[heckanoobs]

I still whiteboard my programming question when giving interviews, can someone summarize the case against whiteboards?

I'm just looking for the candidate's thought process and some pseudocode. I could do the same thing in an empty text file but the substance of the interview wouldn't change.

My feeling right now is that being anti whiteboard is focusing on trivialities like complaining that the office style guide uses Allman vs K&R bracketing or something. But I'm open to having my mind changed if there's something more to it.

[sidlls]

Being anti-whiteboard is a proxy for being against the "regurgitate this CS trivia on a board in front of me" style of interview, not against the use of a whiteboard.

Most problems in practice that require non-trivial application of algorithms, dynamic programming and the like have two characteristics that make them differ considerably from whiteboard style quizzes. For one, they're going to be much less contrived (pick a random leetcode question for an example of this, odds are it's contrived). Secondly, they're going to be resolved when developers talk to each other about them and there is recognition of the solution, which most of the time is an application of algorithms and data structures with library implementations.

The ability to whiteboard things like "given an array of integers and a target find the indices of the pair of integers in the array that sum to the target" and "find the first missing positive integer in an unsorted array in O(n) time and O(1) space" provides almost no useful information about a candidate's ability to solve an actual problem the company faces in most instances. There are exceptions, but interviewing everyone for the standard of that one exception is asinine.

[bgribble]

I like to use whiteboards for non-coding design questions, like talking through how you would architect an app, drawing DB schema diagrams, etc. It's a tool that we use for collaborating on things like this in the office, so demonstrating an ability to do it is meaningful.

Actually hand-writing code with a pen has always seemed weird to me. As a programmer, I compose code with a keyboard. So I give candidates a laptop and use an interactive screensharing tool (I like https://codepad.remoteinterview.io) where they can run code in the language of their choice in a browser, and I can watch and talk through the process.