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Comment by _robbywashere | Hacker News Reader

It’s interesting to me that this type of comment always shows up with like minded articles and studies. It’s always along the lines of “YOU CANT HANDLE THE PRESSURE”

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It’s just hazing. “I had to do it, so you do too!”

Fortunately not every company is like that. I’d suggest finding the good ones.

"It’s just hazing."

I think you've found the core idea.

Some profession include situations with actual stress and mortal danger. Doing good programming should be more like solving high school math problems in solitude than a high pressure social interaction.

Or: if your development environment has high stress interaction get a consultant to settle the issue, you likely have multiple issues that need to be dealt with.

Everyone's talking like they deserve the job and it's just the format that's causing anxiety, but in reality upwards of 90% of applicants don't measure up.

In their defence, anxiety does cause some applicants to fail. But the vast majority of applicants who apply to any technical role can’t really program. It’s obvious in these comment threads that lots of folks have never sat on the other side of an interview room.

Performance anxiety is real though. One mark of a good interviewer is how well they can get a candidate to relax and perform at their best. I’ve done over 400 interviews and I still worry I don’t quite have that skill down.

Because it's true. Job interviews aren't remotely as anxiety-inducing as a manager who wants to know why the widget you worked on blew up in production. If you can't answer basic questions about your background and experience, then you're not the sort of person I want to work with. I hire technical people with the expectation that they will one day either be able to fill my chair or exceed my abilities. If you're hiring a person who you would never want to work for, then you are hiring the wrong people. I guess the one caveat would be to hire someone directly out of school, since they would be less likely to have experienced that sort of direct pressure... but I expect an experienced employee to be able to answer questions with some sort of confidence.

Job pressure and interview pressure have almost nothing to do with each other besides that both phrases end in " pressure".

You don't understand the problem, and are doubling down on the solution. Sadly common.

In real life you'll ask them why there's a bug on production - and he'll tell you wait 5 minutes I'm checking/reproducing the issue. It's very rare that you'll have to get an answer immediately - this isn't emergency medicine. We're only programmers.

In real life there's still going to be pressure to come up with an answer regardless of how long that takes and how distasteful it might be. What I don't need is for someone who is completely risk and pressure-averse to have a meltdown because they feel that the answer to the question I ask is going to be unsatisfactory. I want to know what the correct assessment of the situation is so that I can make an informed decision going forward, not some glossed over bullshit that turns into a bigger problem down the road. People like that are their own worst enemies.

> In real life there's still going to be pressure to come up with an answer

Like how? Honestly. What answer are you immediately looking for if there's a bug? You're looking for a fix, not an answer. And it takes time, a bug fix for a non trivial production system is almost always 10+ minutes unless it's some silly html/css bug.

I like to work with people that take a day and get the best solution, not the people that get an ok solution right away. To understand the essence of what is needed rather than the brute force answer. I also find a lot of people can function at that level when the environment is structured to reward deep thought and to help people calm themselves to the point they can think.

This comment is the personification of the mindset that makes interviews a hostile situation. You are not only extremely biased against some of the best coders I've ever worked with but actively harming the hiring process for your employer if you are involved at all.

It isn't my fault that you have prejudged the person on the other side of the desk as hostile. That's on you.

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