In 2012, I moved from a long-term job to a small startup. I was the first engineering hire for the startup, and they had started building their product with co

In 2012, I moved from a long-term job to a small startup. I was the first engineering hire for the startup, and they had started building their product with consultants at Pivotal Labs. They also used Pivotal to test my programming ability -- I did an interview in which I implemented sets in Java in a style where the interviewer actually typed the code, I told him what to build. That startup failed pretty soon afterward, and I got an interview at another startup -- that had also used Pivotal as contractors. That startup did its own interviewing, but they had liked Pivotal's style of interviewing, so I went into an interview with the CTO who started saying, "Okay, we're going to build a set in Java, I'll type the code..." I said, "Look, I'm happy to do this interview, but I've done this exact thing before. Why don't you let me sit down with one of your coders for the time period you've allotted to this, and I'll help him do his work, which I think gives you a good sense for how I'd actually work." I sat down with a JS developer and figured out a bug in his tests which was causing him to think that he had a bug in his main code. I got the job.