In almost every interview I gave at the last several companies I worked for, I'd start with "This may feel a bit odd, but with this coding problem, I'd appreciate if you spoke through your problem solving. If it helps, pretend like I am your intern. Good ideas, bad ideas, pros and cons of whatever you're considering, it's all valuable information for me to learn a bit about how you approach problems."
I feel like being explicit like this put candidates at a bit more ease than having them try to suss out what the interviewer is expecting from them implicitly (and I know there are many interviewers that will auto-veto any candidate with the audacity to suggest a possibly imperfect approach).
I always hated when interviewers did this. My chain of thought is often backwards, very abstract, or otherwise wildly different from how it seems most others think, and it's very difficult if not impossible for me to articulate my thinking on the spot. In school for writing assignments I would have to spend alot of time reversing or reordering how I arrived at a conclusion before even writing my first sentence. And even just arriving at a conclusion involves taking many dead-ends; the process can be seemingly instantaneous, or sometimes require laboriously following rabbit holes (often with throwaway code) that I know are dead ends but nonetheless help me to explore context. I need to have the entire problem in my head and able to explore it to at least some extent before starting to formulate a linear chain of thought.
IOW, I can't explain in real-time how I'm working things out. I have to work them out to completion first, quietly, or at least have a good idea about what the full path looks, end-to-end, in concrete detail and only after the fact could I ever hope to explain my thinking. Asking me to explain my thinking while I'm thinking is easily the most stressful and impossible task anyone could ask of me. I'd rather you break my fingers as part of the interview process.
I understand as an interviewer that makes for quite a dilemma.
Similarly, practices like pair coding just don't work for me. I'm not not a team player. I like and benefit from design and ad hoc technical discussions, just don't ask me to sit down and write code with someone else, or even with someone looking over my shoulder. All parties involved, including myself, will just end up pulling their hair out. Though I do work best with people who think similar to me. We instinctively know when and how to set our boundaries and expectations.
I really wanna ask, because... I'm 46. Been writing code for a living about 30 years, never on a salary, always contractor. I wrote and maintain enough code for non-tech companies that aren't going to take a risk on AI rewrites anytime soon that I can probably coast until retirement. But I haven't interviewed or even needed to sell myself for a long time.
I always thought I would easily pass an interview, but I may have been wrong before all this on the basis that I don't work that well on a team.
OTOH ...is the question now really valuable whether a candidate can explain their thought process rather than deliver? Why wasn't that a question 20 years ago when it actually mattered? Or does it matter more now because the bar needs to be higher, and there's no cache of more experienced devs to train them up?
I think delivering is still a requirement either way, but the value is in hearing a candidate has the ability to problem solve in an unknown problem space vs regurgitate a memorized solution. Even better is witnessing some has the ability to try, fail, then self-correct, and rebound.
So, my policy has always been that if I sit through a meeting where a client asks for new feature "X" and I figure out a way to avoid building the new feature, and either use existing business logic / day-to-day processes, or else find some new way that doesn't involve code, I don't bill for that time. I'd say that I probably give up about 35-40% of potential coding work just by helping them work through that. Which is fine, because it leaves me free time to do other things.
On the other hand, I don't have the option to fail even slightly. I deployed a patch yesterday for an old, rare, logic bug in one reservation system, and within an hour I was being bombarded with edge cases of people seeing their reservations as cancelled during the 15 minute switch-over period.
Sometimes I feel like the job of a programmer for a company is just very different from what I do. If anything goes wrong with anything I deploy, I'm awake for however long it takes to make sure it's right. On the other hand: No PRs, no teamwork. Just a click to deploy once I'm relatively sure. And a lot of responsibility.