The funny part about this is that the founders of these startups, who in many cases wrote the code that got the funding to start hiring programmers, couldn't come close to passing these interviews themselves. They also in many cases aren't very good programmers, and are looking to hire people better than they are for rewards that won't come close to what the founders receive.

Case in point: I recently emailed a simple question to the Magic (getmagic.com) folks. I asked why they didn't make the short code on their home page (which used to be a 10 digit phone number) a clickable SMS link. It seems obvious right? They are asking people to send them an SMS. Why make people either memorize/type or copy/paste? But not only did they not think of it, they didn't respond to my email and haven't implemented it. These guys basically got a check for $12M at a $40M valuation after 1 weekend of buzz and couldn't figure this out on their own - and either could the VC's that wrote them the check apparently (and they're in charge of billions of dollars).

So walking into these interviews (especially at recent startups), understand that if you have a bad interview experience, then the people that are already there probably aren't very good at what they do. Bad interviews tend to be conducted by bad managers/coders that are suffering from extreme bouts of justifiable impostor syndrome. If you are not hired after a bad interview experience, it's probably a good thing, because you wouldn't want to work everyday with the people that designed that experience in the first place.