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> the goal of an interview should be to assess whether or not that person will be able to do their job...

Sure, but there needs to be some kind of careful thought about HOW to devise and evaluate candidate performance on such "assessments". It's not trivial and it's not a "solved problem".

Are all forms of stress the same? Is the stress of solving a puzzle at a whiteboard the same thing as the stress of dealing with a sh*t-hits-the-fan outage? I think not.

Some people are excellent at handling being put in front of observers who are evaluating them and keeping their calm. Others are exactly the type of people you want in a crisis. These are not necessarily the same people. Some folks are great at triage, working in emergencies and maintaining communications, others are really good at reducing the likelihood of emergencies happening in the first place-- not necessarily the same people, and they don't necessarily act the same in front of your whiteboard quizzes.

More importantly, there's no proof that these "amateur-hour" psychological evaluations to assess stress are successful in predicting actual job performance under stress. HR certainly can't do this, but technical hiring managers think they can do it just because they assume their "gotcha" questions mean anything valid.

Programming jobs aren't inherently stressful. There are jobs that have innate stress, e.g. anything with strict time & attention requirements. E.g. driving, cooking, surgery. Programming jobs tend to have stress because of stressful personalities rather than innate need. Even in high-stakes situations, e.g. "fire fighting" where _urgency_ matters, stress / stressful personalities often throw a wrench in the machine.

I also think that how much stress you want is a matter of taste. Some folks prefer the pressure cooker. I'm not knocking stress, I just think that's a culture thing not a requirement.

When it comes to job interviews, there are so many ways to write somebody off, but all I'm looking for is: - major deal breakers. e.g. too mean, irresponsible, too many bad habits - major wins, e.g. they bring something to the team we don't have.

The default posture of most candidates is uncomfortable and stressed. Being able to evaluate them often means trying to make them more comfortable. If whiteboard interviews are more prone to inducing stress, that's worth knowing.

I would argue that the kind of stress involved is different. I.e., social stress, as I experience in whiteboard interviews, has nothing to do with the stress of an impending deadline.

Well that's what's tough – I would say I've experienced both.

For example, when you're in charge of a production service, and that service goes down, there is a lot of social stress to "just fix it", oftentimes under non-ideal conditions (just like solving a problem on the spot in an interview).

Yes, but if you're solving DA&A problems during a production outage, I'd say you screwed up your architecture pretty badly, and you're unlikely to do a better job while on the spot.

It's much more likely you're typing some bash commands or restoring a postgres database.

I've had to solve DS&A problems a few times in my career, and I've had to solve production outages, but never both at the same time.

> (just like solving a problem on the spot in an interview)

I don't think that's a conclusion you can actually make, it's still a very different kind of stress, especially for someone introverted. When I'm being evaluated, the stress is crippling me - I'm overly nervous and can mess up even the simplest things; even finding correct words can be hard. However, when I'm in a urgent situation where something needs fixing, or deadline is passing, I become focused, assertive (but also easily irritated) and take charge much more easily than usual - and that short-term stress actually helps there. Those are very different situations that make people react differently.

I'd say being able to manage the social stress of some of the more acrimonious design meetings I've been to is necessary, as is dealing with obstreperous team members in non-management leadership roles. Not everybody in tech is a well adjusted, mature person.

It's very different. I breeze through stress situations at work, even if people look over my shoulder. I'm doing what I do best, I feel excited.

On a whiteboard interview, it feels like being in school at a test where you didn't prepare well, for a topic you are not interested in. So stresss kicks in and my mind goes blank. I'm glad that a lot of interviews happened remote, it helped a lot.