&gt;It&#x27;s not a &quot;Valley&quot; thing. It&#x27;s a tech. company thing. I&#x27;ve never interviewed in the Bay Area, but pretty much every interview I&#x27;ve had has asked me to write algorithms on a whiteboard.<p>The last time I had to write anything on a whiteboard in an interview, it was a data model relating to the work I&#x27;d be doing. I felt it was relevant to the process, at the time. If it weren&#x27;t I&#x27;d feel like my valuable time (as well as theirs) was being wasted. But I suppose this comes down to what a company wants. If they just want people who are generally smart, and can be ramped up on the company&#x27;s tech stack, fair enough. But some companies need to hire people who can hit the ground running. Much of my contracting has been done on such a basis.<p>&gt;Well, the problem is that quite a lot of programmers don&#x27;t have portfolios outside of work. I certainly don&#x27;t. I mean, I have a Github, true, but there&#x27;s not really anything on there except for a bunch of half-finished experiments. Honestly, I don&#x27;t have the energy to spend 8 hours a day immersed in programming, and then come home and spend one to two hours more building up my portfolio. Maybe that makes me a &quot;bad&quot; programmer, by some definitions.<p>Your portfolio need not be only Github work. Barring an NDA, you can certainly discuss your professional work. In fact, I <i>want</i> to be asked about it during my interviews, as it forms the basis of my experience (which in theory is a big part of why I&#x27;m there in the interview room!).