> There is a whole class of people you will miss I'm acutely aware that there's a degree of arbitrariness in hiring. That's why I was quite honest in saying th

> There is a whole class of people you will miss I'm acutely aware that there's a degree of arbitrariness in hiring. That's why I was quite honest in saying that I'd appreciate suggestions for better process. > One, let them take 5-10 minutes of silence to solve if they need it, and discuss AFTER that. I do that; as you mentioned, people are diverse - some are bothered/ inhibited by silence. If they are silent, I say something like "I can leave you think about it for a few minutes in silence, but it's best if you can just talk to us about how you'd approach the problem, even about the approaches that you know are not good enough; and you can ask clarifying questions if you need to". Thing is... if you kept silent for more than 30s without writing anything on paper, and I felt the need to intervene, it's either a problem that I consider "easy" and you should've figured out already - or it's one that is probably "hard" and you stand little chance of figuring out by yourself during the interview/under pressure (I've had a few people ask for silence, but can't remember a single one of them that found a good solution in due time). At that point, the only solution is to fall back to the "homework", because while you may be a good programmer, you're not giving me the information to assess that during the whiteboard/in-person interview. [edit] I should also note that this is valid for algorithmic questions; and not all jobs require that sort of questions to be asked - for some, I might ask some basic stuff to figure out that you know the basic algorithms, but I won't go into hard stuff if I'm asked to hire a junior frontend dev.