>this barely qualifies as a clarifying question in my opinion [...] It is almost irrelevant to the prompt
One of my first internships was punching in 10 meter reams of dot matrix printed numbers.
After several days, during lunch, I casually mentioned how much easier it would have been if the list was electronic.
They said that it was electronic, they just printed it out "for my convenience" so I wouldn't have to constantly keep switching between two apps.
They gave it to me on a floppy, and with the help of an Excel macro I finished two weeks worth of work by the end of the day.
While these whiteboard questions obviously aren't designed to have wider context, I now always appreciate when candidates question the question itself.
One of my first internships was punching in 10 meter reams of dot matrix printed numbers.
After several days, during lunch, I casually mentioned how much easier it would have been if the list was electronic.
They said that it was electronic, they just printed it out "for my convenience" so I wouldn't have to constantly keep switching between two apps.
They gave it to me on a floppy, and with the help of an Excel macro I finished two weeks worth of work by the end of the day.
While these whiteboard questions obviously aren't designed to have wider context, I now always appreciate when candidates question the question itself.