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Comment by lfowles | Hacker News Reader

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..."

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I'm working on a large-ish project right now, and into one of the more tricky bits literally today. And you know what? I take breaks. I go read something on the internet or post a comment, or I go for a walk, or I go do one of the smaller housekeeping tickets I keep in my queue to give my brain a rest from continually focusing on the hard parts of the problem.

Can't do that in a whiteboard session.

Most of the time their technology stack with be vastly different than anything else you've worked with. There will be other people you will need to discuss and coordinate with. Articulating your thoughts and expressing yourself clearly and concisely is more important.

Vast majority of the technical problems have been solved and its delivery a solution to a business problem that is the most important aspect.

For this reason I don't do living coding sessions. People have asked me `why` which I politely say the answer is no. They seem to like the boundaries I set for myself and my project's more than some sort of white board.

Yes, I've been turned down for jobs over the white board but I've had more positive results than negative.

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