I'd like to think I'm a competent enough engineer, but I usually don't perform well in those live coding interviews, whereas I tend to do well enough in the "take home" tests. I wouldn't even necessarily say its a problem with live-coding, I've done things like pair programming before and its always gone fine, but an interview is an entirely different setting.
There's nothing I hate more than coding exercises in technical interviews, but the team wanted it, so there's a pretty simple one. I try to make as clear as possible in the preamble before we get to that part of the interview that I consider it to be a casual exercise, and have will offer to pair program with candidates who freeze up.
I honestly don't care if they know the answer to some leetcode problem (also something I state in the preamble), I want to see how they break down a problem, and if they get stumped, how they work with other people on it.
In the example I gave before, I had to explain to the candidate what the code they copy / pasted from the internet did. That might be fine for a junior candidate, but for someone with "10 years" of experience with the language, it's a non-starter for a senior programmer.
