[EDIT] What I'd liken an interview to isn't an emergency, but a date, a visit to the bank for a mortgage application when you're very much not sure whether you'll get it, participating in a talent show, and shopping for a car, all rolled in to one. That's closer to what it is, than an emergency. That also makes it very unlike nearly all activity anyone engages in at work, emergency or routine, social or solo, except for certain high-pressure sales or top executive jobs, maybe.
Great quote. Those feeling pretty much summarize to perfection the current fad of interviewing pressure.
As for those who code without guns to our heads, I'd take the candidate who ships well-tested code over the candidate who ships emergency code. Prefer few large fires over frequent small ones and just roll back.
Edit to add: The kinds of pressure experienced on the job are not at all the same as those experiences during an interview. "Doing well under pressure" is not a generic skill. Someone who freezes up during an interview may be the coolest head in the company while restoring a database backup during an outage, and vice versa.
It's completely different, not even remotely comparable.
The pressure during a real-world outage is not a big deal. It's collaborative, we're all trying to solve this. And the work that needs to be done is actual real work. I'm extremely good at that, so I basically feel no pressure at all no matter how high the stakes are.
Interview pressure though? Whole different monster. It's confrontational and I'm expected to basically do improv acting on topics that have nothing to do with the actual job while someone nitpicks and eyerolls every irrelevant nonsense.
It's probably correct to answer "the person with 5", but does it automatically prove that "# of languages under the belt" is a great metric for evaluating engineering prospects?
We can come up with all kinds of justification for the current state of engineering interviews, but most everyone conducting the intervews know that our methods are extremely primitive and are thirsty for a better path forward.
But just blanking when suddenly put on the spot happens to everyone. Human memory retrieval is a complicated process, nothing like a computer. You can have vast expertise in there but not be able to retrieve it instantly, unless of course you've practiced interviewing that very subject a lot recently.