Stage fright is an excellent point. So excellent that I wonder why nobody else made it before, and instead went for BS reasons like "I need a debugger". Maybe due to stage fright...?
I think the two are linked, some developers feel secure that a compiler / debugger will catch the inevitable simple mistakes that we all make. Not having one in front of an audience makes it that much worse. A lot of those that protest would feel a lot more comfortable in front of people if they knew they had a net to catch the simple errors they make before they show off their code and that's the core of my position on the subject, code test guarantee that these otherwise competent individuals will look incompetent and once they do, it's hard to minimize that experience in the interviewers mind, Steve Jobs called it the bozo bit and once it is flipped it's pretty much flipped for good. The fact that they look incompetent on the whiteboard is such a strong reaction, that it outweighs compensation factors like looking at code already written, in a more conducive environment.
