Been a funny couple of weeks

Had a few interviews and learnt a few things,

• Saying I don't know is better than trying to BS your way through things it still means you will not get the job so I understand now why many do.
• Most seem more concerned about specific skills than general knowledge, problem solving, and clean code, which seems at odds to what I am told elsewhere that specific skills can be taught.
• To me ASP.Net does not just mean MVC, only a few places have done this, where I have applied got there and then oops most of your experience is with webforms so are not interested. 
• The blog genuinely seems to help with getting an interview. 
• FizzBuzz did come up.
• Junior to me meant someone who doesn't know everything, knows the basics and willing to learn which is why they are applying. I think to employers this means someone who can do almost everything and can be left to sort themselves out.

One interview was quite good, "we need a junior who can hit the ground running" and paraphrasing here with no training and no supervision. Why are they advertising for a junior, in my humble opinion they wanted a lower paid middle weight developer.

Making it sound worse than it is, I met some interesting and very smart people so rant over.
 
To do list which I think would help

• Build own website to show off skills and store examples
• Build an application that installs
• Learn more about MVC
• Entity framework
• Linq to SQL 
• Timed code tests to get used to coding under pressure, perhaps with some default system with a tiny screen. A lot of the tests were on laptops.
• Keep up with problem solving on the blog I was ready to give up last week.

I got a job testing! Which I think could be fun, get to learn about Clojure, functional programming has been on my to do for a while.

Good article from information weekly about the IT talent shortage.

Interview prep for ASP.Net 300 interview questions.