I've definitely seen my share of coders who can sling decent code to maintain and extend an app, but not write anything from scratch. It is quite possible to ha

I've definitely seen my share of coders who can sling decent code to maintain and extend an app, but not write anything from scratch. It is quite possible to have a solid career without ever having started with a blank slate. Even starting a new project these days, people often grab a framework that starts them with boilerplate. So it is not really that they cannot code. It is that they cannot go from zero. If you handed them a bad implementation of FizzBuzz and asked them to improve it, they could. But they cannot write the very first line of code because while the code is trivial, the utter lack of context is a new experience. Whether or not you want that to be a deal-killer for a hiring process is a much deeper question.