I will say that, as the interviewer asking the question, I do recognize that people have anxiety, and I would prefer to nudge them out of a spiral, because a bad interview is generally not pleasant for anybody involved.
To some degree the interview is not about getting the question right but also how you respond to questions about your answers. I would rather have someone who started with a totally incorrect answer and then reason back and forth with them til they got on the right path, than someone who came up with the right answer and then clammed up and refused to explain how they got there. (I once had a candidate tell me, verbatim, "I don't think analyzing performance of an algorithm is part of an engineer's job.")
I would prefer if there were a more humane, less stressful, and scalable way to do an interview. The problem is that as a profession we lack the continued examination/licensing of other fields like engineering or medicine, so we don't have a good barometer of skills otherwise. And I often have to sift through massive numbers of people clearly overshooting their shot to get a good position.
To some degree the interview is not about getting the question right but also how you respond to questions about your answers. I would rather have someone who started with a totally incorrect answer and then reason back and forth with them til they got on the right path, than someone who came up with the right answer and then clammed up and refused to explain how they got there. (I once had a candidate tell me, verbatim, "I don't think analyzing performance of an algorithm is part of an engineer's job.")
I would prefer if there were a more humane, less stressful, and scalable way to do an interview. The problem is that as a profession we lack the continued examination/licensing of other fields like engineering or medicine, so we don't have a good barometer of skills otherwise. And I often have to sift through massive numbers of people clearly overshooting their shot to get a good position.