Im a 'competent' programmer who has done few whiteboard interviews in my time and I have failed in most of them. Here is why ? I consider myself a competent pr

Im a 'competent' programmer who has done few whiteboard interviews in my time and I have failed in most of them. Here is why ? I consider myself a competent programmer since I have developed decent work@work and my peers recognise it too. But how would any interviewer can know about this ? My resume is like any other resume in tech world. They cannot. So I've to be put through WBI. For many years I couldn't have known what was wrong with me. Every time I failed I felt miserable to be honest. Eventually, I have narrowed down the reason. It is not just at interview I fail to problem solve - even when I try doing at home with a white board and 'explanation' I fail. English is not my region language but one would not doubt on my conversation abilities as I manage it ok. It is that I simply fail to explain solving programming puzzles in english since while programming I 'do' think in my regional language and most of the time in 'silent' mode in my head. Now 'silent' mode is again dreaded in interviews - as interviewers they want to know 'how you approach solving a problem'. I think a better solution to WBI would be to make interviewee do programming questions on a laptop (alone) where interview is held - say make it an hour worth of exercise. Have that program run through some time bound tests (like google code jam etc) and may be do a code walk through later with interviewer. This way interviewer is sure interviewee can code. Also, one of things that will definitely help would be to have some sort of evidence that you can code (git, code competitions etc). This gives some sort of confidence to interviewer.