>Of course. I have a wide variety of coworkers with a wide variety of opinions of my skill-set. I'd select the ones that I think would resonate best with you.

>Of course. I have a wide variety of coworkers with a wide variety of opinions of my skill-set. I'd select the ones that I think would resonate best with you. Could it be that you have people who will give you good references because you're a good developer? >Barring that I have half a dozen friends that would tell you whatever I want them to. So if I pull those friends up on linked in, they're developers too, and you'll have some plausible overlapping work history? > I fail to see how references are any sort of magic bullet. It's not a magic bullet. But faking 10 years of development work history and multiple decent quality references is a fairly high bar. It's not going to catch everyone but neither is whiteboarding. The goal shouldn't be to catch everyone. Sometimes you make a bad hire. Despite every test you put someone through, you'll get false positives. The problem is that if you ratchet your test up to far to avoid false positives, you end up turning off good engineers, or failing good engineers. I think the problem is that the company wasn't willing to just admit they made a mistake and fire the guy, not that he was hired in the first place. America (assuming you're in the US) has nearly unrestricted at will employment. Why are you so afraid of hiring one bad employee? If you can't identify bad employees after a few weeks of working with, you have zero chance identifying them before you hire them. Maybe instead of spending months trying to find the perfect candidate, just do what literally every other industry does and hire experienced candidates based on reputation, resume, talking to them about the job and past projects, and fire them if it turns out they were completely lying to you.