[brimble]

My crowning glory for the interview-stupids was relatively early in my career going in for a PHP interview, which was the language I was by far the most familiar with at the time and had written many thousands of lines in, and not being able to come up with the "->" syntax for method invocation & property access when I was up at the whiteboard. I used a dot-style instead, and realized only after I left that I'd totally fucked it up (writing some OO code on the whiteboard was just about the first thing they asked me to do, and the interview was really short after that...) I'm pretty sure I also mis-named some built in functions. I'm bad at retaining language-specific details and have since started reviewing a relevant language syntax minutes before an interview, which won't stick by the next day but usually does for a couple hours so I don't do anything too embarrassing. Not being able to put together two non-syntax-erroring lines in a language I wrote a few hundred useful lines of the day before, without a reference, is otherwise the norm for me. This has mattered zero times—except in interviews.