Then again, if you can implement Paxos on the first try...
Of course that is not exactly the same as some other problems presented by white board coding.
Every parent I know is a "great mom or dad" simply because you're not allowed to say people aren't great parents unless they are truly bad.
Raising kids is doubtlessly even less relevant.
Right. But if done successfully (or even just satisfactorily -- given how difficult of a job it truly is), at least has some correlation with character, and general cognitive fortitude.
And hence -- unlike the ability to withstand repeating whiteboarding sessions -- has at least some correlation with actual fitness vis-a-vis the role being applied for.
If whiteboard testing is frowned upon, I imagine testing a candidates kids would be doubly frowned upon.
That's a bit dismissive. From personal experience, if one isn't a complete failure, raising kids to a satisfactory degree would exercise one's managerial and time management muscles, not to mention their ability to work under pressure/sleep deprivation. Parents of infants
The one who's raised kids† obviously.
As that's approximately 3-4 orders of magnitude more difficult -- and indicative of not only of general character (by itself hugely important), but of the more generalized cognitive skills necessary do to high-quality software development -- than the ability to memorize a bunch of scarcely-used algorithms. Because, you know, all those websites and Big 4 recruiters told you to.
† And, to bend your requirements (which is necessary because you're presenting us with a false dichotomy), has darn well "seen this stuff" not only in college (unless you think they're lying about that degree), but in the 0.5% or so of real-life development work which actually requires you to conceive, analyze, and flawlessly implement some non-trivial (if not outright esoteric) algorithm right there, on the spot.
That is, I don't dispute that these skills have some importance -- just that the current default interview process assigns a ridiculous degree of importance to these skills, way out of proportion to their actual importance in the field. And to the exclusion of other, more generalized skills which are actually way more important, but alas, much harder to measure -- with the current crop of faddish (turn-the-crank) interview techniques, anyway.