Mike, actually I totally empathize with your feeling towards the whiteboard questions. I would probably be flabbergasted myself if offered a live coding session

Mike, actually I totally empathize with your feeling towards the whiteboard questions. I would probably be flabbergasted myself if offered a live coding session. Whiteboard is much more forgiving in the interview setting, in my opinion. When I'm interviewing, I keep stressing the fact that I don't care about correct syntax, coding style and whatever have you when you are doing whiteboard - only idea counts. I also leave them for about 20 minutes to give them space to think. Not sure if that helps, but I've not seen people having problems after such intro. "Non-job projects" != "test projects". I do have non-job projects and showcase them when interviewing, but I would not take a test project as part of the interview process, unless I have really good reasons to do so.