[VLM]

"I think I'd be OK provided it was acceptable to drop into pseudocode"

My experience and impression is its generally the opposite.

Whiteboard is a good place for psuedocode, data flow diagrams, schemas, flowcharts, block diagrams, data structures, and bug related examples. Its a pretty bad spot for source code other than one line notes. I usually have scratch paper with scribbles all over it when I'm coding, so that seems fair. I don't think I've ever written anything in Clojure without a REPL open, it would be a weird experience to write something out entirely on a whiteboard without running all the little parts first. Also the test-driven experience is very weird if you can't actually run tests. Its like testing someones teamwork skills by having them work alone, very strange.

I feel a professional obligation to begin all projects with a bit of google to at least prove I'm not wasting effort on NIH and find some pitfalls, so the suggestions to test a dev without any net access also feels extremely weird to me.

I think the primary fail of tech interviews is its nothing more than a stress test, selecting for candidates who don't really care, or at least are unnaturally calm, and that doesn't seem to correlate very well with ability.