Hi everyone. Mod please delete my other post of the same under a new SN, i found my original login info, thanks. I apologize ahead of time for a long post.

Anyway my problem is I have been doing very badly in the technical interviews. Basically just about all of them go something like "Write out a binary search from scratch on the white board".
I havent had to do one in 10 years and that was in school. I understand the binary search inside and out obviously but I dont have it "memorized". Im using the bs as an example, its always something "like" that. Something from a CIS 101 book that I havent had to look at in 10 years.

If its not that then its an HR screener with 15-30 questions which are either riddled with errors that they refuse to acknowledge because they are just HR types reading from a sheet or some cryptic error code snippets that purposely try to throw you off and then ask for the output, which I admittedly am a slave to the compiler and the debugger when it comes to identifying this kind of thing in the real world, where its never as bad as the snippets on these tests. For example, a recruiter with a screener sheet recently asked me "what errors does the compiler give for an empty class defintion". I asked for a little elaboration but got none and then assumed that a proper class declaration was given with nothng but a ; inside the class {}. I thought about it for a minute and answered "NONE". I am fairly confident this is the correct answer(Depending on the compiler of course but I think most this is correct) but the recruiter insisted that the sheets correct answer was default constructor+destructor, copy constructor and something else. She ended the call after i "got that wrong".

A little background about myself to give some insight into what my current situation is. I majored in CS at a very good school. I was doing senior work when I was recruited into the working field for a software company. Finances at the time forced me to accept and put the last year on hold. While working there in an apprentice role, where I didnt do much coding, I was recruited again into the finance field. At this finance job I was to work on a neural net for trading sytems. There was no code in place. There was no dev team in place. The money was excellent and the challenge was very appealing. While working there, the off the shelf software that was being used matured very quickly and everything we needed to code that I was suppose to start from scratch became avilable via this softwares scripting language. The API had previously been closed off but suddenly it became wire open and powerful. The bad news is I became a scripter not a developer. The scripting was very fast and eventually I was pulled into the trading and became a registered trader. For 6 years I was more a trader than a dev by far with occasional scrpting.

During these 6 years there, I still yearned for actual dev work. I was allowed to take a contract on my own time working for startup remotely. They had a codebase in place. They had a team in place. I thought I was finally going to get exposure. Well the codebase was awful and the management was even worse. I spent 18 months lon contract ooking for bugs and writing HTML parses into SQL calls. I learned very little.

Now here we are today. I am bombing these interviews because I dont have that deep experience in what a real life cycle os from start to finish. I cant whip out code under pressure off the top of my head. I can however learn very quickly and figure things out. I get it. I get it at every level right away. I see what the user will see and need and I can code to that. I find the best or very good solutions, but I need references in front of me. I need google, I need my reference material, I need the MSDN and I need to be able to compile bits of code and step thru them to make sure they are correct. This is, as far as I understand it, the real world of developers. I cant do that in the tech interviews. I freeze up and cant whip the answers because I have been put thru this before and I know it never ends well. But I know if I can just get that foot in the door and find the right team I would thrive. I am very intelligent. I have tested 135-145 ranges in all IQ tests ( I had to take one for the finance job and took 3 others thruout my life). I dont meant to brag there but the point is I am not a dummy(i will seem like one for not spell cheking this post) but I am looking like one in this tech interviews every time. I have an interview this tuesday and I am thinking of explaining something along the lines of this post to the interviewer but he will probably have 10 other guys lined up that can do the code. I am plagued by the fact that I have thru my experiences become a jack of all trades and master of none.

What can I do? I need work soon!!! Thanks!