How many people have you interviewed with this technique? After how many applications will you need to change your exercise, such that it becomes expensive to p

How many people have you interviewed with this technique? After how many applications will you need to change your exercise, such that it becomes expensive to put that much structure into it? How do you deal with applicants knowing each other and giving each other the challenge and tips on how to solve it / what your reactions and probes were? The pair programming part is not that different to how algorithm interviews are conducted at least in some places. You can definitely be silent for 1h and expect the best solution, or you can collaborate with the applicant and see whether their communication is good, their thinking is structured, etc. > In that untimed challenge the candidate submits their code and email. I expect you can't do that in companies which are highly sought after because it's too easy to cheat, and the stakes are high enough that people will do it. Yes the pair programming part lowers the chances, but people already cheat on live coding through various means, it'd be even easier if parts of the challenge are untimed. Overall I think the difference here is that of scale: if you hire a few people in specific positions, then fine. If you hire thousands (and you can rightly question whether that makes sense in the first place but that's the assumption for many of these companies), you can't have a specific interview for each and every position, you can't reuse the same interview question after having used it for 500 times, such that you can't invest that much into it in the first place.