> If interruptions require 10 or 15 minutes of recovery time for an engineer, it seems like watching someone code and asking them questions during an interview would be even worse.
Does anyone really conduct interviews that way? I've both conducted and taken interviews that involved a coding exercise that was done on either the whiteboard, a laptop, or even just a sheet of paper, and there were never any interruptions. I would just make notes of what they asked and how they solved the problems, but I wouldn't interject with questions of my own. Same when I was the one being interviewed. After they have solved the problem is when you ask questions designed to find out what alternatives they had considered and so on.
Does anyone really conduct interviews that way? I've both conducted and taken interviews that involved a coding exercise that was done on either the whiteboard, a laptop, or even just a sheet of paper, and there were never any interruptions. I would just make notes of what they asked and how they solved the problems, but I wouldn't interject with questions of my own. Same when I was the one being interviewed. After they have solved the problem is when you ask questions designed to find out what alternatives they had considered and so on.