[HALtheWise]

I interviewed at Google in January, and they offered to let me use a computer if I had accessibility concerns with a whiteboard or really really wanted to, but discouraged it because they found it often made candidates too focused on the syntax of their code and less likely to have a meaningful high-level discussion with the interviewer.

[Frost1x]

That's hilariously ironic. If they wanted meaningful high level discussions without syntax focus, their interview structure would be different.

The most obvious change was to accept psuedo-code (like in the olden times) to reduce cognitive load dealing with: syntax, dynamic problem solving, and dealing with someone asking you random questions shifting your train of thought or changing the problem description on the spot.

This now common poorly structured interview process does a lot to discourage high level conversation and low focus on syntax. It tends to get hung up on language specific syntax, data structure recall, and less on designing and analyzing solutions.

BS atop BS... its BS all the way down