From my side (hiring) it's rough too. All candidates seem prepared for this stupid game. Then I'm like, hey, show me some hobby code of some thing you shipped. Let's talk about your bugs, how you ship? Why you pick that stack? Watching a candidate click through their own buggy stuff teaches me so much, so fast about the person.

My experience is that candidates are ready for trivia and sample/theory but are not ready to brag about their own cool shit. Talk about how great you are and what you learned, defend your choice, evaluate where to improve. That's what we do every day. we only use the white board for drawing arch-pictures/diagrams, and the occasional dickbutt.

In fact, that's my new (and only) whiteboard question.

I have a lot of 'cool stuff' I would love to elaborate on, personal projects and home lab stuff. Though again, in my experience, companies don't want to hear this. They want to see stupid ass 'bubble sort this, merge sort that, fixx buzz without modulus' crap. I can't do that, I don't -want- to do that. I am not a programmer (despite my handle). I can script, I can automate, but I should NOT need to know every damn CS algorithm under the sun for a fucking NON dev, non programmer, role. I'm tired of this interview process. Tech is the only industry I know of, that has multiple interviews of varying nature, including phone, web camera/ doc collab, on site multiple days, etc etc. I once told a non-tech person the type of gauntlet needed to even get an INTERVIEW let alone a JOB in this realm, and their question was aptly "why the hell would you ever put up with that?". Their job interview was: resume -> onsite with manager, hired.

I loathe this type of interview bullshit culture, and it more than anything else is driving me out of the industry. Sure I'm not Jon Skeet, but I do my job and I do it well. Continuing with these types of interviews and company shit, makes me want to go be an electrician or mechanic or anything the hell else.