Why your first technical interview should be async.
Live coding tests performance under fake constraints. Async work tests what people actually do all day. Here's how we run the async assessment we run before any live time.
Isha Yadav
Call My Crew · ydesigns
Live coding interviews are a hazing ritual we inherited from a previous era of hiring and have failed to question. They test how a candidate performs while someone watches them type, under time pressure, against an artificial problem, often in an environment they don't use day-to-day. The signal you get correlates more with interview anxiety than with engineering ability.
An async assessment tests something closer to the actual job: think about a real problem, structure a response, write code in your normal environment, communicate the approach. The candidate gets to think before they type, which is what good engineers do.
The format we use: a small but real task pulled from the client's actual backlog — usually something that's been sitting unaddressed for a sprint or two. Not a leetcode puzzle, not a take-home that takes a weekend. The task is sized for 3–4 hours of focused work, with explicit guidance that we don't expect more.
We're transparent about the time budget. "This should take 3–4 hours. If it's taking longer, stop and tell us where you got stuck — that's signal too." The candidates who quietly grind on it for 12 hours are not the candidates we want; the candidates who say "I spent 90 minutes, here's where I got to, here's what I'd do next" usually are.
Evaluation runs against a written rubric, not a vibe. Code quality is one dimension, but also: how clearly did they communicate trade-offs, what did they choose to skip, how readable is the result for someone who wasn't there when they wrote it. Then we follow up with a 30-minute live conversation to walk through the work — no surprises, just "show me how you'd extend this if you had another day."
The async format has a counterintuitive effect on diversity of outcome: it favors candidates who think before they type, candidates whose first language isn't English (more time for written response), candidates with caregiving responsibilities (no "can you do an on-site"), and senior candidates who refuse to do live coding tests on principle (we don't blame them).
Live whiteboarding will tell you who's good at live whiteboarding. Async work will tell you who's good at the job. Decide which question you want answered.