> Yet there are companies out there rejecting me for job descriptions which are only 50% of my skill set because I couldn’t code this obscure hard algorithms pr

> Yet there are companies out there rejecting me for job descriptions which are only 50% of my skill set because I couldn’t code this obscure hard algorithms problem in 45 mins. Ohhhh, screw that. Maybe I've just been lucky in my career, but outside of the early days I have only had one interview that involved a white-board or some form of timed test. I didn't express this to my interviewers, but I felt like part of a circus -- hey, let's see the candidate do "code tricks." And they were dumb exercises, they asked me to sort an array of numbers using a "bubble sort." Bubble sort. My brain went right to "wait, this isn't an actual example of something I'm going to be expected to do, is it?" It was a simple web back-end in C#/Razor. And you've given me a pen and paper. Granted, I thought back to my High School Pascal I class and "i" and "j"'d my way through OCD sorting. It's "programming tricks" because we write software using a set of tools day-to-day in order to be productive/effective. If I can write software without those tools, cool, but will I be better with them and will I ever work without them in the real world? No. So it's the old "hit the apple off that person's head using this bow/arrow", except "do it blind-folded" (oooh, aaah). In my younger days, I hated writing code with someone looking over my shoulder and my abilities to write good code would decrease dramatically if I felt like I was being judged with every keystroke.