[fivereason]

one advantage to the whiteboard interview is that it allows a person to get the job regardless of their past experience, which can be determined by what they were "allowed" to do at previous companies. in some cases, people are pigeonholed into various genre of engineering based on assumptions about them (e.g., assign african americans or women certain types of work even though that isn't what they prefer). if you can only speak to what you've been allowed to do compared with what you can prove you've learned to do (via the interview), you could be at a disadvantage.

what if we could pick the type of interview we wanted? whiteboard coding challenge or work experience based?

[roncesvalles]

Agree wholly. Especially for early career people, going by past experience is just a test of luck more than anything else. I've meet truly world-class people who've worked on "nothing more" than maintaining some old single-VM C# monolith or some university's LMS system, and a lot of idiots who have impressive resumes with a lot of fancy numbers to show impact.