[devanl]

I agree that collaborating in real-time is important, but I disagree that interview conditions allow you to assess real-time collaboration abilities accurately.

In a real life situation, both you and your partner will be generally familiar with the problem at hand; if not there's an expectation that the person with more knowledge will be explaining not just the problem, but also the solutions that are already under consideration, so that everyone is on the same page.

In an interview situation, the solution is obviously withheld because the goal is to make the candidate derive it, so any back-and-forth is artificial - the interviewee is the one who has to do analysis while being scrutinized while the interviewer has already done the work.

And of course, normally your partner doesn't have control over whether you get hired or fired. If you were dropped into a room with the CTO and told that you had to solve a new-to-you problem they had already solved or you would be fired, you would probably find yourself performing much worse than if your team-mate asked you to weigh in on the problem that had been bouncing around on Slack for the past few days.