[lotharbot]

Writing on a whiteboard while explaining yourself is different from typing alone into an IDE. Conventions you might use to avoid syntax errors (like typing a pair of braces and then filling the middle) may not work on a whiteboard. Pacing is different, and muscle memory doesn't help. You're looking at a blank whiteboard rather than your terminal with other parts of the codebase. The first few minutes of coding are often "getting up to speed"; many programmers are orders of magnitude more productive once they're "in the zone".

In short, I wouldn't consider "your whiteboard code is missing a semicolon" to indicate a lack of productivity overall, only a lack of practice coding on a whiteboard. (It surprised me how much better my whiteboard code got over the course of a quarter of teaching.)

[rmc]

FizzBuzz is not aimed to find the best, the kind of people who fail fizzbuzz don't fail it for syntax errors or semicolons. People fail fizzbuzz by staring blankly at the screen/whiteboard acnd not nothing where to start, you fail fizzbuzz by not knowing how to do a loop. You fail fizzbuzz by nkt knowing how to do an if statement, you fail fizzbuzz by not knowing about modulo arithmetic. Fizzbuzz is designed to get rid of those people.

[wladh]

I have never been in an interview for a job as programmer, to be honest, but really, we're talking about fizzbuzz here. You should be able to recite it in your favourite programming language. :)

For more complicated tasks I guess you can say it's debatable when whiteboard is OK and when you should give the candidate access to a computer.