* Prepare. It's crummy that highly skilled practitioners have to do this in order to jump the sometimes silly hurdles put in place by technical interviews but i

* Prepare. It's crummy that highly skilled practitioners have to do this in order to jump the sometimes silly hurdles put in place by technical interviews but it's a fact. No point bristling against it. I've always scheduled interviews in fairly intense blocks, interviewing at 4-8 companies over the course of a month. In the month prior to the interview month I spend about 100 hours preparing. * The best practice for technical interviews is technical interviews. They are easy enough to set up, all growing companies are hungry for new talent and their pipeline is setup to create technical interviews, not filter people prior to technical interviews. Additionally, even if you're very good the failure rate is still relatively high. I'm a very confident interviewer for correctly matches roles and still get turned down about 1/4 of the time. * Be prepared to talk, plan or converse about scalable architectures and approaches. For my last round of interviews I read a large portion of The Architecture of Open Source Applications[1] as prep work. * Brush up on algorithms. There are so many places to do this that I honestly don't think any advice I can give you here will be more helpful than other resources on the web. * Last but really first: Have a history of working at the same or just below the level as the job that you're applying for. Having both a depth and breadth of experience matters. If for some reason you don't have access to this type of experience you should seek it out via relocation, open source or remote work. 1. http://aosabook.org/en/index.html http://aosabook.org/en/index.html