I interviewed at a place with a fairly stringent testing regime last year. There were many “write on the board” SQL questions and some Java pair programming with one of the team leaders.
Unfortunately, although I nailed the whiteboard part, I did poorly on the pair programming portion. I didn’t handle the context shift between VB (which I was using on the current gig) and Java well enough, and kept foolishly expecting Eclipse to get the case on my variables correct for me, leaving off semicolons, stuff like that. It was embarrassing, considering that six to eight months previously I had been doing a lot of Java.
I suppose I would have done better had I freshened my Java knowledge a little before the interview, but I had an informal offer on the table for a lot more money and was going through with this interview for, shall we say, domestic political reasons (i.e. my wife didn’t think the existing offer was official enough and would have killed me if I’d cancelled this interview. Because of the pay discrepancy and the awkwardness that would have ensued in trying to negotiate an informal offer against an inferior, but formal one, I actually dreaded the prospect of an offer.)