I have been on the other end of the process more than once, in different companies and countries, and I have literally never seen anything like that.

> (They'll write crap like "()f" or "f()a" when they want to call a function, stuff like that.)

Who cares? If they write code that's well engineered and works in your product and they rely on auto-complete or whatever, isn't that what your business needs and why they really pay you? Furthermore, said code will be written from a comfy chair while they listen to their favorite music, with access to Google, SO, etc. And they will have enough time to leisurely think about what they're doing, test, refactor, etc.

In contrast, during such an interview, they are hand-writing code under duress for a problem they've had no time to think about while being judged by one or more people staring at them. If you're company is one of those famous ones where they get so many applicants they need to weed out many potentially good people, and also don't care whether they let in crappy people who game this system, then fine, whatever works.

I frankly still don't understand what's the expectation of such whiteboard exercises. It's just one method, and companies have to understand that one day maybe it will be superseded, hopefully soon. This "we have always done it that way" is ridiculous. If you want to know how good a candidate is, you can easily do it with pertinent questions and maybe a couple of pair programming exercises to see how the person codes, how he/she structures the code in a comfortable situation, not under stress and in an unrealistic scenario -> coding on a whiteboard, as if we had no electricity. Whiteboards should be a tool, not the goal of an interview.