Have you ever interviewed at Google? They care about syntax, psuedocode will not cut it in the interviews... and Google has a lot of strong programmers.
Google has the name to attract strong programmers. I'd like to see stats on how few (or many) strong programmers their interview process misses. Especially when that interview process is used at a company without such a huge name.
Honestly, whiteboard interviews are for lightweight startups with very little programming knowledge. You should be looking at logic, not syntax. You should be looking at how the person thinks, not if they can memorize a specific language to do a simple task.