I walked into an interview once, expecting to go over my work which I'd brought along with me, much of it for the company I was interviewing for, so I wrongly a

I walked into an interview once, expecting to go over my work which I'd brought along with me, much of it for the company I was interviewing for, so I wrongly assumed the interview was just a formality. They asked a couple of basic questions then opened a laptop, and BOOM! technical interview right out of no where. I blanked. They just handed me the laptop and didn't even tell me it was a test. There were some comments at the top of a few javascript files and like an idiot I answered the questions verbally. The two devs just sat their smirking at each other like they'd won at something. I'm not averse to tech interviews, but I do not enjoy the "look at how smart we are that we caught you out" attitude that comes with them. I'm shit at crosswords, that doesn't make me illiterate. I've since been keeping an eye on their work and now I get to feel smug because it's been universally panned. I also had to sit a test for what I call "the worst agency in the world" (AKQA and after 7 hellish months there I'm happy to stand by and put my name to that assessment, they're simply awful). I forgot to specify the radix in a call to parseInt. It was the only flaw and while they didn't make a big deal out of it, the interviewer was clearly pleased with himself for finding it. They then proceeded to ask ZERO questions about why I'd coded the test the way I had. Which is a shame, they might have learned something. In my experience, there's nothing wrong with tech interviews, but there's a lot wrong with the people administering them. If I want to know wether a dev knows what they're talking about, I ask them to explain something they've already coded. If they can explain it, they understand it, and I usually learn something to boot. Everybody wins.