I think this approach is great. It will get you people like me who are passionate about software and building cool things, and in general I feel like these are

I think this approach is great. It will get you people like me who are passionate about software and building cool things, and in general I feel like these are the people I want to work with. If you have no emotion about things you've worked on, that's a bad thing I think. Any silly coding or whiteboard question I ask is a poor substitute for asking someone to talk about the years someone has spent writing software. Where this breaks down is in a big company where you just need to hire bodies, and you you already have a few top-notch engineers who can build great things and direct the unthinking, uninspired masses. At this point, you don't even care about a person's github, because it's too much time to go look through it, and that's too bad.