I'm the author of the post and if people take one thing away from it, I hope that's what they take.

I don't understand this. What do you mean by mental associations?

It is crap, and I say that as someone who's gotten hired after white board coding every time. I am a good public speaker, and I like to think I'm a good coder, but damn do I suck at coding on a white board.

If you're a good coder/public speaker, you have to practice white board coding if you're looking for a job.

Oddly enough, I prefer coding on paper or a whiteboard and transcribing the code if I'm working on a problem I find particularly hard. I think I'm unusual though, I haven't met many people who prefer coding on paper.

I've seen candidates who screw up problems which boil down to trivial "if" or even just "return" statements on the whiteboard (like "write a function which determines if the argument is an even number"). The argument of mental associations makes sense, but having someone in front of a whiteboard with a trivial problem is a good way to tell if the candidate can program at all.

If you know how to do it, you should know how to do it on a whiteboard.

> I've always felt that writing code on a whiteboard is a crap way to interview people

I've never worked at an organization where folks didn't work through ideas together at a whiteboard. Some of said "work through" involves code snippets.

So, while coding on a whiteboard may not be necessary/useful, communicating about code on a whiteboard is extremely important.