After painstakingly writing out a naive implementation of a Sudoku solver on the whiteboard, local software engineer Mackenzie Beth was horrified to find no eraser in the room when she heard her interviewer say the dreaded words: “Okay, now let’s optimize this.”
“What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” Beth muttered under her breath as she began scrubbing away the code, her interviewer looking on placidly. After wiping her palm against her previously pristine white t-shirt, she continued, “Look, I’m not saying that whiteboard interviews are an abomination against the very essence of coding itself. But,” she said, holding up a hand completely covered in red marker, “you have to admit this is the stuff of nightmares.”
At press time, sources report that Beth had taken to crying “Out, damned spot!” in her sleep while rubbing at a blank whiteboard.