Surely an interview scenario is far less stressful than an actual outage though? Your performance in the real one is a lot more important for your job/career than the interview is.
Not necessarily. People put a lot of stock into interviews because they could affect not just today, but years of their future. Whereas nobody really expects to get fired if they can't resolve the outage in 45 minutes (instead of 3 hours), say.
Especially if you're junior and your current job sucks and you've never (yet) passed an interview for a better job.
This is counter-productive, but the brain doesn't always work how you'd want it to.
