In an interview recently, the candidate did something I haven’t seen folks do. When faced with the hypothetical prompt, she asked for a minute to think, started sharing her screen, and began typing out her thoughts in the Notepad.
This did two things at once. She had me engaged as she thought about the problem. In the absence of a whiteboard, this would otherwise have led to an awkward pause in the conversation.
She also laid out her structure on the shared note. This allowed her to demonstrate how she thought about the problem without needing to talk about the structure and kept us on the same page throughout.
While I still miss the experience of working on a problem on a whiteboard, this was a great video alternative.
