For every one of them, there are 100 people in the pipeline who can tell you in great detail how brilliant the last project they worked on is but can't write a lick of code.

And if you couldn’t figure that out doesn’t that say a lot about your interviewing process.

Honestly, he was brilliant. I was looking forward to working with him. Right up to the point where we handed him a laptop and asked him to write some code. "I know you're looking for language X, but I'm really more comfortable with Y."

Me (who has written my share of Y): "Sure, that'll be fine. Y should be installed."

He proceeded to take 30 minutes to not produce anything resembling X or Y. It was agonizing.

That’s acceptable. Sit me down to an IDE to write some code and/or stand me in front of a whiteboard to draw out some architecture - like people do in the real world.

But don’t ask me to code on a whiteboard. That’s not a real world scenario.