[Bahamut]

There are plenty of things one can gauge candidates on via the whiteboard. System design, application design, psuedocoding implementation (or real coding, if necessary - it should be natural flowing from psuedocode to implementation though), problem solving with visuals to denote intuition...the possibilities are vast.

There seems to be a bunch of ingenuous assertions here that is characteristic of someone who doesn't think one should have to prove oneself. I'm at a FAANG and we don't even ask anything crazy hard for algorithms/data structures like Google or Facebook does, but our interviews still manage to be intense for technical and soft skills - they will challenge even strong candidates and one cannot pass the interview without displaying strong technical acumen or communication skills.

There is so much more to technical assessment than just coding. A whiteboard is just a standard medium for communicating ideas in a collaborative manner that still works the best for any sort of deep collaborative design when compared to any other medium so far.