Putting yourself in the shoes of the company interviewing you: If you collapsed into a puddle of goo under pressure, to the point where you were incapable of performing a task "you could do in your sleep," why are you still a good choice to hire?
The point of my story is not that I should have been hired. That isn't my call.
The claim is often made that anybody who can code should easily pass some particular test: P -> Q. I'm offering a story of P & ~Q, which means FizzBuzz isn't really doing what it's claimed to. There's a ton of subtlety I've sidestepped and a lot more I could say, but I don't really have the time.
Because you don't hire firefighters. Senior devs should be able to reason about complex problems and come up with good solutions after a few hours or even days, depending on the problem at hand.
You test their skill of solving trivial problems in 10 minutes under pressure. I can accept if people defend that as the best proxy measure they have for the amount of effort they want to invest into each candidate. But do you seriously believe that this proxy filters the good senior devs from the bad ones?
Because the day to day job is nowhere near as stressful as the artificial constraints of the interview process.
Do people typically come in to work at 11? Why do you schedule interviews at 9 AM?
Do people typically have time to think about problems on their own for a bit and start writing up a solution after they understand it? Why don't interviewees?
