I knew a guy who could go to the board and draw a FSM, construct a context-free grammar, or construct a proof for anything the professor asked for.

And in Algorithms, he could go to the board and walk through any algorithm we happened to be talking about.

In essence he was perfectly suited to white board interviews.

But when I worked with him in Software Engineering his code was unmaintainable, poorly commented, and he was very abrasive and unpleasant to work with.