I've seen articles about technical interviews too many times to count, and while I personally don't believe whiteboarding is a good tool for interviewing and do

I've seen articles about technical interviews too many times to count, and while I personally don't believe whiteboarding is a good tool for interviewing and don't use it when I perform interviews, I do believe that any good engineer should be able to whiteboard answers with relative ease. The gripe really is dependent on the specific questions, however if you've worked with a technology stack you should be able to recall the function names, parameter order, and basic pseudo code syntax to write answers to questions. If a developer is dependent on their IDE or Google to do absolutely anything, I wouldn't hire that person. Even developers directly out of college have done enough programming to do the basics, and if a developer can't they should be honest about their abilities and rather than stumble through a wrong or incomplete answer. Often the interviewer will still ask you to try your best, but it's important to be honest about your capabilities. I've interviewed at dozens of technology companies, many that do whiteboarding, and I've always done well. I've gotten offers significantly more times than I've ever been rejected, this isn't because I interview well, but because the things I claim to know and be an expert at, I know better than the back of my hand. If a software developer has been writing code and working with a set of technologies on a daily basis for years, I'd expect the same of any of them. From what I've seen of the modern software engineers isn't that they interview poorly, or that whiteboarding is the blocking issue. It's that they're actually poor engineers. Lots of people are taking 8 to 10 week crash courses on programming and think they are near the same level as someone who went to college for four years, even tend to expect the same pay. I actually don't think college is generally useful for software engineers either, but it's about the time spent. The best programmers by far are those who started young and even program personal projects as a hobby, who actually love to write software. I love writing software, getting wrapped up and losing track of time, creating amazing software that solves difficult problems and is a delight to use. I hire developers who are the same.