> There are certainly jobs where you need someone who is cool under intense pressure, where what happens inside an hour matters. That's what these interviews are revealing. But I think this is a tiny minority of dev jobs.
I disagree. Every software job I've ever had has involved times where the rubber meets the road and production software has crashed, deadlines fall behind or difficult decisions have to be made under pressure. The fact that it might be 5-10% of the work at most doesn't change the fact that it's the most critical 5-10%.
That's a different thing than what these interviews effectively test for. You're typical live coding asks the candidate to do an unfamiliar task under observation, on their own, and generally without the typical resources at hand.
Even if it were a good proxy for the sort of stress that occurs episodically in the real world, I would argue that the extent to which that skillset is helpful, it is grossly overrepresented in the interview process.