[dm7]

whiteboarding is essential when hiring for roles where development environment is not productive. there are still huge systems which take 5 minutes to link on fastest machine, or embedded, real-time and distributed systems where it takes so much time to debug that one's daily productivity would be close to zero unless he writes code which would be mostly correct before first run.

developing under such constraints is radically different from environments with high iteration velocity - i.e. browser or scripting.

that said, in many modern environments whiteboarding is completely irrelevant, as modern application level programmer productivity is often ability to do plumbing-and wiring- work between many components and quickly assess why something is going wrong, rather then creating a highly performant or memory-efficient algorithm implementation.