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>&gt;If someone has years of experience in their field and a strong portfolio<p>Well, the problem is that quite a lot of programmers <i>don&#x27;t</i> 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.