[remoteorbust]

> It's bizarre to me that you think that whiteboard coding tests "communication", in any way. It's not like a presentation, or anything.

I feel like we're probably at an impasse if I can't convince you that a whiteboard is a decent medium to communicate ideas around datastructures and algorithms, but I appreciate your point of view.

I can only say my experience, which I hope you will take into account as one anecdote. I don't read books about "cracking the coding interview" or do leetcode or hackerrank. I left school 14 years ago or so my stash of cs trivia/secrets/gotcha isn't particularly full. I've done whiteboard interviews where I come up with at best a naive solution.

And yet I've received offers for fairly senior engineering positions at Amazon and Twitter and (hopefully tomorrow) from Google. Most of the whiteboard interview isn't even around the code, although that's a small part. Most of it is analyzing the problem, discussing constraints, discussing tradeoffs, walking through data structure manipulations, drawing arrows and boxes, that kind of stuff. Some code, maybe 30% of the interview. I just keep having this experience where nobody wants to play the gotcha game, they want to know how well I can communicate while solving a problem and they think they get that information out of the interview (I agree with them).

That experience makes it hard for me to understand a viewpoint that believes that whiteboard interviews are about memorizing secrets in advance.

[sidlls]

Have you considered that your experience interviewing at these places might have been atypical?

Every set of interview prep material I've seen from Facebook, Amazon and Google recruiters asking me to interview in the last 3 months has included links to things suggesting "cracking the coding interview" is a good start and pointing to similar docs otherwise.