There were no other questions - no white board stuff, no algorithm questions, no stupid questions like "where do you see yourself in 5 years?" etc. I still remember the interview nearly a decade later.
Obviously this won't work for all jobs, but this will work surprisingly well for a large number of jobs, because most jobs are ordinary. One doesn't need to know complex algorithms to do these
They tested it after I left (a >100x improvement apparently) and called me the next day to ask when I could start.
I might, too, but I frankly might do the same to an even more extreme degree for a particularly challenging real-time 1-on-1 interview question from someone staring at me.
All things considered, I think I'd prefer being left alone in a room where I don't feel them over my shoulder while constantly wondering what they might be thinking with each passing second. I can take a few minutes to relax a little, look over the code, and try to figure it out.
I have anxiety issues when an interviewer asks me some obscure syntax option for grep command or some b-tree stuff that I learned in college decade ago (and never used in real life).
But I don't understand because I am not you. Different things give different people anxiety. Anxiety isn't something you reason your way into or out of.
What can you do to understand why this happens?
1. The interviewers aren't subject matter experts themselves but are hiring managers, so they've taken their questions from someone else.
2. The company gets far more good candidates apply than they can hire, so the process is less about removing bad candidates and more about having some arbitrary way of whittling down good candidates.
3. The interviewer is trying to prove how clever they are or the company is. Sometimes for their own ego but more often because they think it might make the company more attractive to work at.
If there is a theoretical question I'd normally Google / DDG instead of memorise then I'd usually be honest in the interview and say "it's something like xyz but in truth this is something I double check these days as, pragmatically speaking, it is not a problem that comes up frequently. However it is something I have done before [cite example]".
If the questions is asked because of reason 1 or 3 from above, then usually they're happy with that answer. If they ask it because of 2, well as much as I might disagree with their interview process, I'm still not the candidate they're looking for. So we still part of good terms.