> I think they're right -- I, too, have observed a disconnect between how polished people sound when they talk about their work and what happens when they actually have to write code.
I've done a lot of work that people would probably find very interesting and useful. But I tend to choke on whiteboard code interviews because they're so high stakes. Any time spent thinking about the problem looks bad, so you have to talk a lot. But I can't really think and talk at the same time. So I end up talking rather than thinking and I do poorly.
Now obviously I'm going to push to move the status quo towards something that doesn't put me at a competitive disadvantage. So we both know that I'm biased.
But the idea that people can talk about what they've done and answer any questions that you have (about what they did and programming in general) but still screw up on the actual "coding" part might mean that the part where you make them write code is more noise than signal.
The problem is that you never find out because if someone bombs the coding part you simply chuckle and say "well that person is clearly a liar, or something!" and they don't go any further in the hiring process. So they never get hired, and because they're never hired, you can't evaluate their work performance. Which might be excellent when they're not being actively scrutinized by multiple people all at the same time in a high stakes situation.
Unfortunately to try and get some objective data on this you'd have to hire several people who talk about their projects well but don't do well on the coding part. An understandably impossible task unless your client is a Google or Microsoft and they know it's just a big experiment regarding hiring.
But until someone does that and reports back (and they won't because it'll be a competitive advantage) it's tough for me to swallow the "talks good but can't code so NOPE" that I tend to see bandied about.
Putting someone in a pressure cooker and then measuring their performance will only tell you how they perform in a pressure cooker. Which is usually quite distinct from what they're going to do day-to-day.