> You are then ushered into a room with the programmer's worst nightmare - a blank whiteboard.

It may be the case for a few, but some people (including me) feel pretty comfortable with a white board. There's nothing hard in using a whiteboard. It's just a big sheet of paper...

Then if people think that they will never have to use a whiteboard to explain the design of their system to someone, maybe it's because they just "design" simple system.