[JohnMakin]

Well stated. I seem like the exact type of dev as described in this blog post - I get performance anxiety and the audited interview process doesn't fit my particular style. I wouldn't describe myself as slow, but my steps to solving a problem are often not linear and sometimes difficult to measure in such a setting.

as a devops engineer as my main job, I also try to explain to interviewers that on any given day I am reading and writing half a dozen languages of vastly different paradigms, and although I'm very proficient in many of them, I definitely need to reference things that maybe shouldn't "need" to be referenced (like confusing bash/python loop syntax is very common for me as an example). This rarely ever slows me down in reality, but will definitely cause me to fail interviews I shouldn't.

If I was an interviewer, I wouldn't care if a dev knew whatever esoteric language syntax or API calls by heart. I'd just expect them to know how to use them intelligently. The former does not always imply the latter.

[sneed_chucker]

For what it's worth, I do interviews for my employer and we allow candidates to use Google during the coding interview as long as they screen share their browser window.

An impressive number of people still fail the interview despite the questions being pretty simple (in leetcode terms, probably on the easier side of medium).