Maybe I'm an outlier, but I cannot talk proficiently about a project I haven't worked on in months. When it's in my brain, I am living and breathing it, but afterwards if I'm asked to talk about it, it stumbles out as I try to recall the pieces. I can rehearse beforehand, but it becomes clear as soon as the interviewer does any digging, that I don't remember the details.
Ask me to code something beforehand and I'll excel at it, but ask me "what's going through your mind" as I'm coding it and I'll sound like a scatterbrain. I need time, low pressure, and privacy to code well.
>I need time, low pressure, and privacy to code well.
Me too. I've had jobs where I had to work in areas with high foot traffic, lots of distractions, I could never get in "the zone" and never got any real work done. Well, looking back, I did get some work done, but I always felt like I was too distracted to focus, and it definitely took me a lot longer than it would have otherwise.
Ask me to code something beforehand and I'll excel at it, but ask me "what's going through your mind" as I'm coding it and I'll sound like a scatterbrain. I need time, low pressure, and privacy to code well.