Companies should be hiring people on a contract basis to perform REAL WORK. This work should ideally be the very type of work they would be doing if they were hired full time.
If they do a good job, then great! Hire them on full time.
If they don't do a good job, but they meet the acceptance criteria of the contract, then they get paid, but don't get hired full time.
If they don't complete the contract requirements, then they don't get paid at all.
This arrangement is completely fair to both parties, and doesn't waste anyone's time. It's a win/win scenario.
Unfortunately, most companies are too lazy to set up a hiring process that looks like this.
The trick to pair programming is for each dev to have their own workstation with two screens.
Then, you simply use a screen sharing tool to share and collaborate on a code editor on each of your primary screens. We used to use Screenhero for this before they got bought out by Slack, but another tool that works well is something like Tuple.app or Drovio.
The beauty of this approach is that each person can "check out" temporarily and do research and look up stuff or check messages on their secondary monitor (without the other person seeing it), but they can easily move their mouse back over to their primary monitor and re-join in on the pair programming.
It makes pair programming a lot more tolerable, and gives you the ability to collaborate, while still having some flexibility and autonomy.
This also works well in both local and remote pairing sessions.
You need to be using RubyMine. Simply command-click on ANYTHING to jump to the definition, even if it's nested deep in a gem that your project uses.
RubyMine, and the "jump to definition" feature in particular, is the primary thing that enabled me to really "get" Ruby and finally understand how everything worked together.
That was the theme of Quake2: captured humans were "automated" with implants. Today we start with cows, in 50 years we extend this to violent criminals and who knows, maybe in 100 years most of us will be automated for "safety reasons".
I have hired quite a few interview candidates that did AMAZING on the interviews and code tests, but turned out to be terrible programmers when it came to real world problems and/or team dynamics.
I've also had candidates that utterly bombed their interviews, but we gave them a chance and they turned out to be some of the best employees we ever had.
Unless someone's daily job is going to actually be writing leet puzzle code all day, leet puzzle code tests don't tell you all that much about how someone can actually perform their job, especially when under the pressure of a stressful interview environment.
I'm at a point now where I firmly believe that what all these leet code tests are actually about is GATEKEEPING. It's about making devs feel smug about themselves as they administer the test to the candidate, and it's about inflating their own egos. It's basically just a form of hazing. After all, anyone can ace those puzzles if they study them beforehand. You might as well be hiring them based off of whether or not they can solve a Rubik's cube.
So I stopped doing those types of interviews. I have a "gut check" conversation with the dev to get a rough sense of their skill level, and then I might hire them on a contract basis to do REAL work on my projects. If I like their work, I might hire them full time. It's the ONLY REAL way to find out how someone actually works, and whether or not you get along with them.
I have a 5 year old son. He has access to an iPad and all of my old game consoles (a Switch, my old PS4 Pro, and my Xbox One X), but he mostly prefers using the iPad.
The iPad is locked down and has a ton of educational apps on it, but the main thing he does on there is watch Youtube Kids or play Minecraft (using an Xbox controller with a bluetooth connection to the iPad).
His Youtube Kids account is locked down to mostly educational content only, with the content restrictions set to 2-4 years old. When I had it set to the 5-7 age range, Youtube kept showing him a lot of inappropriate videos.
He knows how to use the search feature to find videos about just about any topic. I might have a conversation with him about quantum mechanics and then later in the day I will catch him watching a bunch of videos about the topic. He is obsessed with outer space and black holes. He will binge on low quality entertainment like my little pony for a while, and then he will watch some educational videos about math, and then he will switch over to some Kurzgesagt educational videos about outer space or something, and then he might switch to magic school bus.
Any time I see something that I don't like on Youtube kids (like Ryan toys review), I will block the video (or the entire channel). I probably have 30 different channels blocked on Youtube Kids.
I don't know if I'm doing the right thing by letting him watch so much content, but I can definitely say that he knows waaayyy more about the world than I ever did at his age, and he is also a voraciously curious self-educator. He loves math, mainly due to the Number Blocks TV show, for example.
I have a nine year old like that. One moment he's into silly toddler videos, the next he's watching videos about history, astrophysics, math or whatever he fancies at that moment. It's hard to say whether this is good or bad but I don't want to restrict him so I keep an eye out and every now and then suggest a subject.
Companies should be hiring people on a contract basis to perform REAL WORK. This work should ideally be the very type of work they would be doing if they were hired full time.
If they do a good job, then great! Hire them on full time.
If they don't do a good job, but they meet the acceptance criteria of the contract, then they get paid, but don't get hired full time.
If they don't complete the contract requirements, then they don't get paid at all.
This arrangement is completely fair to both parties, and doesn't waste anyone's time. It's a win/win scenario.
Unfortunately, most companies are too lazy to set up a hiring process that looks like this.