[em-bee]

i do pretty much the same as an interviewer. i am interested to see how the candidate communicates (down to language skills if they are not native speakers)

i had one who could not deal with that at all. he preferred to show me some of the code that he had worked on. fine, i let him do that instead. i passed on him not because he refused the coding session but because we didn't communicate well enough for me to be confident that i could work with him.

as a candidate i would skip the introduction though and just start talking like i would when pair programming, mainly because i'd be uncomfortable to ask for permission first.