>You're making the opposite point you think you are. How do you know that you observed an inability to code as opposed to interview performance anxiety?

I've done lots of interviews, and I know that if someone has seen a question recently, or if someone is rusty in interviews, or one of a million things can affect someone's live coding ability.

So I'm not looking for speed, I don't give more 'points' to someone who is calm and collected vs. someone who takes twice as long cause they're nervous. They both "pass" in my book.

I also don't particularly care if someone starts intermixing java and C++ syntax or forgets the string library and says len(var) instead of var.len() for example.

I'm even fine with giving hints. But there are literally people, with hints, who cannot write a basic recursive function or understand to check for null references. That isn't being nervous. That's just...being bad at the craft.