[claudiusd]

> What typically happens is that people are screened into a hiring process on the basis of what’s on their resume... That already throws a lot of the baby out with the bathwater.

In my experience, about 80% of the candidates who send in their resume will not come close to working out. If you've never run a hiring process before, you'd be surprised how many people look decent on paper but somehow can't write a line of code without some serious hand-holding. The OP points out that sometimes the opposite is true (a candidate with a mediocre resume ends up being stellar), but this is an exception and you'll waste a lot of time trying to find these people.

I've honed my resume screening skills over time and I've gotten pretty good at filtering out most of that 80%, and I know I'm likely to screen out plenty of talented folks, but it's well worth being able to focus my time and my team's time interviewing more exceptional engineers than mediocre ones.

In other words, I think it's OK to throw out a lot of the baby with the bathwater as long as you're left with mostly baby.

[vonmoltke]

> In other words, I think it's OK to throw out a lot of the baby with the bathwater as long as you're left with mostly baby.

Quite true, and basically what companies like Google do.

The issue comes in that we have been inundated for years with people bitching about "talent shortages"; i.e., there ain't enough baby left over.

[jkchu]

> you'd be surprised how many people look decent on paper but somehow can't write a line of code without some serious hand-holding

I think a lot of this may have to do with nerves. Writing code on a whiteboard when given an arbitrary question is very different than writing code in a comfortable context and environment. I think it's safe to say that a decent percentage of people in our field let nerves affect their ability to write quality code at the same level they normally do.