> It should be obvious from my Github and general OSS contributions I can code and do meaningful things but sometimes I just can't code on-demand.
This isn't obvious at all - I've interviewed many people that have faked their GitHubs or were just completely incompetent at software development despite their amazing GH, OSS profiles or CVs.
People lie, a lot. I'm sorry, but having "a profile" isn't a useful signal for an interviewer :(
> However in my experience questions like "How would you architect a replacement of Amazons S3 service with similar durability" or "Given a smart grid reporting metrics from every home in the US how would you store this data for analysing both long-term trends and intra-day anomalies" yield by far the best signal to noise ratio.
Agreed, in my experience these questions give by far the best signal for a good coworker in general. Sadly they're not appropriate to interview junior developers.
Umm. It's very hard to fake actual contributes to actual OSS projects. You might be able to fill your GH account with crap that might fool some people into thinking you have a "profile" but when you say you are "Committer to X" or "Contributed X feature to Y" then that isn't fakable and is the only stuff I look for.
So yeah, it might not be useful for recruiters/sources that don't understand the technical side deep enough to evaluate but it 100% sure be good signal for an interviewer if they know the fields and projects in question you are hiring for (they probably should...).
This isn't obvious at all - I've interviewed many people that have faked their GitHubs or were just completely incompetent at software development despite their amazing GH, OSS profiles or CVs.
People lie, a lot. I'm sorry, but having "a profile" isn't a useful signal for an interviewer :(
> However in my experience questions like "How would you architect a replacement of Amazons S3 service with similar durability" or "Given a smart grid reporting metrics from every home in the US how would you store this data for analysing both long-term trends and intra-day anomalies" yield by far the best signal to noise ratio.
Agreed, in my experience these questions give by far the best signal for a good coworker in general. Sadly they're not appropriate to interview junior developers.