Love / hatred of the whiteboard process being of course a perennial topic here, there is one major distinction between Math/CS olympiads and the typical industry whiteboarding session: with the Math/CS olympiads, you can count on a reasonable degree of professionalism (in terms of forethought and judgement, and overall solidness of execution) -- not to mention basic common sense -- behind both the curation of the actual problem sets, and in the design of the test environments. These people know what they're doing, and their process is mature and generally well accepted. And the actual problem solving environment is designed for maximum efficiency and fairness.
In the tech industry, however -- here and there you'll find companies that know what they're doing: they actually put a lot of though into picking reasonable problems to solve, and present the candidates with reasonable conditions for doing so. They're clear in stating both the problem and what they expect; and the interviewers are reasonably personable, and have great communication skills.
But quite often, it's a total shit show: problems are often poorly stated (and sometimes ridiculously complex); combined, importantly, with a poor or completely absent statement of what is really expected from the candidate (As in -- do they want a perfect working solution, on running code? Or does it suffice to just outline the general idea, perhaps with pseudocode? Quite often this is never stated up front); along with gratuitously taxing and sometimes downright annoying conditions in which to tackle this allegedly crucially important problem you're asked to solve (among my favorites being: whiteboards with barely usable markers / erasers; or their electronic equivalent -- Google Docs, or other ridiculously unusable coding "platforms"; voice-only sessions of nearly any kind, but especially those where the interviewer clearly has limited communication skills for one reason or another; and then of course sessions where the interviewer doesn't know the language you're coding in very well, and you have to constantly pause to explain the basic facets of said language, along with the solution itself).
In the tech industry, however -- here and there you'll find companies that know what they're doing: they actually put a lot of though into picking reasonable problems to solve, and present the candidates with reasonable conditions for doing so. They're clear in stating both the problem and what they expect; and the interviewers are reasonably personable, and have great communication skills.
But quite often, it's a total shit show: problems are often poorly stated (and sometimes ridiculously complex); combined, importantly, with a poor or completely absent statement of what is really expected from the candidate (As in -- do they want a perfect working solution, on running code? Or does it suffice to just outline the general idea, perhaps with pseudocode? Quite often this is never stated up front); along with gratuitously taxing and sometimes downright annoying conditions in which to tackle this allegedly crucially important problem you're asked to solve (among my favorites being: whiteboards with barely usable markers / erasers; or their electronic equivalent -- Google Docs, or other ridiculously unusable coding "platforms"; voice-only sessions of nearly any kind, but especially those where the interviewer clearly has limited communication skills for one reason or another; and then of course sessions where the interviewer doesn't know the language you're coding in very well, and you have to constantly pause to explain the basic facets of said language, along with the solution itself).