[vonmoltke]

It's the same as companies that purposely make interviews more stressful than they need to be "to see how you work under pressure". They fail to realize that not all stress is the same and that interview stress is different, in some cases very different, from on-the-job stress.

[bluetomcat]

I am very fed up with the whole "ability to work under pressure" expectation. Companies that emphasize this almost always have a totally broken work organization process.

At the end of the day, programmers are not emergency workers and need some rest and calmness to do their work efficiently.

[ChemicalWarfare]

That + the fact that no matter how strong the candidate is unless we're talking some well-known genius, the personal dynamics of the interview is the candidate wants something (the job) the interviewer "has" so it's skewed from the get go.

[Benjammer]

Yeah, totally agree.

Deadline stress more often involves doing research and making decisions quicker, and then putting in the effort to write the code in a more efficient manner to get it done on time.

Interview stress is more just like "Fuck, fuck, fuck, am I doing this the optimal way? Is my thought process here really stupid? Should I make an assumption/decision here or ask for clarification? Would they rather me be more thorough or more self-sustaining? Fuck, I have to do this in 10 minutes? And with no Google/SO?" etc...