Ask HN: What do you do if you can't pass technical interviews?

My advice would be to just do more interviews, and stop taking each one so seriously. Understand that it's a flawed process that in no way reflects your actual skill as a developer, and just play along with it, like the game that it is. If an interview doesn't work out, understand that it's really their loss, because their flawed process ended up filtering out a great candidate that had much to bring to their team.

Doing actual interviews is by far the best way to practice interviewing. And I find that taking interviews less seriously actually helps me keep my composure during interviews and allows me to perform much better than back when I first started interviewing, when I was treating each one like some kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and stressing myself out unnecessarily.

Software is a seller's market right now, and there's no shortage of companies that are looking for great developers. As long as you keep interviewing, you'll keep getting better at interviewing, and eventually you'll become good enough, or get lucky enough, to land an offer that you like.

P.S. I really like the way TripleByte does their technical interviews, offering each candidate a choice between a live-coding track and a project track. Unfortunately, having a choice in the interview style isn't a very common hiring practice, even among TripleByte's own clients, who tend to then turn around to grill TripleByte-referred candidates on algorithms in live-coding sessions anyways.

Does anyone know of some kind of a job board that allows filtering by the availability of a take-home project as an alternative to the traditional interview?

Eventually, I want to stream myself working on side projects, so I can say to companies: If you want to see what I've worked on, take a look at my GitHub/LinkedIn/Website/Resume. If you want to see how I work, take a look at my streams. If you like what you see, feel free to contact me to talk about opportunities and make me an offer. If I like your offer, I'd be willing fly over and meet with your team to see if we can get along, but the moment you start trying to grill me on my ability to solve obscure algorithms and data structure problems under pressure, I'm outta there.

As someone who is graduating this semester, those kinds of questions are very commonly asked to recent grads and for junior positions. In fact it would make less sense to ask a senior programmer whiteboard questions.

You'd be surprised how bad it can be working as a developer at non-tech companies. AD-agencies where the projects might be 90% tech even end up being shitty workplaces. You're a second class citizen amongst copy-writers, SCRUM-EXPERT project managers and UX-Gurus who make keynotes of 2 or 3 frames for the long parallax intro animation of 7 pages.

I think lots of companies only interview up to Level 2.

I won't mention a certain big one, but they just test to make sure your brain grasps the concept of pointers. They do pay upscale salary and are in one of the major startup hubs.

I'd say Level 2 is the optimum to be comfortable in for a degree level if you do a lot of tough stuff. Level 3 if you're in something more niche like optimizations. A huge, listed company like Google or Microsoft might do Level 4, only because they have the money to solve problems that give a 0.01% improvement and want to maintain that competitive edge.

There's a reason for this - the best programmers have an abundance of job offers. So it's good not to annoy the candidate too much or to stretch out the interview process very long.

I am not sure what you mean with "HR companies" but HR in general isn't there for you, it's there for the company. An ex-colleague of mine had to experience that the hard way. She's alright now, but she felt horrible for a couple of months.

They really took advantage.