> That being said, the way Google and other companies use whiteboards is an epic fail. Asking someone to code on a whiteboard is stupid. Asking them to solve algorithm puzzlers on a whiteboard is lame. This isn't how we use whiteboards every day so why should a candidate be expected to use them this way during an interview.

Every candidate I interview has the choice between coding on a whiteboarding, and coding in a text editor with rudimentary code formatting.

I really like it when people code in the text editor, because that's one less thing I have to transcribe in my interview evaluation.

Regardless of whether they will choose the whiteboard or the laptop, I have never, and will never mark people down for typos, confusing .length with .size, a missed semicolon, or any other petty bullshit that isn't pertinent to the problem. I'm not hiring a compiler.