No, I've had the life experience of being a professional recruiter as well as a developer. There's no inherent power asymmetry in interviews outside of your ow

No, I've had the life experience of being a professional recruiter as well as a developer. There's no inherent power asymmetry in interviews outside of your own employer. They have a job to offer. You want the job they're offering. They either offer you the job or don't, you either accept the offer or don't. You are determining whether the employer is a fit for YOU and what YOU want out of your career just as much as they are deciding whether you are a fit for them. It takes two to agree. At the end of the day, you owe each other nothing but the courtesy one would normally have for someone you are about to spend an hour or more with. On either side of the desk, I interview for jobs much better than most because I always keep that in mind. Most people claim to understand that on a conceptual level but they don't actually process it. As the interviewer, I'm mostly interested in gauging the talent level of the individual and their interest in the problem domain that we are trying to solve for. As the interviewee, I understand that the worst anyone can do to me is waste my time because either our values don't align, the project isn't interesting, my skills aren't a fit, or there are simply better candidates out there. These are all okay. When I took my first job after being the sole developer at a company for a decade, it was going to be the first time I worked with a team of devs. The first time I worked with a version control system in a professional setting. The first time when I was not going to be the main point of contact for any flaws or failure in the system. The first time that I wasn't going to be the main designer of the system's components or front end. The first time I would ever work with Angular. I told them all of this. Know what got me the job? I could tell you every technical detail about everything I had ever done, but also fully admit where I was lacking. I left no grey area and offered to elaborate where necessary. Either I did something and was confident that I could reproduce it (or explain the business / design decisions behind it), or I had no on-the-job experience but expressed confidence that (a) I could learn, and (b) that I was enthusiastic about learning about the problem domain. And I got along with everybody I talked to because my aim was to be a part of a team and not some weird data processing oracle. Managers want a combination of talent, technical expertise, interest, and team fit. This shit isn't rocket science. You are totally within your rights to cancel an interview if someone tries to make you be a whiteboard monkey and regurgitate data structures that you will either never use or have widely-used open source libraries that are available, or if the interviewer is disrespectful to you, or if they aren't respectful of your time. As a matter of fact, I recommend it. But at the end of the day, if they don't hire you, you've lost nothing of value but the time it took to interview.