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by guelo 2841 days ago
Not to defend that interviewer, but sometimes it's inevitable that you do have to code under pressure. I've been in situations where the whole system is collapsing, thousands of dollars are being lost every second, and I have to push a patch to production as quickly possible. Not that I would interview for such a situation.
3 comments

You should probably roll back the commit that broke production though, instead of hastily pushing something out hoping you'll fix it.

And ideally you should've been doing a gradual rollout, deploying on a few machines first then slowly ramping it up.

And if you are in that position, it is because you have the most (or enough) context to be able to solve the problem.

In an interview situation, it is like being asked to fix a problem with skyscraper having never seen the interior before. Interviewing is low-context. You cannot test whether someone will fail under high-context pressure in an interview.

"I've been in situations where the whole system is collapsing, thousands of dollars are being lost every second"

That's the situation you get into when you code under pressure.