Maybe it's changed by now, but I was caught badly off guard by my first technical "interview" (exam) out of college. I thought it would be more or less a norma

Maybe it's changed by now, but I was caught badly off guard by my first technical "interview" (exam) out of college. I thought it would be more or less a normal "interview", the tell me about yourself, your interests, your coursework kind of thing. I was completely unprepared for the whiteboard exam part of the interview, which was in C++ (Java was a brand new thing back then) and involved algorithms and data structures (just a linked list, mainly, but with pointers and so forth thrown in). I failed it miserably. Honestly, the experience left me kind of embarrassed and metaphorically beaten up for a while. Kind of like I'd claimed to be a programmer and had been revealed to be a fraud. By this point (almost 20 years later), I've been through this wringer so many times that it seems like common knowledge. It doesn't really bother me at this point. But now that I think of it, yeah, I was unprepared for this and unaware of it. I'm used to this sort of thing now, but I still think it's an usual and really unpleasant part of our industry. Most knowledge based fields really don't have anything like this sort of interview/exam (seriously, it's almost a pure exam, I think that describing it as an interview is simply misleading to people who aren't aware of what goes on in our field) - though most fields have a more standardized set of credentialing and degree programs. I do think that the mysterious, unpredictable, and stressful nature of tech exam interviews deters a lot of people from entering or remaining in this field.