The author argues for evaluating Ph.D. candidates based more on the oral thesis defense than on the actual thesis. By essentially the same reasoning, I’ve been arguing for prioritizing in-person design/code reviews over code-only async PR comments. The important thing is to verify that the human has a coherent design in mind and can demonstrate that it got implemented, regardless of who or what was at the keyboard. “…
The tricky part is that live review is much more expensive than async review. But maybe that just means we were getting away with a cheap proxy because it happened to work reasonably well.
Unfortunately, from my experience, forcing people to talk about their research to an audience mostly just condemns introverts and people with social anxiety. Being able to formulate your thoughts clearly in writing and in speech are two radically different skills. I've seen world class scientists give the most horrible conference presentations to the point where everyone in the audience agreed they'd rather have just read the paper when it came out, because they had no clue what he said while the author is amazing at writing. If we want to switch academia and to purely oral skills, you'll probably need to replace a ton of people. And in the industry these fields are already dominated by fast talking bullshitters.