The solution: dump (popular) algorithms! All whiteboard problems should be fairly novel and 'not possible to practice' or else you are testing their preparatio

The solution: dump (popular) algorithms! All whiteboard problems should be fairly novel and 'not possible to practice' or else you are testing their preparation, not their ability. (Admittedly, preparation is a measure of something, and 'conquering all algorithms' is a measure of something.) But neither are the measure you're looking for. And 'General IQ' is not only it either. The ability to decipher problems, understand requirements, grasp tradeoffs, translate that into reasonably clean code, keep possibly complex systems in your head, work with others and maintain a positive disposition. Finally, the elephant in the room is 'perceived confidence'. It took me 30 years at least to be able to understand how well a problem was communicated, and how good the solution actually is. Someone who is confident, who 'looks the part', who can communicate the issue clearly ... may still have a mediocre problem. The weird, lacking in self-awareness, a shy-but-blunt nerd who may be totally unsure of themselves, sweaty palms ... may possibly have just as great as a solution. We are hard-wired to see 'patterns' and our intuition misguides is significantly on this issue. It's a lot of hard work to try to ignore 'the bad parts' of one's own intuition while keeping the 'good parts'. One of the solutions to this literally is data. Instead of 'feeling' how they did, a checklist of things might help us structure in our minds how truly well something was accomplished. And of course, we can't ignore the fact that communicating matters, it just matters differently in different contexts.