No, it's not only you who can't think when being prodded. I have similar issues. Actually, my issues are kind of entertaining when they don't get in the way of

No, it's not only you who can't think when being prodded. I have similar issues. Actually, my issues are kind of entertaining when they don't get in the way of my livelihood. My brain appears to prioritize processing interaction with people, especially strangers, over some other kinds of activity, including the kind that's needed to solve logic problems. Ask me to take some open-ended time alone to write a solution to a problem, and I'll give you one when I'm done. Ask me to do the same thing with people watching or, worse, interacting with me as I do it, and you will get random results that may or may not bear any relation to the problem. It affects things other than coding. When she was a teenager, my daughter sometimes engaged me in conversation when I was driving somewhere, just to see where we would end up. I remember a particular instance of winding up in the parking lot of a Safeway in Capitola, California, wondering why I was there, while my daughter laughed her head off. I've been at this programming thing for a long time now. I have a reasonable idea of how good I am at it. Given the right circumstances and the right kinds of problems, I can be (and have been) extremely productive. I've been described by someone paying me as one of those "10X" programmers, and the dvcs logs bore him out (but I know what he didn't: if the tools and goals and problem space had been different, or if the work circumstances had been different, then I wouldn't have been nearly as productive). But technical interviews aren't going to reveal any of that, certainly not about me, specifically. I'm always going to look like something between an idiot and a mediocrity in the typical technical interview. Various critics are complaining that the OP's methods aren't going to work, but all the data we have says that current fashions in hiring already don't work. The correlation between interview performance and job performance is laughable. Companies all like to say they hire "the best"; what they really mean is that they hire the best that currently-known methods can distinguish, which is to say, a random selection of people. About the most you can say about current methods is that they select for people who want a job, which I suppose is better for hiring than pure sortition. We don't know how to hire good people in technology. Popular hiring strategies are voodoo. The only method that has been shown to produce much better results than chance is blind, standardized skills-testing, which is not currently popular. Technical interviews are nonsense. The proper role of interviewing is to find out whether the candidate seems to be a glaring asshole. If you want to select for skills, administer standardized tests. If you don't want to do that, then it doesn't matter much what you do. It all seems to be about equally useless. You might try doing a Tarot card reading for the candidate.