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?
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