[rahelzer]

Well, you have to fix the problems you have.

1. You must become a jedi-knight of white-board programming. For this, go to HackerRank and work absolutely as many problems as you can. But don't program them in an editor, get a whiteboard and use that. Then type in the program when you are ready to get it graded.

2. You need to fill in some knowledge you would have gotten in college. For this, read the first few chapters of "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein.

There's no royal road. Treat this as your full-time job until you get a job, i.e. work on it 8-10 hours a day 5 hours on the weekend.

This is what I did last time I was laid off.....I got nothing for 6 months, then after 6 weeks of the above regime I was able to slam dunk every interview I went to and got an awesome offer. Best of luck.

[throwaway2387]

No other profession would put up with this nonsense. It's amazing how business people have tricked software engineers into demanding unreasonable standards of each other.

[bitshepherd]

This. So much _not_ this. You're suggesting self-flagellation as a solution.

When I was last unemployed, I made connections with people I had no intention of talking to other than for or about a job. I also kept my tech hobbies up, not cramming about algorithms and whiteboarding code. These hobbies led into questions from interviewers, which led into conversations, which eventually led to a job. My full-time job was finding a job, not memorizing algorithms and CS trivia tidbits.

My point is, you don't have to treat the job search like an exam. In my case, I've had to relocate several times when my network in a certain city couldn't come through and I needed gainful employment. In order to succeed in this industry, you need to be flexible like that if it comes down to it.