Anyone else do something similar? How did you recover? Yup. About a zillion trillion times until I learned how to push my mind through it. It's just another

Anyone else do something similar? How did you recover? Yup. About a zillion trillion times until I learned how to push my mind through it. It's just another kind of performance, and it requires training and psyching-up for, like any other. What's crazy is, after the call was over, I went back to work, opened up a text editor, and wrote functioning code in less than 10 minutes. It was 12 lines of code. 12 lines of code cost me a job. This happens all the time, unfortunately. The people constructing these "tests" simply neglect to consider the level of anxiety many candidates have to deal with (not to mention the distractions that aren't even related to anxiety or insecurity -- like just the discomfort that comes from being watched, and having to explain, in real time, thought processes that you're used to experiencing as completely private -- and on no particular deadline). It's also not too different from real-life coding. When under pressure (or just needing a break), my first approach to a moderately difficult (or even fairly trivial) coding task might be pure crap. Then, after the coffee break (or just letting the problem gestate without thinking directly about), a much simpler and more intuitive solution emerges -- almost like magic. Of course, the fun part is we don't get that second "after the coffee break" try in coding interviews. What happens instead is that some guy (who at the end of the day, might be just as well qualified as you are -- but at different things at the moment) thinks you're an idiot for not immediately solving some problem the pulled from some book or website. Then goes and gets himself another $6 latte (while you go back to either unemployment or your dead-end job). How did you recover? Experience. Having enough sufficiently cool/rewarding job (and non-job) experiences to get a visceral, internal assurance that other people's assessments of you just don't matter is really the hugest and most fundamental part. And then after that, just do all the background reading on "interview-ology" (including all the coding challenges, the brain teasers, the inane HR and culture fit questions). Then like the saying goes, "Get up in the morning. Fail. Go home. Do it all over again." Just keep going to as many interviews as you can (without burning any bridges) until you get the hang of it -- which eventually you will.