[physicles]

I honestly don’t think that’s relevant.

A whiteboard interview tests your ability to do something you do constantly while writing code: you look at the code you wrote and run it in your head with enough fidelity that you can verify it to a first approximation. If you can’t do that, you’re going to be slower and you’re going to make more mistakes than someone who can.

Small contrived problems like recursion are useful for testing this specific skill. A program to calculate e.g. Fibonacci using recursion isn’t that complicated; to me it seems like table stakes for actually writing new software.