> the goal of an interview should be to assess whether or not that person will be able to do their job... Sure, but there needs to be some kind of careful thou

> the goal of an interview should be to assess whether or not that person will be able to do their job... Sure, but there needs to be some kind of careful thought about HOW to devise and evaluate candidate performance on such "assessments". It's not trivial and it's not a "solved problem". Are all forms of stress the same? Is the stress of solving a puzzle at a whiteboard the same thing as the stress of dealing with a sh*t-hits-the-fan outage? I think not. Some people are excellent at handling being put in front of observers who are evaluating them and keeping their calm. Others are exactly the type of people you want in a crisis. These are not necessarily the same people. Some folks are great at triage, working in emergencies and maintaining communications, others are really good at reducing the likelihood of emergencies happening in the first place-- not necessarily the same people, and they don't necessarily act the same in front of your whiteboard quizzes. More importantly, there's no proof that these "amateur-hour" psychological evaluations to assess stress are successful in predicting actual job performance under stress. HR certainly can't do this, but technical hiring managers think they can do it just because they assume their "gotcha" questions mean anything valid.