There are three goals in interviewing: for the interviewer to gather enough evidence to prove that the candidate is going to succeed in the role, evidence that

There are three goals in interviewing: for the interviewer to gather enough evidence to prove that the candidate is going to succeed in the role, evidence that they will grow in the long term, and to sell the candidate on the position. A whiteboard interview isn't a good growth indicator, but it's great at leveling a candidate. Moreover, it signals to a candidate that their peers will be at a similar level. So I'd vote yay. If you pay attention, you can determine someone's proficiency at coding on the whiteboard in about 15 minutes. This is particularly important when you have people who are changing careers or junior or otherwise don't fit the mold. I'm honestly shocked at the arguments against whiteboarding as many of them seem entirely reactionary. "But I'm never going to work that way." Didn't we all do the better part of two decades of formal schooling? We test people like that for a reason: you can carefully focus on the specific markers of mastery of a subject. I understand why people make this argument: it's a reaction to some of the weird puzzles companies used to ask. But it's never substantiated that this will help the interviewer and candidate make a better decision, so it has the same problem the puzzles did. "But at work I have Google and StackOverflow." This is a good point, the questions you ask in a whiteboard question should be based on the fundamentals rather than trivia. But it's a terrible point because it accepts that the interview is just a ritual you go through and this argument is that we should make it fair. Whether a candidate knows "the answer" is not the point, it's more that they're able to talk about what's going on, have good instincts, etc. If you're an experienced engineer, you've seen lots of people write code, you know what looks like "junior" or "senior" and "guy who thinks anyone can just pick up coding." "But if I work on a computer I can compile and see the edge cases." Are you interviewing the candidate or the compiler? Again, this is the ritualistic view of interviewing. "But at work I have plenty of time to work on things." Everyone has this problem, so everyone is less able to perform, and the interviewer can simply adjust expectations. "All of these interviewing "tools" (or tricks) attempt to be time/cost efficient proxies for doing the damn job..." That's very much the ritualistic view. Other industries have had notions of apprenticeships and so forth for thousands of years, and our problem is that we view recruiting, professional development, etc. as things someone else does, rather than something we take ownership of. Interviewing is a critical business function, it can produce value and thus is not a waste of time. If you treat it as a useless ritual, though, it will be.