The way we interview and hire in this industry is, generally, fucked up. I've been interviewing off and on for the past 6 months. I've observed two methods that companies use. Both, it seems to me, are bad ways to judge the quality of a developer, although one slightly less so.
1. You need to whiteboard this code out. It's an algorithm that I use to show how smart I am. Solve it without any access to books or the internet. While I watch you. Oh, this problem has nothing to do with our business.
2. Here is a link to our obscure little puzzle. You have X number of hours/days to solve it. Have fun spending all your free time this weekend figuring it out! Oh, this also doesn't have anything to do with our business.
I guess if these are the only two ways #2 is preferable but that's like preferring death via lethal injection to death via the electric chair.
There has to be a better way. Why do I even have my gitHub account in my resume? Why do I list the companies I've been at and the roles I've had? Why don't you ask me my experiences solving REAL problems for REAL businesses? Whiteboard algorithm guy? Go Fuck Yourself
Interviews around resumes can have amplifying effects. Being able to talk a good game about your past does not mean you can perform at writing software. Further there is a whole class of developers who do very poorly explaining their past and selling themselves. Lots of those developers do a great job of solving actual REAL problems for REAL businesses. Further, some of us work in environments where talking at any depth about the technical problems we've solved open both parties to potential lawsuits.
Maybe in some industries, with some population of developers a Github profile is useful for evaluating candidates. But there are whole swaths of candidates who have no profile on Github, or only use it for dumping toy projects or experiments. It is certainly not something you can build a repeatable hiring pipeline around.
This leaves us with very few options. Design sessions on a whiteboard suffer from many of the same problems as traditional interviews, but they are at least similar to an activity that is actively part of a developers job. It is a near daily occurrence, at least on the teams I've been on, to have sessions solving problems at the white board.
Work samples are ideal, but the combination of business relevant, not proprietary, representative and able to be completed without being a huge burden is very hard to come up with.
So, while I completely agree, our industry is terrible at filtering talent and in the future we are likely to back on our current processes as silly, I suspect the future will hold more design sessions and work samples, not less. Hopefully we just get better at creating them.