I interviewed a lot of people while I was at Google, and sometimes the people were clearly, clearly too anxious to interview. Like one fresh-grad who's hands were shaking. I thought about how much pressure the kid must have been under.
You try to help them relax, but you don't have much time, and the whole thing is just so unnatural.
Other places I've since been at, and interviewed with, give you a laptop, a problem to solve, and some time. You can focus on the problem instead of the situation much better, and I think that really helps. As an interviewer, it also helps keep some distance from the interviewer. It's too easy to try to micromanage the interview and keep the candidate uneasy. But there's a natural "don't interrupt someone when working" instinct that keeps interviewers more distant when the candidate's programming.
Coderpads on video conference, I think, are pretty good when the candidate has a good space to work in. They're in comfortable territory and you can see them by their keystrokes. The interviewer feels like they're getting more accurate data about how the candidate really operates. I just wish it could do keyboard shortcuts better -- emacs users like me hate seeing Ctrl-N bring up a new window.
The issue of IDE/compiler/keyboard/keybindings is also there, but that's easier to work with.
Microsoft interview. I was just graduating college, and was super anxious walking in to my first interview. The interviewer realized that writing on the whiteboard was going to be awkward for the problem he was asking me to solve so he let me just sit down at his computer while he hung out to to the side and watched me work in notepad. I think that was the best way to do that interview, because the second I started writing code my brain flipped in to code-writing mode and everything relaxed. One of the better interviews in my career.
Nowadays that's "favoritism" in an interview and it wouldn't fly. Everyone must pass through the same meatgrinder (that, surprise, fails people other than white men more often).
You try to help them relax, but you don't have much time, and the whole thing is just so unnatural.
Other places I've since been at, and interviewed with, give you a laptop, a problem to solve, and some time. You can focus on the problem instead of the situation much better, and I think that really helps. As an interviewer, it also helps keep some distance from the interviewer. It's too easy to try to micromanage the interview and keep the candidate uneasy. But there's a natural "don't interrupt someone when working" instinct that keeps interviewers more distant when the candidate's programming.
Coderpads on video conference, I think, are pretty good when the candidate has a good space to work in. They're in comfortable territory and you can see them by their keystrokes. The interviewer feels like they're getting more accurate data about how the candidate really operates. I just wish it could do keyboard shortcuts better -- emacs users like me hate seeing Ctrl-N bring up a new window.
The issue of IDE/compiler/keyboard/keybindings is also there, but that's easier to work with.