Maybe it&#x27;s changed by now, but I was caught badly off guard by my first technical &quot;interview&quot; (exam) out of college.  I thought it would be more or less a normal &quot;interview&quot;, the tell me about yourself, your interests, your coursework kind of thing.  I was completely unprepared for the whiteboard exam part of the interview, which was in C++ (Java was a brand new thing back then) and involved algorithms and data structures (just a linked list, mainly, but with pointers and so forth thrown in).<p>I failed it miserably.  Honestly, the experience left me kind of embarrassed and metaphorically beaten up for a while.  Kind of like I&#x27;d claimed to be a programmer and had been revealed to be a fraud.<p>By this point (almost 20 years later), I&#x27;ve been through this wringer so many times that it seems like common knowledge.  It doesn&#x27;t really bother me at this point.  But now that I think of it, yeah, I was unprepared for this and unaware of it.<p>I&#x27;m used to this sort of thing now, but I still think it&#x27;s an usual and really unpleasant part of our industry.  Most knowledge based fields really don&#x27;t have anything like this sort of interview&#x2F;exam (seriously, it&#x27;s almost a pure exam, I think that describing it as an interview is simply misleading to people who aren&#x27;t aware of what goes on in our field) - though most fields have a more standardized set of credentialing and degree programs.<p>I do think that the mysterious, unpredictable, and stressful nature of tech exam interviews deters a lot of people from entering or remaining in this field.