I'm in the process of changing careers to programming in my late 30s. I dabbled in coding on and off for most of my life, but two years ago I started taking it seriously, read K&R, etc, and completely fell in love with programming. And so I start thinking about working full-time as a developer, and schedule an interview for a programming position for a company in the industry where I've worked for the past decade. I've always been a confident interviewer, but I totally froze in this phone interview. They started the interview off with a tough algorithm problem that I probably could have solved on my own in 30-40 minutes, but couldn't possibly solve on the spot in a conference call, with several people listening in and quizzing me. From there, things went downhill quickly, and I struggled to answer questions that I could have easily answered on my own at my desk. Since then, I've been burned on two freelance programming assignments (that I should have known better than to take given the level of desperation involved), which was quite a blow after spending a decade freelancing for dozens of clients without incident in another industry.
I love programming, and so I continue to code whenever I get the chance (and have two rather large projects underway), but these experiences have shaken my confidence. If most programming jobs involve similar interview processes, I'm not sure this would be the best move for me.
However, this comment has given me hope. If there are companies out there like this, then I stand a fighting chance -- I would excel at an interview where I'm given a problem, a time limit, vim, and then told to go solve it with no whiteboard or group of people watching. Let it be a hard problem, but make it realistic -- not some obscure puzzle or algorithm -- and let me use my own tools. I wish there were some job board where companies with this type of interview process posted jobs.