[PhrosTT]

Yeah I'm completely fed up with this whole GitHub or GTFO mindset. Many good programmers:

A.) Are great in their dayjobs and don't wish to spend their free time writing Open Source. Maybe they have families. Maybe they have non-coding hobbies.

B.) Work on private repos all the time.

Whiteboarding lets me prove raw problem solving IQ without being negatively judged for lack of twitter followers or technical blog posts.

[v64]

> Whiteboarding lets me prove raw problem solving IQ without being negatively judged for lack of twitter followers or technical blog posts.

Portfolios allow devs to prove raw problem solving IQ without being negatively judged for lack of documentation or a debugger.

There are developers who aren't good at whiteboarding interviews because they don't think that way and work better when they're at a laptop and can refer to other source code and documentation and can run their code continuously as they write it.

With those devs, they may not look impressive in a whiteboard interview, but you can look at their GitHub portfolio and draw conclusions about their programming ability.

An ideal interview should be holistic and include both off-the-cuff code and polished projects.

[dllthomas]

"without being negatively judged for lack of documentation or a debugger"

A good judge at a whiteboard won't mark you down for uncertainty about interfaces, which partially ameliorates this, for those cases where you have a good judge...

I'm also tempted to say that needing a debugger to lay out a mostly correct solution to a small problem is weird - can you elaborate on how that might be applicable?

In any event, I agree with your ultimate conclusion - holistic is probably a better way to go.