnable skills.