As an interviewer, I don't trust references one tiny bit. I've literally asked you to cherry-pick a handful of people to say that you're good. I don't know who

As an interviewer, I don't trust references one tiny bit. I've literally asked you to cherry-pick a handful of people to say that you're good. I don't know who these people are. They'll either say you're good (which I expect, because you picked them), or they're stabbing you in the back (which I can't ethically tell you about). Then there's the internal referral. These candidates are pretty rare. The first month you're hired you're likely to suggest anyone you can right then. After that if you're proposing them, you have a vested interest in them being hired. Then there's the agency candidate. This person has been groomed by the referral agency to answer your questions. Once when I was hiring, we were asking candidates how to build a priority queue (a queue, where higher priority items were processed first, equal priority items in order). We interviewed 50 candidates, and 47 of them answered quickly and confidently that they'd use XML with XPath to find the next item. o.O There's the open-source committer. I could spend a few hours reviewing your code, but that's time that I could be interviewing someone else, or actually getting work done. But then I need to make sure you didn't plagiarize it from somewhere. It's too easy to run a search and replace on a git history and slam the whole thing up on GitHub. I mean, I guess that shows technical chops, but poor ethics. There's the long coding challenge. I wouldn't trust that. I've had coworkers actually ask me to do the coding challenge for them, because they didn't have the knowledge. I assumed they ended up getting someone else to do it for them. Last is the credit-taker. This was me when I was young (we all have a past). I would over-state my involvement in the project, but because I did have a sizable role in the project and I was insatiably curious, I was aware of how the product worked and why design decisions were made. So I was able to answer any question asked by the interviewer. But was I actually able to build what I claimed? On-the-spot coding challenges suck, but I don't see a better option out there.