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> Also, the ability to work under pressure is valuable skill. If you have a candidate that fails to perform when being in a room with someone else, I doubt you can argue that that's your hiring decision when other candidates are able to perform in similar circumstances.

I'm curious, as a software engineer when was the last time you've seriously worked under pressure? Like, 'do this thing now or you're fired/the company goes under' and so forth? The kind of snap pressure that interviews can push on you.

I haven't been under significant pressure in the past 10 or so years of software engineering. Not when on live ops diagnosing why our server is failing to work in prod, not when identifying critical client crashes.



> I'm curious, as a software engineer when was the last time you've seriously worked under pressure? Like, 'do this thing now or you're fired/the company goes under' and so forth?

All the time. Depends on where you work. It happens in startups, small companies and many others. Even in large organizations with stack ranking for example.

> The kind of snap pressure that interviews can push on you.

Not even close to the same. How do you equate pressure? Someone can fear spiders more than jumping off a cliff. Crunch time for them can be less than interviews. Point being?


> I'm curious, as a software engineer when was the last time you've seriously worked under pressure?

Jetbrain's 2023 Developers’ Lifestyles survey states that around 29% of all developers work on weekends for work.

Having to work weekends is the last resort when working under pressure. Nearly 1/3 of all developers claim they are at that stage. No other profession has the concept of "crunch time".

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/lifestyle/


I asked you, specifically. I'll bite anyways, but I'll expect an actual answer from you.

> Having to work weekends is the last resort when working under pressure

No, it's not. I've had to work weekends before. We had a live ops rotation that would occur roughly once every eight weeks or so for me. The times I've had to work on the weekend were due to needing to solve some prod bug that was causing relatively minor headaches but they wanted some triage and solutions in earlier as possible. This was not a 'you are fired if you fail to solve the bug issue' or a thing where management is breathing down my neck to fix it because they're all busy sleeping on the weekend while I'm tanking the call.

It's often the result of either shitty management or people that cannot log off.

> No other profession has the concept of "crunch time".

Crunch time is a vastly different kind of pressure. I would know, I've worked in professional game development. And again, it's often the result of shitty management. If a game is going to fail and management is forcing you to work long hours in order to fix it then it's time to walk away.




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