Speaking of problems, if you're interviewing for a developer or programmer position, invariably you'll have to prove how well you write code.

Obviously, at this point, you either can or can't code. But even experienced code jockeys can tighten up in a stressful interview situation and underperform if, say, they're asked to step up to a white board.

Puramu Elitist, who writes a blog called and has interviewed numerous tech candidates, , "Write some code by hand on paper the night before. Writing code by hand, and writing code by IDE are very different. ... You don't want to get derailed on a simple question because you can't remember the syntax for a command line program in C#. Make sure you can write a basic 'hello world,' that compiles and runs, in any language you might be asked questions on.

"During interviews I give people a lot of slack for things like this, because IDE's do a lot of the basic set-up work, and I imagine that's pretty typical. But if you can smoothly whip out a running program, you look a lot more competent than you do trying to explain that 'whatever the namespace definition looks like goes right here, and the main would go here with arguments I think,'" he writes.