I understand the urge to minimize risk as much as possible. However, the truth is that in any field whether it's business development, sales, marketing, etc. wh

I understand the urge to minimize risk as much as possible. However, the truth is that in any field whether it's business development, sales, marketing, etc. what you do see most often is the person's track record and not how they actually went about doing things. So the fact that you can actually see more for a programmer is actually a bonus, but that doesn't mean it should be abused like plenty of companies try and do these days. Risk aversion is fine, and obviously you want to hire the best candidate but like mentioned elsewhere on this thread: 1. Not everyone has public github projects and I hardly believe anyone should have to work on open source stuff just to show off their coding skills.. Thats really not the right reason to work on open source stuff. 2. For web projects while you might not have access to backend code you can always look at the front end and see if the guy is any good. This is especially true for me considering the fact that I have multiple projects developed from start to finish live and available on the Internet. Again, small demos or code sample requests are always fine. However, an entire project to get a job somewhere ? Might have been okay when I had nothing to show for it, but after a bit of experience on your resume, it gets old..