Being watched usually makes me a horrible coder. I get so distracted from having a backseat driver that it can even hard to type at times. The only thing I can whip up on the spot in a readable manner is something I already know pretty well, and if the interviewer can't keep up, it becomes a big conversation about "what are you doing again?"
It can be pretty hard to make a stranger feel at ease in a stressful situation so I can't pretend I have a 100% success rate, especially for the one screening interview we do which is a one hour pair programming exercise. However we do it, I am going to be there and look at what you are doing.
For the onsite though, most of the time, I explain the exercise and then I leave people work while I do something else in the same room.
I stay there so they can ask questions if they are stuck but I am not hovering over their shoulders so they can concentrate.
I'm not toot excited about the pairing part. Most pair interviews I've had feel like the interviewer is trying to shove a box that says "they arrived at the solution I like in the manner I was expecting". Most pairing feels like me going out of my way to connect with a robot interviewer w/ no imagination.
> For the onsite though, most of the time, I explain the exercise and then I leave people work while I do something else in the same room.
I love this. I'd love to see more interviewer's do this.
We try to make it easier and fairer with a rule like " if candidate reaches this step = automatic pass" (and the step in question is not that far in the interview).
But there are still many person to person differences and I often have dilemmas.
It is very hard to differentiate between giving a pointer and handholding the candidate.
So sometimes I ask myself if I gave too much or too little help, since there are cases where the candidate would have gone far enough with just a little bit more push and others where I feel that I helped them too much. On a 45 minutes exercise, if you help somebody not getting stuck for 10 minutes, it can make a difference.
Another part that make me uneasy is wondering if accents or culture differences can make me act differently. Like different micro expressions or attitudes from what I would expect, can these influence me enough to go from pass to no pass more easily for some ethnical/cultural groups ?
All in all it is a perilous exercise.