A Story of a Fraudulent Coder
This could have also been entitled, &quot;A Story of an Incompetent Screener&quot;.<p>I have interviewed over 2500 programmers and have never looked at their previous work, on github or anywhere else. Never.<p><pre><code>  - I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s their own work.
  - I don&#x27;t know if they were part of a team that did the work.
  - I don&#x27;t know their role on that team.
  - I don&#x27;t know how long it took to build it.
  - I don&#x27;t know what else it connects to.
  - I don&#x27;t understand the context that the work fits into.
  - It&#x27;s usually far too much for me to review to get a feel of their ability.
</code></pre>
I only need to see a very small sample of work done just for me.<p>I usually have them do something small in 15 to 30 minutes, on white board, pencil and paper, or environment of their choice. OP mentions fizzbuzz. This is often a good choice (and weeds out 90% right away).<p>Then I review what they&#x27;ve done with them. I&#x27;m interested in their &quot;noun&quot; (what they&#x27;ve produced), but more interested in their &quot;verb&quot;, the discussion thay have with me about what they&#x27;ve done. That discussion can get very interesting...<p><pre><code>  - Why did you do it this way?
  - How else could you have done it?
  - What could go wrong?
  - If you had more time, what else would you have done?
  - What additional data could you have used to make your decisions?
</code></pre>
<i>That</i> is how you find you what a programmer can do, not by looking at some repository without context.<p>Believe me, I know there are lots of Fraudulent Bryans out there. They don&#x27;t get past me. They shouldn&#x27;t get past anyone who doesn&#x27;t have a lazy dependence on stuff like github.