All stress is not the same. Interview stress is actually very different from working stress.
Ask a firefighter who rushes into burning buildings for a living to give a public speech in front of a large crowd of people in a non-burning building. Which is more stressful? For the firefighter, it may be the latter. Fighting fires is what they train for, what they're experienced with, whereas giving speeches is not.
A lot of people, no matter the profession—firefighter, programmer, etc.—have a great fear of public speaking. Likewise, a lot of people, no matter the profession, also have a great fear of job interviews, especially the crazy audition-style interviews of programmers. It's simply human nature, with little bearing on job performance in general. We shouldn't be giving auditions to people who aren't stage performers. Personally, I never work with someone watching me—definitely not a judgmental stranger who will fire me for any perceived peccadillo—nor do I ever have some specific narrow time limit on my work in the range of 15 minutes or so.
Interview stress is nigh indistinguishable in my experience from a bad customer call. Indeed, if I replaced the bug fix part with writing an effective ticket or test for the issue, this becomes an even better method for tech support, technical account managers, or sales engineers than for developers, unless it's a company where devs regularly interact directly with customers.
Ask a firefighter who rushes into burning buildings for a living to give a public speech in front of a large crowd of people in a non-burning building. Which is more stressful? For the firefighter, it may be the latter. Fighting fires is what they train for, what they're experienced with, whereas giving speeches is not.
A lot of people, no matter the profession—firefighter, programmer, etc.—have a great fear of public speaking. Likewise, a lot of people, no matter the profession, also have a great fear of job interviews, especially the crazy audition-style interviews of programmers. It's simply human nature, with little bearing on job performance in general. We shouldn't be giving auditions to people who aren't stage performers. Personally, I never work with someone watching me—definitely not a judgmental stranger who will fire me for any perceived peccadillo—nor do I ever have some specific narrow time limit on my work in the range of 15 minutes or so.