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I don't see why the whiteboard is so unpopular here. Isn't it a good way to see how people are able to discuss solutions and share ideas with their colleagues?

I don't see why the whiteboard is so unpopular here. Isn't it a good way to see how people are able to discuss solutions and share ideas with their colleagues? The way I see it, one could start to find a solution on the whiteboard, possibly with some help from the interviewer. And next stage is writing the actual code, which can be done easily on the whiteboard if it's a short program.

innocentoldguy 12y ago
There are myriad problems with whiteboard questions: 1. The questions are always esoteric and have absolutely nothing to do with the company's business (unless, of course, they are in the business of generating Fibonacci numbers or CSS flags). 2. The situation itself is completely unrealistic and in no way demonstrates "how a person thinks" in a programming situation; which is weird since that is, after all, the universal rationalization for asking whiteboard questions in the first place. 3. Most, if not all, interviewers have no idea what to do with the information they observe in a whiteboard situation, so regardless of the result, it just becomes a confirmation of whatever opinion they formed within the first 30 seconds of the interview. In my experience, whiteboard questions demonstrate a lack of interviewing skills and are a waste of time for everyone involved. I refuse to interview people that way, and I'll walk out of an interview if someone asks me to solve something on a whiteboard. If you want to see my code, go to my Github account. If you want to see how I solve real-world problems, I use past experience, Vim, a debugger, a terminal, my gists, Dash, and Google. There. Did we really have to waste an hour of everyone's lives to get to that answer? Absolutely not!