"Whiteboard problems were never meant to be fast, scalable or simulate real-world problems to ensure high-quality hires." No "problems" can simulate a real world situation, real world development is not a set of questions to solve. Not even the popular problems where the person is asked to do stuff like write a zigzag binary tree traversal or put ant on a chess board.

Also I still have to understand why interviewing has to be a scalable process. Are we interviewing 1000s of candidates at a time at some company ? From all I can think that is totally not the right place for a company to be. Granted there are millions of upcoming jobs, they are distributed across too many companies/teams , so the number of interviewees per head would be more or less constant.

"Programmers in this era were just used to the idea of writing code on paper. " So no one in current age group is comfortable planning on a whiteboard ? Does the author think that things are not planned on a whiteboard in real life ? I am 27 years old (maybe too old according to the article but still I was never a part of the punched card generation ) but how does that count as a reason not to ask someone younger to explain his/her approach or how they incorporate feedback on a whiteboard ? Whiteboard interviews are not meant to check if a interviewee can memorize the language constructs properly as being portrayed by the article, if such is the case, the candidate better walk away.