I always prefer being able to look at someone's work. I'm an adult - I don't expect to see that for someone coming out of defense or certain other industries.

I always prefer being able to look at someone's work. I'm an adult - I don't expect to see that for someone coming out of defense or certain other industries. But, I will be clear: I want to see your work, and whiteboarding is kind of awful. So is coderpad. Take home projects are nasty because of time commitments and time pressures. How do I solve this problem? For my sake as an interviewer, I need as much information about you as possible, as realistic as possible, as fast as possible. For my sake as an interviewEE, github gives me the ability to do good work, on time of my choosing, and present it in the manner I see fit. As a social awareness question, I prefer to work with people that have the social awareness of the broader software community to go, "yeah, this is how the community is rolling, I can play the game a bit". Whether that's github, or Haskell, or Rust, or assembly, or retro Pascal. I sort of don't care. The social cues matter a lot in The Work. At the end of the day, passing on someone with no portfolio and a preference for doing art over spending time learning a bit more about a topic and doing a quick demo project is an easy pass. (Personal note: if you're gonna just throw your novels out, maybe write code instead? worst case is you learn something fun)