Better ways to do that than spend 5 hours in front of a whiteboard. Never gone through a whiteboard interview and then thought to myself that was time well spen

Better ways to do that than spend 5 hours in front of a whiteboard. Never gone through a whiteboard interview and then thought to myself that was time well spent, neither on the interviewer nor interviewee side. I've written integer programs, ray tracing simulation software for fields of heliostats, custom orchestration tools and deployment pipelines, etc. and not once has anything said or done during a whiteboard interview been relevant to any of it. The actual job is pretty much orthogonal to whatever the interviewer thinks they are figuring out during a whiteboard interview and as above the stuff I've worked on goes over the heads of 90% of the programmer population so 9/10 they can't and are not qualified to judge things properly but somehow they still think through the magic of the whiteboard they'll divine the candidate's true capabilities. When working on hard problems I go to the library and don't stand in front of a whiteboard to see if I'm smart enough to reinvent some wheel. Chances are someone else has already figured it out and I just need to read some paper and then implement it. If they haven't figured it out then that means the problem is harder than I thought and will either need to rethink my approach entirely or spend my time on something else. Unless of course the job is to stand in front of a whiteboard and wave furiously, in which case you should be using a whiteboard to interview.