I'm not saying ignore people's portfolio. I'm only saying I don't spend a lot of time doing it before I talk to them. You also understand as well as I do that code portfolios and art portfolios are very different things, we can't compare those two types of interviews directly. It's easy to get a sense of quality from an art portfolio very, very quickly. At the same time, it can take days to understand whether a code portfolio has high quality.

You, as someone who'd done a lot of hiring, I think understands that a hiring manager doesn't have 4 hours to research each and every candidate at the resume phase before interviewing them on the phone, while also trying to write code and manage other coders at the same time. We take the best candidates we get, rank the resumes, look over the portfolios, reject any candidates that aren't prepared for the job, then call the top candidates and chat on the phone for a few hours, after that bring in the top from that set for interviews, which can be multiple days.

I also take hiring extremely seriously, and I've never had to fire someone, because we spend a lot of time talking with the candidate and making certain they'll fit in well on the team. That time spent talking is spent talking about their portfolio, having the candidate explain in their own words why they made the design decisions they made, why they chose to work on certain projects.

I would be willing to bet that in a face to face conversation, we would be agreeing damn near 100% on hiring philosophy and process. The problem here is it's hard to get across my motivation online in text. :P