The first dozen paired sessions I sat in on were close to worthless, and the reason was not the candidates. We had an engineer who treated the hour as an oral exam, a task invented specifically for interviews, and a scorecard that got filled in the following afternoon from memory. We were measuring whether someone could perform under observation by a stranger. Useful if the job is performing under observation by a stranger. The seven steps below are what we changed, in the order we changed them.
Step 1: Decide what the session is actually for
Write one sentence naming the single question this stage must answer, then check whether a cheaper stage already answers it. Most hiring processes accumulate stages the way a codebase accumulates dead files.
For a paired session the defensible question is almost always some version of: what is this person like to work next to when the problem is not yet understood? That is a question no CV, no take-home and no systems-design whiteboard answers, which is exactly why the stage earns its place. If what you actually need to know is whether a candidate can carry a large piece of design work alone over several days, a paired hour is the wrong instrument and a properly scoped take-home assessment is the right one.
Write the sentence down. It becomes the tie-breaker in step 6, when two interviewers disagree about a candidate and nobody can remember what the session was supposed to measure.
Step 2: Take the task from your own codebase
This single change improved our sessions more than the other six combined. Stop inventing interview problems. Go into your repository, find a small, real, already-solved problem, and strip it back to its starting state.
Good candidates look like: a function that needs a new case handled, a bug with a reproducible failure, a small endpoint to extend, a slow query to improve. The constraints that matter:
- Already solved by your team, so you know the shape of a good answer and roughly how long it takes.
- Completable in forty minutes by one of your own mid-level engineers who has never seen it, which you confirm by testing it on one of them.
- No single hidden trick. If there is one insight that separates passing from failing, you are testing whether the candidate has met that puzzle before.
- Boring context. Avoid domains requiring local knowledge the role does not require. A problem framed around UAE payment regulation tests familiarity with UAE payment regulation, which may well be legitimate for the role, but then score it deliberately rather than by accident.
Strip out proprietary detail and anything covered by a client confidentiality obligation, which in this market is worth a specific review rather than an assumption. What remains is a task that behaves like the job, because it is the job.
Our Expert Take
The test of a good paired task is whether your own engineers argue about the best solution. If three of them give the same answer in the same way, the task has one path and you are measuring recall. If they disagree and have to justify their choices to each other, you have a task that will generate conversation with a candidate, and conversation is the entire point of pairing.
Step 3: Brief the candidate before the day
Surprise is not a signal. Anything a candidate could have prepared but was not told about is noise in your measurement, and in a market where good engineers are interviewing at several companies at once it is also a reason to drop out.
Our brief goes out with the invitation and contains: the format and that it is collaborative rather than observed, the duration, who they will pair with and that person’s role, that they should use their own machine, editor and preferred language, that AI assistants are permitted, the rough shape of the problem domain, and the dimensions they will be scored on. That last item unsettles people the first time they send it. It should not. Telling a candidate you will score collaboration and technical judgment separately does not let them fake either one for forty minutes alongside an engineer.
Step 4: Choose the engineer, then rehearse once
The interviewer makes or breaks this stage, and the selection criterion is not seniority. It is whether the person can genuinely pair: contribute, be wrong out loud, take a suggestion, and hand over the keyboard without narrating their own superiority.
Some of our strongest senior engineers are poor paired interviewers for an understandable reason: they are used to being the person with the answer, and a paired session where the interviewer holds the answer the whole time is an exam with extra steps. Pick the engineer who asks the best questions in code review.
Then rehearse once. Have your chosen interviewer run the session with a colleague who has not seen the task, while you watch. Every time we have introduced a new task, that rehearsal has caught something: a setup step taking eleven minutes, an ambiguous requirement, a task finishable in twelve minutes by someone who had seen the pattern. Catching those with a colleague costs an hour. Catching them with four candidates costs four candidates.
Step 5: Run the session to a fixed shape
Same shape every time, or candidates are not comparable. Ours, in a sixty-minute block:
- Minutes 0 to 5, context. The interviewer explains the system, the task, and that this is collaborative work rather than an examination. Explicitly: asking questions is expected, and so is saying you do not know something.
- Minutes 5 to 45, paired work. The candidate drives. The interviewer navigates: answers questions directly, flags blind alleys after the candidate has had a fair run at them, and contributes opinions when asked. The interviewer does not sit silent taking notes, which is the behaviour that turns the session back into an exam.
- Minutes 45 to 52, candidate-led review. The candidate walks through what they wrote, what they would do differently with more time, and what they would want reviewed before merging. This is the highest-value seven minutes in the session and the part most often cut for time. Protect it.
- Minutes 52 to 60, candidate questions. What someone asks after working inside your codebase for forty minutes tells you what they noticed.
One rule for the interviewer: when the candidate is stuck and asks directly, answer. Withholding help to see how long someone flounders measures nothing that happens in the job, where the answer is a colleague away. How a candidate asks for help, and how they use it, is the signal.
Launch it: we will build the task with your team
Send us the stack and one recently closed ticket. We will turn it into a paired task, write the scoring anchors, and rehearse the session with your interviewer before the first candidate sees it. Python developers | Build a marketplace app in the UAE
Get 3 Free Developer ProposalsStep 6: Score collaboration and code separately, within ten minutes
This is the step that turns a pleasant hour into a decision you can defend. Two requirements: two independent scores, and written anchors.
Two scores, never one. A single overall verdict collapses into whether the interviewer enjoyed the hour, which correlates with similarity to the interviewer. Score technical judgment and collaboration on separate lines, and require a sentence of evidence for each. The combination is also diagnostic: strong technical and weak collaboration is a real finding that should route the candidate to a different team shape rather than to a rejection; strong collaboration and weak technical judgment at senior level is usually the harder no.
Written anchors, agreed in advance. For each dimension, write what a 2, a 3 and a 4 look like in concrete behaviour. For collaboration, a 4 might read: stated assumptions out loud before coding, asked two clarifying questions that changed their approach, disagreed with a suggestion and gave a reason, handed over the keyboard unprompted when stuck. A 2: worked silently, accepted every suggestion without evaluating it, did not ask what the code was for. Those are observations, not impressions, and two different interviewers can agree on them. We keep the full scorecard pattern in our guide to building a technical interview scorecard.
Within ten minutes. Not the next morning. Memory of a technical session degrades fast, and what survives longest is the overall feeling, which is the thing you were trying to avoid scoring. Block fifteen minutes after every session and treat a late scorecard as a missing one.
Step 7: Calibrate every ten sessions
After roughly ten sessions, sit down with the scores and ask three questions. Is everyone scoring 3 on collaboration, which means the anchors are not discriminating. Are two interviewers systematically a point apart on the same candidates, which means they are reading an anchor differently. Did the people you hired behave as their scores predicted.
That last one is the only real validation, and it takes a couple of quarters to arrive. When it does, adjust the anchors rather than the candidates. The commonest finding in our own calibration was that we had been over-rewarding speed: candidates who finished the task scored higher than candidates who got three quarters of the way with better reasoning, even though on the job the second group was stronger. We rewrote the technical anchor to score reasoning quality explicitly and capped the credit available for finishing.
The Four Ways This Goes Wrong
| Failure mode | How you spot it | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| The examiner | Interviewer talks less than a tenth of the time; candidates describe the session as a test | Change the interviewer, not the task. Rehearse with a colleague watching for silence |
| The trick puzzle | Scores are bimodal: candidates either sail through or stall completely | Replace with a real ticket from your repository that your own engineers solve different ways |
| The alien environment | Setup eats more than five minutes; strong CVs perform oddly badly | Candidate’s own machine, editor and language. If a shared environment is unavoidable, send it a day ahead |
| The late scorecard | Written hours later, full of adjectives and no evidence sentences | Fifteen minutes blocked after each session; a late scorecard counts as missing |
There is a fifth, which is running this stage in addition to a take-home and a systems interview and two culture conversations. Each stage individually defensible, the total an unreasonable ask. In this market, where the engineers you most want are being approached weekly, process length is itself a filter, and it filters hardest on the people with the most options.
FAQ: Pair Programming Interviews
How long should a pair programming interview last?
Sixty minutes of scheduled time, of which about forty minutes is actual paired work. Shorter than forty-five minutes and the candidate never gets past the orientation phase, so you measure nerves rather than ability. Longer than ninety minutes and you are imposing a real cost on someone who is usually doing this after a full working day, which both shrinks your pipeline and skews it toward candidates with the fewest commitments. We block sixty minutes and protect the last ten for the candidate to ask questions, because what they ask after working with your engineer is one of the more useful signals in the whole process.
Should the candidate use their own machine and tools?
Yes, almost always. A developer on an unfamiliar keyboard layout, in an unfamiliar editor, without their own shortcuts and snippets, performs materially below their real level, and you have no way to quantify the gap. Let them use their own setup, their own editor, and the language they are strongest in unless the role genuinely requires one specific language on day one. The exception is when a shared environment is unavoidable for security reasons, in which case send the environment at least twenty-four hours ahead so they can configure it before the session rather than during it.
Are AI coding assistants allowed during the session?
Allow them, and say so in the brief. Banning the tools your team uses daily tests a working style nobody on your team actually practises. What changes is what you score: the interesting signal is no longer whether the candidate can recall an API, it is whether they can judge the output. We watch for three things. Do they read what was generated before accepting it. Can they explain why a suggestion is wrong when it is wrong. Do they notice when the assistant has quietly changed behaviour they did not ask it to change. A candidate who accepts generated code without reading it is showing you exactly how they will review a colleague pull request.
Does a pair programming session replace a take-home assessment?
It replaces the part of a take-home that was trying to measure whether someone can write working code, and it does that better because you can see how the code arrived. It does not replace the part that measures sustained design judgment on a larger problem, because sixty minutes is not long enough to show that. In practice we run one or the other rather than both, chosen by role: a paired session for roles where daily collaboration is the main risk, a take-home for roles where independent architectural judgment is the main risk. Running both on the same candidate is a reliable way to lose senior people to employers who respect their time more.
Get started: run it on your next shortlist
Tell us the role and we will send a shortlist that has already been through a paired session on a task from a comparable stack, with the two scores and the evidence sentences attached. React developers | Data engineers
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Method note: the seven steps, the session timings, the two-dimension scoring approach, the written anchors and the four failure modes are our own method, developed across the paired technical interviews we have run for engineering roles in this market. The calibration finding about over-rewarding speed is our own observation from reviewing our scores against hiring outcomes. No external study is cited and none is implied. Adjust the durations and anchors to your own stack, then hold them fixed across a hiring round so that candidates remain comparable.