Comment by mattbillenstein

I like the spirit of this, but he may well have not been hired for a variety of other reasons besides this -- including how he attempted to solve the problem or how he handled not being able to solve it on a whiteboard in an interview.

I hate whiteboard programming questions and I don't give them when I interview someone - I give them a laptop with 10 different languages on it, and some data to munge -- I think it's a pretty decent thing for both parties.