I'm much, much more willing to do a 15-minute programming test, or even a 60-minute one, than to give a potentially malicious company access to my network. References are for the last stages of the hiring process, once I know I can more or less trust the company.

And from my limited experience on the hiring side, while a trusted referral is worth much more than a programming test, a good report from a potentially adversarially chosen reference is worth much, much less. It's much easier for an unscrupulous person to find a friend who's willing to inflate their achievements on the phone than to provide on-the-spot solutions to programming problems they lack the skill to solve themselves.

> It's much easier for an unscrupulous person to find a friend who's willing to inflate their achievements on the phone than to provide on-the-spot solutions to programming problems they lack the skill to solve themselves.

A good hiring manager will be able to sniff that out rather quickly. Following up on references doesn't mean calling it a day after one random phone call either.

How do you sniff it out?

Obviously you give the reference a coding test

Ha! But in all fairness, multiple references, with references coming from verified previous employers. A quick phone call to the candidates prior employers to verify employment/listed reference will flush things out quickly. Also, most people are terrible liars when pressed ... even on the phone. It does require effort by the hiring manager though.

There are plenty of companies at which the senior engineering talent would very easily be outperformed by new graduates at FAANG. So calling their references to ask what their title was does nothing to verify their technical abilities.

Source: I am FAANG ATM and the new grads I work with outperform 10+ year tenured engineers at other companies I have worked at.

I assume a competent HM would dig deeper than that with a reference. It’s not perfect, neither is an online coding exam. It’s a tool that should be used in the process, that’s all I’m saying.

I was thinking about this recently and realized I haven't had to give references or have worked at a place that asked for them when hiring in at least a decade. I guess that practice is pretty much gone these days.

Same. But ‘references’ from coworkers are still a key factor in promotions at big tech companies. Go figure.

> Surely that’s a better signal than a 60 minute coding test.

It is! Where I work we have a min of three references required for non-entry level jobs and it reveals quite a bit at higher levels. It does require more effort on the part of the hiring manager though and I suspect most would rather punt it off to a test than do the due diligence when it comes down to it.

I suspect references are far worse at filtering out people than tests.

For candidates with 1-3 yrs experience, probably. OP said they have 20 years experience. For senior candidates (10+ yrs) surely references would confirm that and provide more info than a test.

OP here. More shocking to me is that I have quite a bit of published code that these folks can inspect, and running apps they can run -- in the languages and technologies they're interested in. Yet no one asks me about reviewing any of that.

Self-published repos are mutable. It tells us what you think good code looks like, but not how many iterations it took or how much help you had.

The best code is code that is iterated and looked at by more than one set of eyes. I wish all my code had been mutated to its ideal form!

Sure, but we need to evaluate you apart from everyone else who may have worked on it.