My reply is about 2 days late. But thank you for the feedback... I am genuinely trying to improve the process since I've been at the receiving end of it at one time as well.
I'd definitely like to run something like this but I'd need folks to install a good screen sharing tool (join.me, webmeeting or some such thing...). But I'll definitely be open to asking the candidate's willingness to do so. That way they can get working code in an environment they are comfortable in...
We do most interviews remotely and offer a remote work setup as well. So its always not practical to physically have the person code in front of me.
One of my most enjoyable experiences as a candidate was when a company shared login information with me for SSH-ing into a temporary virtual machine they had spun up at Amazon S3 solely for the interview. They asked me what editor I'd like present, and separately made sure any environment details were taken care ahead of time.
Then I was able to simply log in with my shell here at home, and the screen was shared with the interviewers. The whole interview took place in console Emacs, with the interviewer pasting in a question, me poking around and asking clarifying questions, then switching over to IPython, tinkering, and going back and writing code incrementally.
I think all of the modern front-end services that do this kind of thing are pretty terrible, like Coderpad, HackerRank, TripleByte, or more UI-focused screensharing tools. Heck, I'd even opt for just a Google Hangout if we had to do it by UI screen sharing.
I think the low tech route of SSH is vastly superior.
I'd definitely like to run something like this but I'd need folks to install a good screen sharing tool (join.me, webmeeting or some such thing...). But I'll definitely be open to asking the candidate's willingness to do so. That way they can get working code in an environment they are comfortable in...
We do most interviews remotely and offer a remote work setup as well. So its always not practical to physically have the person code in front of me.