Technical screening is purely a waste of time if you are not sitting right there with the applicant watching them write the code. (How do you know they wrote t

Technical screening is purely a waste of time if you are not sitting right there with the applicant watching them write the code. (How do you know they wrote the code, otherwise?) And if you are sitting there watching them write the code, it's still a waste of time. An applicant's relative level of skill can be ascertained in five minutes of talking with them instead of 30-60 minutes of watching them write FizzBuzz or something equally useless. Hiring in literally every other engineering discipline works this way. New hires include a 90-day probation period just in case someone can talk the talk but can't walk the walk. Good software shops function similarly.