Whiteboard is cruel for actual coding. It's too far removed from your normal tools. Whiteboarding can be good for architectural design or stepping through something.
A sixty minute screen share is the sweet spot for me. They get to use whatever environment they are familiar with. Seeing someone work in their environment also tells you potentially a lot about the candidate.
Staff engineer that can't navigate their debugger?
Senior engineer that codes by copying every line off of stack overflow and mashing the keyboard until the lines somehow work?
Bootcamp graduate that builds test cases in Excel?
Junior engineer that writes code in notepad.txt and pastes it into a Python shell?
All things that I've seen happen that tell a different story than a whiteboard or a 3 hour submitted homework test.
It was a combinatorial sum-of-n problem. Given a sequence of integers, can you produce a target by summing N of the values. He used Excel to put the expected return value in column A, the target in B, and C+ were values. Saved as a CSV which his program ingested. It was neat, actually: the rationale he gave was that it made it easy for anyone to add test cases.
(The candidate was previously in the accounting biz, so his navigation of Excel to do this was wizardlike to produce a few dozen test cases in about a minute.)
Not incompetent. Doing it via screen share lets you see their approach to problems — sometimes those approaches are poor. Had it been a take home test, I would have never seen him do that, and never had the opportunity to discuss the approach.
A sixty minute screen share is the sweet spot for me. They get to use whatever environment they are familiar with. Seeing someone work in their environment also tells you potentially a lot about the candidate.
Staff engineer that can't navigate their debugger?
Senior engineer that codes by copying every line off of stack overflow and mashing the keyboard until the lines somehow work?
Bootcamp graduate that builds test cases in Excel?
Junior engineer that writes code in notepad.txt and pastes it into a Python shell?
All things that I've seen happen that tell a different story than a whiteboard or a 3 hour submitted homework test.