One particular expectation when whiteboard coding for an interview is that there is little/no downtime, you must be making progress or talking about your thoughts. Incidentally, 50% of my thought process then becomes "How do I talk about what I'm thinking about? Oh no, I'm only thinking about talking about what I'm thinking about..."

I would argue that a piece of paper showing that someone attended school and graduated and is licensed to be an ER nurse carries much more weight than a piece of paper showing that I'm allegedly qualified to be a software engineer.

I know it's totally anecdotal, but we've all heard horror stories about candidates who couldn't write a for loop; some of us have witnessed these things first hand. And yes, phone screens should be filtering out those sorts of candidates long before they start sweating with a dry-erase marker in their hand, but, well.

How likely is an applicant for a nursing job to flat out not know how to stitch up a wound, or to take a patient's pulse and temperature?

That's because she's already went through all that stress and bullshit and skills testing in med school and residency. If any clown could call themselves a nurse, and would apply to ER nurse jobs, it would take all of ten seconds before nurses would have to do whiteboard triage interviews.

I have no idea what the candidate did in their CS undergrad. Maybe they cribbed all their work from their roommate. Maybe they went to a party school. Maybe they spent the last 4 years as a 'Senior Developer' at FooCorp copying files from hard drives to floppy disks, and posting a few paragraphs a day on the company's WordPress install. Maybe they are an Architecture Astronaut who can talk for six hours about how great Haskell is at doing multi-manifold monadic trivariable entaglement, but has no idea how to do any real work.

Or maybe they spent the last decade building Bigtable and MapReduce, and Spanner, and TensorFlow at Google. I'm not an expert on Bigtable, or MapReduce, or Spanner, or TensorFlow, though - and I can't definitively, in 60 minutes, tell if the person I'm talking to is bullshitting me. I can't tell if they actually did any of that work, or they coasted. I can't tell if the complicated problem they are describing to me is actually hard, or if they are embellishing it. Even if I felt confident that I could make that conclusion, my opinion would be incredibly colored by personal biases.

Oh, I should check their GitHub, you say? Well, guess what - Jeff Dean - the guy who did spend the last decade building Bigtable and Mapreduce, and Spanner, and TensorFlow - doesn't have a GitHub account. Presumably because he has better things to do with his free time, then work on OSS.

Oh, I should hire fast and fire fast? Don't get me started on why that doesn't work...

Hospitals also hire people who went already through an even more rigorous screening process than even exists in our field just to become eligible to be nurses and doctors.

Once you're an RN or an MD with all the appropriate qualifications, assuming you're not outright faking them, they can be reasonably confident that you are, in fact, a competent nurse or physician and move on from there.

We don't have that, and so we have to spend a lot of time making sure that a prospective candidate even has the basic skills and qualifications of a software engineer.

Sure, I can, and I did, although I didn't come up with the super-hindsight-obvious solution I'm sure I learned three times over in college.

But it's the interview equivalent of your driving instructor making sure you adjust your side and rear view mirrors before you start the car.

I don’t care if candidates can figure out BFS under intense pressure in 30-60 minutes. That is nobody’s job anywhere ever. I want to know if someone can think creatively, if they’re a pain in the ass to work with, if they’re thoughtful and careful or if they shoot from the hip. Admittedly, these are hard to measure (which is one reason why I would support some kind of mild licensure, but that’s a different subject), but being able to derive BFS does not correlate with competence or ability. Maybe if you’re doing router hacking or something, I guess, but specific algorithms are so little of most developers’ careers.

Honestly, we all might as well read chicken entrails because that would be about as predictive as our current interview practices.

You’d be amazed at how little some otherwise competent people can figure out from first principles in an interview in front of a whiteboard.