This seems false to me. Interview stress isn't deadline stress isn't code review stress.

This is like saying "all drivers need to be able to drive well under stress, so let's test them while blaring a foghorn in their ear". Context is important.

I don't want to hire someone who is good at interviewing, I want to hire someone who is good at what I need them to do. While it may behoove the individual to train themselves on being better at interviews, as an employer it is a negative to wash someone out simply because they don't interview well.

Personally I rock at interviews, I've done easily 100+ interviews in my life at this point and I actually relax when I get into the room. This doesn't make me a better coder and it doesn't make me more qualified than the next guy who comes in with sweaty palms, and an employer whose heuristic uses interview-skill as a proxy for engineering-skill would be very misguided.

The entire problem with tech recruiting comes down to stupid proxies. We went through a phase where the top tech companies replaced real questions with logic brain teasers, as if that was a suitable proxy for real engineering ability. Now some startups are doing stupid shit like requiring extensive side projects, as if that is a suitable proxy for real engineering ability.

I'm not sure how many more years it will take for tech as an industry to realize that the best way to know someone is good at X, is to get them to do X.

Many people, me included, experience something called "interview anxiety". It is only ever present during interviews. It may not be rational, but it's how our minds work.

It's easier to understand if you think of it like a phobia - someone may be irrationally scared of spiders, but that doesn't mean that they are going to be scared of heights, clowns, dogs, and snakes too.

Why? Interviews are an unnatural situation. I have hired people who did not interview well but were great at the work.

True. Sr developers need to be able to handle stress. However, I don't think an interview accurately measures a person's ability to handle under stress.

I'm shocked that you're shocked. An interview is a contrived situation whose social stressors do not at all match those of programming a computer.

You aren't looking at the entire picture. Some have trouble in interviews because of learning disabilities and social anxiety but do well in the workplace once they are comfortable with the people.

Add to that the fact that most tech interviews are held in non-real world situations and it's easy to see why some people have problems. Putting a person in a room with a piece of paper with a chunk of code that has a 'hidden' flaw with no access to any other resources isn't real-world.

All of us have access to books, manuals, the code, google, any number of places we can use to help.

And usually these interviews focus on nuances of a language or a programming trick that you only know if you've seen it before or encounter it regularly.

The codebase I'm working on now targets the iPad. If I were to interview with a company and the tech reviewer asked me about an IE specific hack chances are it would take me a while to come up with it. Assuming I've encountered it before.

The main issue is that a lot of those interviews are poorly correlated with actual job performance. (People should familiarize themselves with Daniel Kahneman's related work there). Even the outcome of the interview may have more to do with the mood the interviewers are in and various social factors and signals then some objective measures. Most of my experience is interviewing others but it is certainly a reality check, which everyone should go through occasionally, to go interview somewhere else.

Personally I have no issue with stress. It actually brings out the best in me. I do realize however this whole thing is a game. When I interview others I try to be aware of these factors and get at what I really need but I'm not 100% immune to being in a bad mood etc.

One day I should blog about how to interview. That's a fun subject to write about...