[paranoidrobot]

> Whiteboard is great for sketching out ideas and solving problems collaboratively, which is a good indicator of team fit.

Agreed.

But asking an algorithmic problem is usually not what you're going to solve on the whiteboard for the vast majority of jobs.

In most jobs, it's usually some variant of:

- We have some new feature, what's a good way to design it - We're trying to add this feature to this existing thing, what's the lowest impact way of modifying the existing code. - We've got an existing feature that has some problem (bug, complexity, performance), Is there a way to solve that, and perhaps the same entire class of problems across the application by implementing a known design pattern.

There's not a huge amount of novel thinking other than how to specifically glue existing libraries, design patterns and so forth, together with business specific logic.

Most whiteboard coding questions tend to be of the "Design an algorithm to solve an anagram" or "Implement a sort function" which don't relate to the job at all, and tell you nothing about the candidate's ability to do any of the things they're going to do day to day.

[Areading314]

I guess you can run an interview poorly whether its on a whiteboard or anywhere else. If you are looking for an implementer-type role that isn't going to be doing much problem-solving, it could be that an interview working with real code makes more sense. A good process should involve a mix of these situations to get the full picture.