A couple personal observations here. I think there's a serious disdain for interviewing in general. The whole process sucks from end to end. Often it's because

A couple personal observations here. I think there's a serious disdain for interviewing in general. The whole process sucks from end to end. Often it's because the interviewers just aren't good at it. But when it comes down to whiteboard interviewing, I think it's about your value system. More specifically, I think every interviewer has an opinion on the practical <--> theoretical spectrum, and the problem is when the candidate disagrees with the interviewer's opinion on where on the spectrum the interview should be. The upside of a practical interview is that you are testing whether they can do the work. The downside of a practical interview is that it indexes heavily on experience and lightly on the ability to cross disciplines. Theoretical interviews are the reverse. So the important question is: what does your team care about? Google will care much more about the ability for their engineers to move around than your startup will. In general large companies will care much more about portability. They have deeper pockets and are therefore more willing to train you on the job, so generally speaking if they think you can ramp up (even for senior hires), they're happy. As much as startups will say they see things this way, it's not really true. Startups in general care that their senior hires come with substantial domain expertise.