>So you've never taken an exam in your entire life?

You missed the context where we're talking about a professional setting.

>And that's already way more forgiving than any exam I ever took in school.

You took exams in school were the professor was looking at what you were writing the entire time? Your exams were in front of several people on a whiteboard?

>To me, that means they either really aren't nearly as talented as they think they are, or they won't be able to deal with the pressure of the job anyway.

And you'd be wrong. I've worked with very talented programmers who are absolutely terrible at interviewing. The problem is you're biased by your experience. You are probably good at this kind of interview and you are probably a good programmer, so you assume that any good programmer must be a good interviewer.

I know for a fact that these 2 processes are orthogonal. Books like cracking the coding interview exist because it is possible to practice and game the system. I've met just as many people who are good at interview questions, but are terrible software engineers, as I have people who are bad at interviews and are excellent software engineers.

The fact is that our current hiring processes are broken. Other professions don't conduct interviews like this. Go talk to some mechanical engineers who've been working for 10 years and ask them if they interview like this. Newspaper writers work on deadlines, but they don't have to write an article on the spot while someone watches them type.

Studies have constantly shown that work sample tests are really the only form of interview that shows real predictive power (that and general intelligence tests). The closer you can make the work sample to real work, the better. Finding the nth item of some arbitrary sequence in 15 minutes while someone watches your every move is not close enough to real work to have much predictive power.

>So what, if I hire you and at some point need you to hotfix something in, is that unfair?

If you're regularly giving me life or death tasks that I have 15 minutes to solve, I don't want to work there. I'm also probably very familiar with the domain, and it's not some artificial problem that I may have never seen before. But more than that, why don't you see the difference between a hotfix and an artificial situation where someone who already knows the answer is standing there watching your every keystroke, and judging your value as a programmer?

There are better ways to interview programmers. Here is one:

Pair the candidate with an interviewing engineer, give them an hour or two to solve a problem as a team. The interviewer isn't an adversary; their job is to assist the candidate like they would if they were working on a real problem.

Repeat this process if necessary.

Get everyone together and talk about past projects the candidate has worked on. Have the interviewers evaluate the candidate, and make your decision.

You know whether the candidate can code, and you've removed the adversarial nature and unnecessary stress from the interview process. Most importantly, you got to see them work in a much less artificial environment that's closer to what they'll be doing day to day.