[mappy]

> Personally I think all companies should be using pair-programming or contract to hire

You should qualify that with "all companies by which I want to be hired", because not all teams/developers pair program or want to pair program.

The team I'm on does a phone tech interview, then an in-person interview where we dig into history, then a mix of problem solving, pseudocode problems, OO/schema design, and web app design/technologies/approach, and then more interviews with the extended team. While we will sit with each other to help out at times, sometimes for hours, we don't strictly pair- that is just when help is needed. We rely on some up-front design and all PR's code reviewed for quality control, in addition to QA and approval by application owner.