I think you'd get more value out of talking with them about those repos, and the process of building them, design choices, then any silly question like "how would you design a database". Of course, that would also mean you'd have to actually put more then a few minutes into prep for the candidate's interview...

I've had many, many interviews where I actually had to ask the interviewer "Did you take a look at my GitHub repositories and contributions?" only to be answered with "No, I didn't have enough time, etc. etc." It's shocking to me. Can we please cut through the songs-and-dances and talk about actual, real-world code?

To be fair the days when Github was a strong signal are long over. When interviewing it is rarely worth the interviewers time to look and figure out if it is original code or just forks. Whether the CV is well formatted and free of spelling mistakes is actually a much stronger signal than whether it has a Github link on or not.

Agreed. Every single time I've ever looked at a github profile for a candidate they've had 1 or 2 original repositories that are as bare bones as possible and 18 forked repositories so it "looks" to the untrained eye (i'm guessing recruiters) that they have an active profile.

And then you have others with 90+ repos, and 75%+ of them are original code, and have thousands and thousands of lines of code. Maybe all your candidates have been weak/just out of school.

Also, forked repos are fairly obvious, and there's a dropdown to just show source repos, and if they are manually forking to prevent it from showing as a fork on there, that's a pretty shady indicator that you may want to follow up on...

Those candidates are 1 in 100, seriously. If you have a stack of CVs to filter, it literally is not worth looking at everybody's Github to check. Just filter by formatting and spelling and you're probably good.

And that's why I think resume based hiring is shit, cause my resume isn't great, but my github and skills are stellar. But people like you would chuck my resume in the trash without thinking twice cause I'm not currently working as a programmer.

If that's true, the target of your blame should be the weak candidates who flooded Github with junk repos. And/or whichever journo or blogger started telling those people that "having a Github" was a shortcut through the hiring process.

While I agree with you for the most part, many companies want a "standardized" interview process, for both diversity and CYA reasons. Tailoring the interview to the candidate is actually illegal in certain organizations (like government), as it has large potential for abuse.

That's kind of bullshit though. There's no way for it to be truly objective or standard. You already know what university I went to and made assumptions based on that, you know where I worked before and what my hobbies are.

An interview is not like the SAT. And even the SAT is not an unbiased test.

Objectivity is not a binary, and just because we can't be 'truly' 100% objective doesn't mean we shouldn't try to be more so. If you ask everyone different questions, you don't have a baseline of responses, so you can basically fail or pass whomever you want without anyone being the wiser.

It may surprise you to know that I prepare extensively for interviews that I conduct, and that my questions do not include time-wasters like "how would you design a database". My questions are carefully tailored so that candidates who can program computers can sail right through and get to talk about interesting things.