The disdain is fueled by companies' behavior. Your approach makes sense, but if that were the case, then a DSA whiteboard interview should be a fail/pass -- a c

The disdain is fueled by companies' behavior. Your approach makes sense, but if that were the case, then a DSA whiteboard interview should be a fail/pass -- a company shouldn't prefer a candidate that managed to cook up an O(n log n) solution over a candidate that only got a solution in O(n2). In my experience, no company doing whiteboard interviews works like that. As OP themselves said in another comment, "it's not a binary yes/no, but gives a range to score the candidate" At the end of the day, you can't test for negatives and just pick a random person that doesn't fail anything. You need to have a defined set of values to look for in a candidate, and to design an interview that tests for those values. That's why I hate DSAs -- for most (all?) companies, they're treated as dogma rather than a pragmatic solution to a difficult problem.