Online coding interviews

Ask anyone who interviews engineers what they dread, and it is rarely the questions. It is the first ten minutes. The screen-share that won't start, the candidate hunting for an editor, the “can you see my screen now?” that quietly eats the time you needed for the actual problem. We built ShareCode partly because we were tired of losing those minutes ourselves. Now we paste a link into the calendar invite, and the moment the candidate clicks it they are typing in a real editor. Nothing to install. No account. No warm-up tax before the interview even begins.

How an interview runs, start to finish

Because both sides share the same editor, the interview stops being a performance and starts being a conversation. Drop a starter snippet in before the call. Highlight the line you want them to look at. Fix a typo for them when they are clearly flustered by it, instead of watching them lose two minutes hunting for a missing bracket. The thing you are actually trying to learn — how this person thinks when the answer is not obvious — only shows up when you can watch the code take shape, not when a finished solution lands in the chat at the end.

50+ languages, no environment to configure

A candidate who is strongest in Go should interview in Go, not in whatever your team happens to use. ShareCode supports over fifty languages with syntax highlighting, so you can match the editor to the person rather than the other way around. The download button lets you save the finished solution as a real file for your notes or to share with the rest of the panel.

Keeping the screen fair

A good interview measures how someone solves problems, not whether they have memorised trivia. Because setup friction is gone, you get the full session for the actual problem — and a consistent, shared environment for every candidate makes it easier to compare them fairly. The blog posts below go deeper on designing the questions themselves.

Designing a question that measures the right thing

The tool removes the friction; it cannot write a good question for you. Our rule of thumb after running plenty of these: pick something close to the actual job, and open enough that two reasonable engineers might solve it two different ways. The clever “aha” puzzles feel rigorous, but really they just test whether the candidate has bumped into that exact puzzle before. We have had far better luck with something mundane — parse this messy input, model it sensibly, handle the couple of edge cases that bite in production. Boring problems are honest problems, and you learn more watching someone work one than watching them recite a trick.

A shared editor changes how you can pose the problem. You can pre-load a starter file with a function signature and a few example inputs so the candidate is not wasting time on boilerplate. You can add a failing test for them to make pass, or paste a small snippet of buggy code and ask them to find the defect. Because both of you are in the same document, you can extend the problem on the fly when someone finishes early, turning one question into a natural progression rather than scrambling for a follow-up.

What to watch for during the session

Watching the code appear keystroke by keystroke gives you signal you simply cannot get from a finished solution pasted at the end. Does the candidate clarify the requirements before diving in? Do they start with a rough approach and refine it, or freeze waiting for the perfect answer? When they hit a bug, do they reason about it methodically or guess? How do they name things, and do they notice the edge cases without being prompted? None of this is visible in a take-home submission, and it is exactly the kind of thing you are hiring for.

The shared cursor also lets you stay involved without taking over. Dropping a comment on the line they are stuck on, or highlighting the part of the prompt they have overlooked, keeps the session moving and mirrors how you would actually help a teammate. A candidate who takes a hint well and incorporates it is showing you something valuable.

Common interview formats, and when to use each

Different stages call for different formats, and a shared editor supports all of them:

• Live problem-solving. The classic format — a self-contained problem the candidate works through in 30 to 45 minutes. Best for assessing reasoning, communication, and how someone handles ambiguity.
• Debugging a real snippet. Paste a small piece of broken code and ask the candidate to diagnose and fix it. Excellent for senior roles, because reading and repairing code is closer to day-to-day work than writing it from scratch.
• Pair-style collaboration. Work through a problemwith the candidate as you would with a colleague. This tests how they collaborate, not just whether they can perform under observation.
• Code review walkthrough. Give them a working but imperfect implementation and ask what they would change. Surfaces judgement about readability, trade-offs, and maintainability.

Mistakes interviewers make — and how to avoid them

The most common mistake is reaching for an obscure puzzle because it feels rigorous. It usually just filters for people who happened to study that puzzle. Another is staying silent while the candidate flounders; an interview is not an exam, and a stuck candidate given no help tells you less than one you nudge and observe. A third is changing the question or the bar between candidates, which makes comparison meaningless. A consistent, low-friction environment for every interview — same editor, same setup, same starting point — is a quiet but real contributor to fairer hiring decisions.

For candidates: how to prepare

If you are the one being interviewed, the best preparation is not memorising solutions — it is practising how you work out loud. Get comfortable restating the problem in your own words, asking clarifying questions, and narrating your approach before you start typing. Begin with something simple that works, then improve it; interviewers would rather see a correct brute-force solution and a plan to optimise than a half-finished clever one. Talk through your edge cases, and if you get stuck, say what you are considering — the person on the other side of the shared editor is usually trying to help you, not catch you out.

Frequently asked questions

Remote versus in-person technical interviews

For a long time the in-person whiteboard interview was the default, and it had real drawbacks: writing code on a wall is nothing like writing it in an editor, and it favours candidates who happen to be comfortable performing at a marker board. Remote interviews in a shared editor fix the most artificial parts. The candidate types in a real editor with real syntax highlighting, the way they actually work, and you both see the same screen without anyone craning to read a photograph of a whiteboard afterward.

Remote screening also widens the pool. You can interview candidates in other cities and time zones without travel, schedule more flexibly, and remove the logistical overhead that quietly filters out good people who cannot easily come on-site. The trade-off is that you lose some of the in-room rapport, which is why keeping a video or voice channel open alongside the editor matters — the conversation is still half the interview.

Reducing candidate anxiety

A nervous candidate underperforms, and you end up measuring their stress rather than their skill. A lot of interview anxiety comes from friction and uncertainty: a clunky setup, an unfamiliar environment, not knowing whether they are allowed to look things up. Removing the setup step helps immediately — there is nothing to install and nothing that can go wrong before the interview even starts. Beyond that, small things make a real difference: tell the candidate up front how the session will run, let them use the language they are most comfortable in, make it clear that thinking out loud is welcome and that getting stuck is normal, and treat the session as a collaboration rather than an interrogation. A shared editor where you can jump in to help reinforces that tone — it signals that you are on the same side of the problem.

The payoff is better signal. When a candidate is relaxed enough to work the way they normally do, what you observe in the interview actually predicts how they will perform on the job — which is the entire point of running one.