I hate them deeply and sincerely. I'd rather take a shot at a reverse Russian roulette rather than going through another one. Reverse Russian roulette is like this: pick a fully loaded revolver, take one bullet out, spin the wheel, put it to your head and shoot. Yup, I hate them that much. And I estimate my chances of passing unhurt (it chips away at your self esteem eventually) one of these abominations which bottom line programmers have to go though is actually lower than surviving this roulette play. Not to say I'm going to go through such setup. I like playing the odds, not getting played by them. Tell me your stories.
If I were to identify myself with a person in history, I'd say I'm Chevalier de Méré. A nobody, not a noble (or rich, in this 21'st century world) and fully conscious of it. For guys like me, beating the odds is their only chance. And not only I'm quite good at it but I've come to realize my "fellow programmers" are hopeless imbeciles in this regard. An edge (some might say)!
I have participated in a lot of interviews of candidates for the place I currently work. The key mistake I see people making is they do not know how to talk about the technologies and projects they worked on. If you can talk in depth about the projects you worked on, there is no need to sweat an interview. You will either get the job or you won't.
I think OP may be referring to the dreaded "coding quiz", something I've endured before. These suck, are demeaning and aren't really useful. 37 years out of school, can you still code a bubble sort? Of course not. Nobody hand-codes sorts anymore (especially bubble sorts). You use Boost for C++ or whatever is available in your language of choice. Having been on both sides of the interview table I've found it's easy to tell if someone actually knows what they claim on their resume. If they say they know C++ I just ask "Tell me the differences between public, private and protected." No joke, more than half couldn't succinctly answer the question.
So true, followed by asking what is difference between static and instance methods. And do not even get me started on asking what is constructor
Having been on both sides of the table, I've grown to see interviews as a necessary evil. As I've gotten older, I've learned the true power of networking. Once you build a name for yourself and have worked with some great companies, you basically can write your own tickets. That said, the worst part of a programming interview for me is the technical portion. I've been in positions where I've hired people, and I know the difference between a good interviewee and a bad one. Bad ones tend to overtalk answers which is usually a sign that they're not very sure of their answer. Honestly though -- we would phone screen people and 90% of them were just fucking awful. They put all these buzzwords on their resume and when we asked a basic question like "What is Amazon's S3 service used for?" and they would say things like, "Well, it's a DNS server for Fortron servers...uhhh...It's like a phone book. That's what DNS is..." -- Like WTF dude, you put "Expert in Amazon EC2 services on your resume and you don't even know what the fuck S3 is?" That said, in the rare instances someone gives me a technical interview, I'll be honest and tell them that I don't code well under pressure (not that kind of pressure) and if they'd like to give me a take home assignment to see how I do, I'd be more than happy to do that. Just be honest with them -- if you are a good candidate and know what you're talking about, they'll usually give you the benefit of the doubt. Honestly, I hate hiring -- because we get people referred to us from hiring agencies and these people don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. We've had people agree to a time and when we called them, they sounded drunk, talked real low, never asked questions (that's a big one for me -- at least ask one question about what we do as a company) and would answer a question like, "What is an IP Address?" with "Uhhhh....(sound of keyboard being typed) ... uhhhh well .... (more typing) .... " Jesus. If you know the difference between RAM and ROM, you're ahead of like 80% of the potential hiring pool.
I keep reading that some high percentage (>50%) of job placements come from knowing someone on the inside. Amazingly I've never made a job move that way. It's always been through the front door based on my perceived merits. I must have just been lucky.
If you'd rather play a game where you a have a high probability of dying vs. a game where you won't incur any permanent injury...stay away from anything related to trading or management of risk. In all seriousness, you might find this book helpful. A friend from a non-CS background said it helped him get a software job at MSFT. Edit: won't let me post link. Look up this book: " Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions"