So the 50+ percent of the population who have a problem with performance under high stress situation have a giant red flag above their head? We are doing something wrong.
Well, yes. If the job requires you to perform under stress, being unable to do so should certainly be considered for disqualification.
Job interviews aren't perfect and everybody wants something different from them. But maybe the employer actually is looking for something you don't have and wouldn't it be better to find out before joining?
"The scariest part of all this is that people think this is a good way to filter candidates. It shows you that the company is populated by stress tolerant, herd mentality thinkers. I see them as a cross between army grunts and high school nerds. Simple fast logic, drawn to rules and systems, prone to being swayed by appeals to authority. Low sensitivity nervous systems meaning high stress tolerance and low ability to perceive, synthesise and abstract. Working with these guys is like wearing a straight jacket anyway - avoid like the plague. Unless you happen to fit that model, in which case go right ahead, you do you, but please be aware that there are other kinds of human out there who can add value outside of the cookie cutter."
But we have a problem where we are recruiting all kinds of personalities into a market and then after significant investment in education telling them that they aren't suited for the role.
Fundamentally what is going on here is a battle between different kinds of personalities and it's annoying that I'm in the minority. But there is an argument here to say that this isn't a very economically productive situation. You need all kinds of people in an organisation.
I get the stress tolerant part although I don't agree that this would imply a low ability to perceive, synthesise and abstract. Why would the people that pass such an interview be herd mentality thinkers?
Because the ability to perceive is tuned by the reactivity of your nervous system. Think of it like the sensitivity on a microphone. A normal microphone might work well to record a conversation at a party. But it wont capture the beating of a fly's wings. And conversely a high sensitivity microphone will be useless at a party, it will just get blown out by the noise.
In the same way the minds of people are tuned to different levels of stimulation. People with low sensitivity are better suited to noisy information rich environments. People with high sensitivity work better in quieter less information dense ones. You might want a highly sensitive person to conduct a one on one interview, because they can better pickup the subtleties of the interaction. But you don't want that for a lawyer who has to work in a busy courtroom.
That covers perception. The synthesis comes both from the lower perception floor and from the tendency for those things that are perceived to perpetuate within the nervous system. A reactive nervous system carries waves upon its surface more readily. It reacts even to itself more strongly. The inter-neuron gain is higher. Consequently a highly sensitive nervous system (i.e. introversion) is associated with withdrawal from high stimulation environments and the perception and processing of subtlety.
The herd mentality comes from being less able to pick up the subtleties that let you know the group think is not an accurate picture of reality. If you cannot perceive the discrepancies then you cannot doubt the status quo.
So when you do public whiteboard interviews you are selecting for low sensitivity individuals who are on average less able to discern subtle patterns in perceptions coming in at low volume. Does that sound like the kind of person who excels at coding?
Although it might sound like someone who can work the least sub optimally in a noisy open office.
Can you provide a source that 50+ % of the population find live-coding/collaboration interviews to be a high stress situation while the rest of the interview is not? I think you are conflating your personal feelings with objectivity until I understand why you think a majority of the population is significantly impacted by specifically this technique of interviewing but not others.
Additionally, if you find a whiteboard question to be high stress to the point of not being able to answer, while other candidates are smoothly answering it, demonstrating their chops both as a technical knowledge worker but also as a collaborative and communicative engineer, you bet your ass that's a giant red flag. Why should it not be?
Your argument, as best as I can tell, is that people are completely unimodal in how much stress they can handle, and therefore are completely determined in multiple dimensions such as "sensitivity", "intelligence", and "attention to detail"?
I asked for a source that people find whiteboarding significantly more stressful than other forms of interviewing people are not complaining about here, and you gave some bullshit opinion that denigrates a massive amount of people simply for having stress management techniques / more advanced self-mastery.
Here's my opinion: technical interviews catch people who are not technically qualified, and whiteboard & other social aspects of interviewing catch people who are not socially qualified. I think that teams work together better with frequent and high-quality discourse. Do you?
You are conflating social skills stress tolerance and self mastery. The idea that you can think your way out of something that is a basic property of your nervous system is very insulting. What is happening here is that you are unable to step outside of yourself and to understand what it might be like to have a different kind of personality. What that tells me is that you are not emotionally intelligent. Someone with high social skills has an ability to step outside of themselves and appreciate the world from another's shoes that you seem not to possess. So the statement that I am in some way socially inept because I have a more perceptive but less stress tolerant nervous system, honestly falls a little flat. You might even say that being attuned to detail can make you better attuned to social detail.
I spent, what, 35 years. Maybe. Working on myself because I bought into the line that you can change your personality, that if you are not living up to what the status quo expects of you, then you need to work on yourself. And then I had kids. And I saw that they could not change. That their nature was not some malleable thing that listens to the whims of what the world expects from them. There are parts that can and do change, but the bedrock properties do not change, they are who and what they are and that is good.
You cannot step outside of yourself and admit that others may live in a different reality that finds things you find easy, difficult. And finds things you find difficult, easy. There are high stress tolerance people and they are great and good and useful. And you have low stress tolerance people and they are great and good and useful. But they are not the same, they have different abilities and to try to deny that is wrong headed.
Job interviews aren't perfect and everybody wants something different from them. But maybe the employer actually is looking for something you don't have and wouldn't it be better to find out before joining?