[pjsg]

Interviewees rightly complain that whiteboard coding exercises are unfair -- some people don't perform under pressure. A take home exercise is the solution for that. Make it time boxed (say 2 hours) and the interviewee can use any resources that they want (which is what happens anyway when working).

In our experience, not everybody gets the code correct (at least according to our test cases). It then turns into an interesting exercise to ask the candidate how they would fix the code to deal with the failing case.

When I was in a startup consulting company, candidates were asked to prepare a talk on a topic of their choice for 20 minutes and allow another 10 minutes for questions. I suspect that many candidates did not realize why they were being asked to do this -- we need to know whether they could get their message across in a limited amount of time, and be able to manage an audience that was throwing them off track. The smarter ones would realize when they were being side tracked and ask the question "Can we deal with these questions later as I'd like to be respectful of your time?"

I think that all candidates should realize that in nearly all cases, they are being asked questions, and to do things, for a reason. It may not be the reason that it appears to be on the surface.