I did a whiteboard-based interview recently. I am very, very bad at these, mostly because I tend to freeze up. Fortunately, there were two parts, and by the s

I did a whiteboard-based interview recently. I am very, very bad at these, mostly because I tend to freeze up. Fortunately, there were two parts, and by the second part, I was more comfortable, and did significantly better [0]. Your point about being clear about refactoring and talking through the problem is critical, I think. It also helps if the problem starts small (write a function to reverse a string) and builds in complexity. That allows the interviewee some time to find their sea legs, as it were. [0] During the first part, I completely, totally, forgot about SQL joins. No, really.