I'm getting up the gumption to look for a different, hopefully better job in the nearer future (in automotive control software, looking to move to AV), and I had a bit of a revelation when talking to a friend of mine who does interviewing. I cannot talk about the things in my current job that would make me a good hire for the things I want to move into. It's all hunting down an obscure bug buried in layers of technical debt and overly complicated standards, but giving any depth beyond that bare platitude requires going into things that my NDA covers. I even work in driver assist technologies, but I can't go into detail about that because I'm working on unreleased, unannounced features. That means that the only thing left is side projects or whiteboard interviews. To be fair, this is at least partly an industry problem due to long product development cycles and a culture of secrecy, but it makes a lot of the better solutions to interviewing unworkable and causes companies to drop back to whiteboard interviews. And as a candidate, my personal maximizing function is to hit the books and be ready for curly braces and logic puzzles. Sometimes there really isn't a better way.