dormo

I also read it as Michael Keaton at first. It didn't cause me to have a panic attack, though.

Well I have empathy for your situation despite your shortcomings. I hope you can redeem yourself in some way.

Is the "young programmer" you mentioned Jacob Appelbaum?

The problem is when authority figures act like they're better than you. This is colloquially referred to as a "power trip". The effects of this can range from annoying (some assistant manager at a store on a power trip) to potentially life-changing or life-ending (a cop on a power trip).

I have had a great experience in a recent interview that used Byteboard. The format was two parts: First there was a design document in a Google Doc for a hypothetical system with three implementation options. All options were defendable, you just had to defend one in an essay-style answer. There were also various comments to respond to throughout the document.

The code part was a small existing codebase simulating the system in said design document. You you are given three tasks, and explicitly told you are not expected to complete all of them. I ended up using virtually all of the time (70 minutes) completing the first two tasks, and using my remaining minutes writing comments about how I'd complete the third task. When that was complete, I was given 15 minutes or so to describe what I would do if I was given another 15 minutes of time to work on the project.

My only real complains were that the time limit added some pressure (that I was able to manage reasonably) and that the grading process is opaque. I know a human grades it according to a rubric, but I don't see any of my results. The company I was interviewing for just said "Everything looks great, we're moving you forward to the next stage of the interview process".

The code didn't involve writing any fancy algorithms, but instead getting to know a (very small) existing codebase and understanding how to use it to add functionality. This is much more realistic a gauge of how good of an employee you are than how well you can implement a search algorithm from memory.