>It's a bit odd you responded to various parts of my comment but not the "But more importantly I think you missed my point..." portion (i.e. kind of silly for us to debate this audience straw man)
Your argument was that almost all creative professions have auditions similar to whiteboard interviews. I pointed out that that's not true because it's only true for performance artists. You then took the discussion off topic by arguing that movie stars aren't performing in front of audiences.
Actors are expected to perform in front of an audience, programmers aren't. The ability to perform in front of an audience is difficult and rare, and is completely orthogonal to the skills required to work day to day as a programmer. Whiteboard interviews are just too far removed from anything resembling actual programming to be a work sample test. At best you're administering an ad hoc IQ test, but then you're adding an adversarial public performance aspect for no good reason. That adversarial public performance aspect is the biggest single difference between whiteboard interviews and real programming work--it's a much bigger difference than the difference between acting auditions and acting day to day.
>I'm guessing, like most developers, this is your first/only profession
I also switched careers after years in another field.
> not every job requires the level of problem solving we deal with on a regular basis
This is true. But having worked on the embedded systems side of hardware, there are many professions that do require at least the level of problem solving that programming does.
EEs (the majority of whom don't have any kind of certification unless they're working in power systems), computer engineers, and even embedded developers don't routinely go through the kinds of whiteboard problem solving tests that you're talking about. Engineers working on real time, safety critical systems are hired every day without a Google style 6 person interview interview.
The key differences are that these companies aren't trying to cargo cult the Google interview process, they don't have engineers a year or two out of college conducting the interviews, and they aren't paralyzed by the fear of unqualified candidates slipping through.
I spend a lot of time on (capital E) Engineering forums. You don't see people on those forums complaining about the industry standard interview. You don't see flame wars started every time someone even mentions interviews. I've never heard of an EE with 20 years experience being asked to solve pet problems by a 22 year old new grad. And I've never heard of an EE spending months practicing for an interview.
Clearly our interview process is broken. Perhaps it's time to look at similar industries and spend some time trying to figure out if we are really so different instead of insisting that programming is so uniquely challenging that it requires such a controversial interview process.