Even for a programmer with a portfolio, it's vital that you be able to probe them with questions about design decisions and expose someone who didn't actually w

Even for a programmer with a portfolio, it's vital that you be able to probe them with questions about design decisions and expose someone who didn't actually write it. Repeating what I said in another comment: during my last job hunt I had multiple companies which contacted me, unsolicited, asking me to apply to work with them, because they wanted an "extremely senior" Django person, preferably a committer (I got my commit bit in 2007). Every company which contacted me like that also put me into a fizzbuzz-esque phone screen. There is no sense in this; my work is publicly verifiable and vouched for (sometimes in an extremely literal sense, as it's my PGP key that provided the signature on a bunch of release packages of Django), so either they believe I am who I am, in which case no need for a fizzbuz, or they don't, in which case they shouldn't have been contacting me in the first place. My policy now is to hang up on any company that reaches out to me for a skill they know I have, and then fizzbuzzes me in spite of that knowledge.