If we’d ever had somebody crippled by interview stage freight, I make be able to take that seriously. The coding skills you need to pass our test is writing a for loop that mutates a dict. We’ve never had anybody forget how to do that in our interview, but we have had people come up with remarkably inefficient solutions to the problem.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that people’s problem solving skills (which is what we’re actually testing) become exponentially less efficient during an interview. But even if it was, the test is still doing it’s job, because what would we expect to happen when we give a person like that a deadline, or ask them to review a PR?
Don't need to be "crippled." Simply a shot of adrenaline is enough to shut down most higher-level thinking. At that point the candidate is just pulling things from memory at random hoping they fit.
> remarkably inefficient solutions
The first one usually is. As the problem gets clearer, better solutions become obvious. That takes relaxation and calm thought however, e.g. Archimedes in the bathtub.
> I don’t think…exponentially less efficient
Doesn't need to be a large difference. With multiple candidates, even 10% is decisive.
There's also the psychological factor of knowing something makes the "knower" think it's easy while the others believe it's hard.
I do lots of interviews as a contractor, and must say they have little to no bearing on my ability. In the real world I've solved every problem encountered, given some time. Interviews almost none, the few successes depend on whether I wrote the same algorithm in the last two weeks by chance.
A random throw of the dice at the craps table would be just as accurate and less stressful for all involved.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that people’s problem solving skills (which is what we’re actually testing) become exponentially less efficient during an interview. But even if it was, the test is still doing it’s job, because what would we expect to happen when we give a person like that a deadline, or ask them to review a PR?