When interviewers start lobbing questions that have no relevance to what it means to be a programmer, just smile sympathetically and relax, act like you have just been informed you will be required to work with passionless programmers.
What will blow your mind is that you can ace these interviews without being able to write a line of code to save your own life. Just do what Ken Jennings does when he practices for jeopardy: memorize every esoteric fact you can find. This is not a small task, I built a Web app to store and randomly quiz myself on all potential questions in a domain. I have about 9000 factoids in there, I wow the pants off these non programmers, and made the mistake of picking a place that refucture the codebase and I have to scurry around to fix it or they will use their political connections to blame the problems on me.
After they are done playing jeopardy with you give them the Joel test, they will get a 3 or 5 of 12.
What will blow your mind is that you can ace these interviews without being able to write a line of code to save your own life. Just do what Ken Jennings does when he practices for jeopardy: memorize every esoteric fact you can find. This is not a small task, I built a Web app to store and randomly quiz myself on all potential questions in a domain. I have about 9000 factoids in there, I wow the pants off these non programmers, and made the mistake of picking a place that refucture the codebase and I have to scurry around to fix it or they will use their political connections to blame the problems on me.
After they are done playing jeopardy with you give them the Joel test, they will get a 3 or 5 of 12.