> yet it is entirely implausible for someone with 3 years experience to be able to be able to explain the technical details of their most recent development pro

> yet it is entirely implausible for someone with 3 years experience to be able to be able to explain the technical details of their most recent development projects when in reality they contributed zero code to those projects? Here is problem. It's not entirely implausible, just very unlikely. The type of interview I'm talking about isn't going to catch every single bad candidate just the vast majority. But whiteboard interviews don't catch every candidate either and they have an extreme amount of false negatives. To your point about students, they have much less work experience to talk about. The point of the interview is to look at their experience and talk about it to verity they aren't lying. In most cases the student doesn't have enough experience to tell me anything. That being said, if a student can talk me through technical implementation details of a final project, then I think that's a pretty good indication that the student can code. I would say the false positive rate for that test would be very close to the false positive rate for a white board interview with drastically lower false negatives. If you're Google and you have a limitless number of people who want to work for you, you can get away with taking a vastly higher false negative rate for a slightly lower false positive rate. However, if you're almost every other company out there, you might want to reconsider.