Being a professional programmer is not an entirely stress-free job. Sure -- it's just the tenor (and for some people, sheer intensity) of the psychological str

Being a professional programmer is not an entirely stress-free job. Sure -- it's just the tenor (and for some people, sheer intensity) of the psychological stress experienced during interviews is, for many people, basically orthogonal to the stress of real-life work situations -- or even genuinely dangerous (even physically threatening) situations in life, otherwise. With the latter, it's like "Oh shit - the client's gonna get real pissed if I don't figure something out real quick".† Or even: "That guy looks like he's about to lunge at me - I better think of something!" For which your brain and your glands have benefitted from millions of years of evolution in support of mechanisms for pumping just the right kind and amount of juice into your system to "figure something out". But with interviews it's more like: "This person's evaluating me, using some hidden criteria. Given that the problem is slightly tricky, I literally don't know if they're expecting to power on at all costs, or, secretly, that I simply admit that I don't know where to start just yet. Not only that, something tells me he's not stating the problem quite correctly -- they do that, no all the time, but way too often in these kinds of interviews. And on top of that he's just being plain overbearing... and now he's starting to fiddle with his phone. On top of starting 15 minutes late. Like he never really wanted to talk to me in the first place. If I ask too many questions -- or even just one instance of the wrong kind of question -- I'm screwed, and gonna have to hit my inbox for leads again. Oh great, now he's starting to offer 'hints', completely derailing my flow of thought and whatever self confidence I thought I had. Fuck it -- I just should bail and go work on my personal projects. No one will be paying me $150k but at least I'll be learning something." † Where "the client is gonna get real pissed" is roughly equivalent to "if I can't get these rocks to flake in just the right way, we aren't gonna have any more arrowheads and were' all gonna starve!", to a first order approximation.