[lazerwalker]

There's a big difference between someone looking over your shoulder and forcing you to explain what you're thinking, and someone working with you to collaboratively solve problems. In the latter case, you can ask lots of questions and throw out lots of dumb half-baked ideas, and actually get a meaningful, useful response from your partner/pair in response. If you're whiteboard interviewing, good luck getting your interviewer to meaningfully engage with you, since they don't want to "give away the answer".

The best interviews I've had were legitimate pairing interviews, where the two of us were tasked with solving a problem in a real codebase that the interviewer hadn't solved before.

(The best best interviews made it an issue in an open source project, so it can be a not-canned interview without you writing potentially production-ready code for a for-profit company without being paid)

[cnp]

THIS right here is the dream interviewing scenario and in my opinion the singularly best way to test a candidates competence, aptitude and personality. Solving problems together exercises all of these key things in harmony.

[re_todd]

There's also the fact that some people, like me, freeze up in these interview scenarios. I didn't get past my first interview a few weeks ago because I couldn't think straight knowing I was being judged going through this process. As soon as the interview was over and I was more relaxed, I thought of several good answers, like I normally do when employed.