Coding on a whiteboard is the worst. I’ve been in google interviews where I mention that the whiteboard format makes the process very difficult because of how much work it is to rework existing code.
The interview replied “well wouldn’t you have to do the same on a computer?” chuckles to himself at how clever he is that he realized that
No numb-nuts, on a computer I can move lines around by pressing Alt+Down. Here I need to erase the entire thing and re-write it, which wastes precious time, so instead I spend way more time pre-planning the exact layout of the code, which wastes more precious time.
And in the end you take a picture of it to transcribe into the computer to send to the hiring overlords. Just let us use our tooling to begin with.
Interesting. This was 2019, but it was a SRE position. Don't know if that makes a difference. Probably not, because the interviewers didn't even know it was for an SRE position.
