This is a spot-on summary of probably most interview processes out there for software engineers, and I’m guilty of asking those kinds of questions to candidates: if they get it right, it doesn’t mean they are a hire, but getting it wrong would probably disqualify them.

To me, a candidate is a hire if I can see some interesting or valued contributions to StackOverflow, *something* on their Github (or GitLab) account, activity on Medium is nice too, especially if they’ve written decent articles, and there’s always side projects. Bonus points if they’ve read one or more books about this horribly-broken field we have chosen: Beautiful Teams, the Unicorn Project, Mythical Man Month, etc.

I have yet to meet a candidate, nevermind a coworker, who checks all those boxes. I’m sure they exist, they definitely exist on Reddit, but I haven’t had the privilege of working with someone like that. At the risk of gatekeeping, it seems like a truly passionate “technologist” would check most or all of those boxes.

But even then, if they don’t check those boxes, it doesn’t mean they are no-hire, it just means I have to put in effort to interview them and figure out if they are a hire.

It’s not easy to figure out if someone is a good fit in an hour or less, but if they could point me to their Github/Medium/StackOverflow accounts it could go a long way and benefit both sides.