I've gone through interviewing recently and it was a rather frustrating experience. I thought that the most challenging thing will be some tricky algo questions I don't use in real life or never heard of it. It turned out that the problem was to get to the tech interview at all by convincing the interviewer to believe that I actually have the experience that I claim. Didn't always work. It was mostly because they didn't care to assess my skills because I think my resume sucks: I couldn't provide any big or even local big names thus they probably went with someone who could actually namedrop. This was in Eastern Europe, to add some context.
I finally got two offers, dropped the ongoing processes and accepted one, but before I had some dark days thanks to these negative experiences. My takeaway from this is that interviewing sucks, but one company will realize what you can do and happily accept you as-is. I was lucky that I was not forced to take a sub-par offer by giving it enough time.
> convincing the interviewer to believe that I actually have the experience that I claim
Yeah, I read about "impostor syndrome" on here, and maybe the people in question really are suffering from that, but I've never felt like an impostor: I know I'm good at this; I've been doing it successfully for three quarters of my life. Statistically speaking, I'm probably not the best that there ever was, but I do know that I'm at _least_ good enough to do a phenomenal job at whatever programming position I'm interviewing for. I personally suffer more from "I feel like you're just sitting up there on your high horse looking for any reason to reject me" syndrome.
If you're in an EU country and can move, I strongly recommend Ireland. They're starved for people, I've never had an experience like that at any of my interviews.
I finally got two offers, dropped the ongoing processes and accepted one, but before I had some dark days thanks to these negative experiences. My takeaway from this is that interviewing sucks, but one company will realize what you can do and happily accept you as-is. I was lucky that I was not forced to take a sub-par offer by giving it enough time.