Most certainly aren't, but some are potentially higher stakes (especially with smaller companies), since you and coworkers losing jobs you have -- which can be the price of getting things wrong -- is a bigger stake than you not getting a job that you currently don't have.

Seriously though - if you're creating a high stress meeting like that in a company where people are at risk of getting fired then your culture is going to be terrible with people backstabbing each other so they look good at the next meeting. A company is a team - it's everyone's job to make sure the team is working by helping to fix any mistakes brought up in meetings, not firing people. You are not in competition with your employees. Your employees are not in competition with anyone either. Employees are hired by a company to work together to create things.

Wrong outcomes for meetings have business consequences, which can include people losing their jobs. That's not necessarily "people getting fired for getting things wrong in meetings" -- indeed it generally shouldn't be that except in rather extreme cases of "getting things wrong" -- but it still means that people's jobs are on the line in the meeting and that there is extreme pressure not to make mistakes. Not because your boss will fire you because they don't like your answer, but because the market will punish your company -- potentially cost you and your coworkers their jobs -- if the market doesn't like the outcome of the meeting.

So you're basically saying that a meeting could fail to create value because an employee made mistakes in the meeting as he could not handle the stress. The correct way to solve this for everyone involved is to reduce the amount of stress everyone is under in a meeting and to create an environment conducive to problem solving. This isn't really that hard, a well motivated employee whose rewards and goals align with the company will try his best to create value as it helps him the most as well. If an employee is very bad at meetings, he could also be asked to express his ideas beforehand to someone he feels comfortable with and then that person could help him express his idea in the meeting.

The solution of hiring only people who can shout the loudest and brute force their ideas through in combative meetings is not a solution that will create value over the long term. If someone is breaking down in your meeting the problem is the meeting, not the person. Fix the meeting. Even people capable of taking stress is meetings will still perform better if that stress is removed.

EDIT: You also shouldn't be making snap judgements in a meeting that will affect the future of the company in the market. If there is a lot of tension in the meeting and the outcome is unclear, postpone the issue a short while until people can work out the issues better. If someone notices that there was a mistake in a previous meeting, work through the mistake in the next meeting and change direction ASAP. And obviously, don't fire anyone for this...

Sure, you can mitigate this to some extent, but you can't reliably avoid having high-stakes situations which you need a meetings which are inevitably going to be high-stakes to address, or that senior developers won't be to a certain degree on the spot in those meetings.

> The solution of hiring only people who can shout the loudest and brute force their ideas through in combative meetings is not a solution that will create value over the long term.

I haven't been arguing anything like that; particularly, I'll note that there is a big excluded middle between people who tend to freeze up in high-stress situations and "people who can shout the loudest and brute force their ideas through in combative meetings".

> EDIT: You also shouldn't be making snap judgements in a meeting that will affect the future of the company in the market. If there is a lot of tension in the meeting and the outcome is unclear, postpone the issue a short while until people can work out the issues better.

Postponing action can be a decision that will affect the future of the company in the market. You don't always have the luxury of making decisions in the way you'd prefer without paying a cost.

Sure you can. You can send out the problem before the meeting so the developer can think through the issue and make notes before he is put on the spot. You can also help the developer during the meeting by simply making the meeting positive instead of negative.

"You don't always have the luxury of making decisions in the way you'd prefer without paying a cost."

Snap decisions are often bad decisions. If you need to make a very important decision in a hurry it means someone already made a mistake in not considering this issue earlier. That happens, but you need to realize that the resulting decision is highly unlikely to be a good decision, let alone optimal. A mark of a good team is being able to avoid these kind of situations through research and planning.

Again, I'll go back to the same point: if you have created an atmosphere in a meeting that is causing people to freeze up due to high stress, you need to fix your meetings. There is something very wrong.

I don't fault developers who come across as nervous when I interview them.