What I find most hilarious about it is FAANG (certainly, Google in particular, since they researched this themselves and then chose to ignore their own research

What I find most hilarious about it is FAANG (certainly, Google in particular, since they researched this themselves and then chose to ignore their own research: https://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like-google/ https://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like-google/) knows whiteboard interviews are pretty bad, but they continue to use them. I can only assume it's a means of filtering out absolutely trash candidates. FAANG also knows they are not hiring the best of the best. That's simply not possible when you're employing 10k+ developers. Some of them are going to be less than great. Your goal at that scale is just to avoid wasting a huge amount of money on a terrible hire, and whiteboarding is decent at filtering out complete trash, but the problem is we don't train people how to do whiteboard interviews properly, so they also filter out incredible developers who just aren't interesting in memorizing a bunch of algorithmic tricks they'd normally just look up, but would be perfectly capable of implementing whatever.