[india]

I write lots of code just for the sheer pleasure of it. None of it is publicly available though nor would I like to share it. Shipping code is a lot of work. The other day I wrote a quick app at my end to analyze and make sense of some parts of a project that I am about to take on. It does what it needs to but if I had to ship it, I would want to proof read it and describe it's purpose to a general audience and make it at least general enough to have some utility outside my immediate needs. That's a lot of work. I write a lot of code for fun and profit. Writing code and publishing/sharing code are two very different things.

[nessus42]

Okay, well Google doesn't want to hire you if you can't write efficient and elegant code on a whiteboard for a problem they've specified while they look over your shoulder. Me, I only don't want to hire you if you can't take a few pages of code you've written for fun and make it presentable. Who would you rather interview with? (Assuming, of course, that I was offering jobs as nice as the jobs at Google.)

[india]

I might be an exception here but I much prefer the whiteboard. I have one in my room and I enjoy problem solving. Pressure environments really do not impact me much. And if you have a whiteboard in your office and you do use it for actual work and not just interviews, this gives me an excellent opportunity to check your quality as a future problem solving accomplice. It provides me a real if brief window into what working with you would be like and I like that.

Having said that, market realities are what they are and I will probably take a month off when I can afford it and put some substantial code out in the wild. Can't hurt to have both bases covered. I will still like to make the point in here that I will be doing this because of the perceived business climate not because I really want to.

[kstenerud]

"And if you have a whiteboard in your office and you do use it for actual work and not just interviews, this gives me an excellent opportunity to check your quality as a future problem solving accomplice."

Except that when preparing for an interview, most places will clean the whiteboards before you arrive to make things more presentable, and to avoid accidentally divulging company secrets.