I interviewed this week. While there were a few whiteboard coding questions that I personally wouldn't ask, most of the interviews were quite reasonable (mostly algorithmic still, but it was in robotics, so understandable). But yeah, I actually don't understand why people insist on using a whiteboard so much. Everybody has a computer these days and typing is much faster.
At my previous company (not robotics) I conducted a lot of interviews and I think we hit a good balance between algorithmic problems and design/architecture ones. Then again, even algorithms questions can be formulated as real world problems - it help weeding out obvious brain teasers. We also didn't asks people to write code on the whiteboard - there was a separate coding exercise.
I don't even think that asking about algorithms is such a bad thing if you do it correctly and it's not all what you do. But perhaps too many people just throw a problem at the interviewee without and help or guidance.
Overall, conducting a good interview is hard and it is not a primary job of most engineers who do it, so it's not surprising there are quite a few bad interviewers out there.
