Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens
This post ought to be the final nail on the coffin of the cult of leetcode&#x2F;whiteboard style inverviewing.<p>Just looking at this guy&#x27;s repo and his writing style -- you&#x27;d be foolish to waste his time or yours on leetcode-style hazing.  Your conversation should be strictly high-level.  If you must, pick a file at random from one his larger projects, and ask a few straightforward quetions (&quot;I&#x27;m new to Go - can you explain why I would use this datastructure here?&quot;) just to make sure the repo isn&#x27;t a copy of someone else&#x27;s, and he isn&#x27;t outright trolling you.  Apologizing as you&#x27;re doing so, of course (&quot;Sorry, but do you mind if I ask a silly-sounding question or two about something in your repo?&quot;).<p>That&#x27;s all you need to do.  Most candidates won&#x27;t have work samples that are quite as slam-dunk, of course.  But still, your own &quot;smell test&quot; can save you tons and tons of time (and the candidate, agony).  It&#x27;s really, really hard to fake one&#x27;s way through questions like these -- and really easy to tell if someone is trying to do so.<p>Put another way, your basic mindset should be:  &quot;Trust, but verify&quot;.  Not: &quot;Joel Spolsky wrote that post 20 years ago claiming that 99.5 percent of all candidates are utterly incompetent.  Therefore I need to torture this guy until he confesses.&quot;<p>At least as far as answering the &quot;can he&#x2F;she code?&quot; question is concerned.