It is nice to hear a defense of this style since there’s often so much complaining about it, and the tips to mitigate the downsides are useful.

Personally I don’t mind a whiteboard session or two during a loop but what’s wild to me is how, especially at big companies, you’re expected to do four or five of these to get an offer.

How often do these companies decide “well they understand when to use DFS and they can merge-sort a linked-list and they knew to use dynamic programming but we can’t hire them because they couldn’t remember how to implement a heap”?