Blinkz0rz posted:

Yeah, that's kind of what I'm getting at. The process for interviewing at Silicon Valley companies is so loving onerous that it's untenable for normal companies to follow the same process.

Anyway, I think whiteboarding has a pretty important place in the interview process, but I think people miss the point. Whiteboarding should be more about watching how the candidate solves problems than about making sure s/he can write code.

I'd never ding a candidate on syntax errors and any company that does sounds like it would be terrible. I've interviewed candidates that have solved problems in pseudocode and because they reasoned through the problem carefully and I saw the code they wrote for the pre-test.