> Whenever I've had a whiteboard programming interview, it's always been a trivial problem that's a smoke test for "can this candidate actually write code or is

> Whenever I've had a whiteboard programming interview, it's always been a trivial problem that's a smoke test for "can this candidate actually write code or is their CV faked". I think it took somewhere between 5 to 15 minutes, which I consider to be rather well spent time compared to spending hours or days on a take home project or anything bigger. That sounds pretty reasonable, but I don't think it's the norm. I had an interview over two afternoons with 5 or 6 different whiteboard coding challenges, each around half an hour and each much more substantial than a smoke test. They were things like parsing and evaluating a string with a simple arithmetic expression like "2+3*4+5" or taking a phone number and enumerating every possible alphabetic representation (2 is "a" "b" or "c", etc.). Google has example whiteboard interview questions on YouTube, and one of them was writing a function in C++ that takes an array of integers and a target integer and calculates whether some subset of the array sums to the target integer. Not the most difficult things ever, but hardly smoke tests, and pretty annoying to whiteboard in my opinion.