I also don’t think this rings true. Picture this: you have a high-stress job that also takes over your weekends on occasion. You have kids or elderly parents that need support. You have a long commute.

How can you fit in _another_ project (albeit small) in a week’s time (heck, make it two) _and_ manage any two of the above at the same time, when setting aside an hour (or more, if it also entails on-site) is already a very significant investment on your part?

I saw a role open at a competing company for a bigger job that I would have been perfect for. They wanted me to take a personality test, which was supposed to take an hour, but could be paused/picked up again, and then a coding test which was going to be a block of 3 contiguous hours.

I volunteer teach, I am president of my condo board, help run a local meetup, have a demanding job, oh and a family that needs love too- my free time is precious.

I started with their personality test (Calipers). It actually took 3 hours over 45 minute sessions that took the better part of a week. Fitting that in was extremely stressful and took away pretty much all of my personal time. When it came down to blocking out 3 hours for their coding test, I just could not be bothered- this would require me to more or less have to lock myself in a room for a good part of a saturday or sunday, toiling away still to only have a chance for a new job that might work out better than my current (I quite like my current job, this was just a potentially bigger role), but maybe not.

And I wasn't even in the market- Imagine now I am doing this for 5-10 (if not more) different companies. Its completely unreasonable IMHO.

That is deceptively easy to write when you're not having to do so in order to "keep up" because your work culture is so toxic that there is clear-cut hypocrisy between "work-life balance" and "we want you to be at the customer 300Km away tomorrow morning".

I am a single dad with custody of two kids and I would be able to take the six hours. I've consciously created this life. There are other parts of my life I'm sure that I do not do as well as you (for example my workout regime has gone to shit) but it's entirely doable.

That being said I also haven't needed a job for a very long time so...

I think taking the 6 hours _once_ can be done by pretty much everybody, that should not be a serious problem.

What kind of gets me thinking is that, in my experience, people will take a look at multiple options before committing to a career change. This is where this concept seems to fray a bit.

Still I think it is a valid concept to minimize your exposure to false hires so it’s ok.

At my shop we opted for a similar approach but exchanged the project with a pair programing task that candidates get up front (and yes, we created reference code bases in many, many languages).

One other departure is that we don’t subscribe to the hard comparisons mantra. Candidates get to code with someone from their future team(or two sometimes) and it’s just a thumbs up or thumbs down signal. Thumbs down would usually mean that the process also gets cut short.

Shouldn't that make you extra motivated to find a new job, though? ;)

another question is: do I care enough about your company in order to invest this time? there are many job opportunities, why should I choose to invest my free time into this?

you guys are forgetting that this is a partnership, you also have to sell me your company.

if you're ok with that, I think you're missing out some good candidates.

I didn't mean to make a personal offense, just that this shouldn't be the normal.

Spare time - and time in general - is managed by priorities. While I did (on both sides of the interview process) a take-home technical test, it was always AT MOST a 2 hours test. A six-hours test is cutting away a lot of potential candidates which have higher priorities in their spare time (kids/parents above all).

Wouldn't you actually be motivated to take the 6 hour assignment to get away from high-stress workplace that is taking also weekends and with long commute, to land a position that has proper work-life balance, higher salary and maybe closer too?

Sorry, you are describing a candidate who's working life is hell and sounds to me they would be willing to do whatever it takes to get out and get on.

i mean, if they want me to do a 6 hour take home test for a chance at interviewing, that would be a strong indicator that they DON'T very much value work life balance.

Now, consider if they instead said, we don't need you to come onsite for 4 hours at all, just take this 6 hour at home test at your own leisure at your own time, and we will give you an offer based on it. That would speak volumes about the type of company and culture that they are.

I would very much doubt that a company that demands 6h of overtime even before we sigh a contract actually offers good work-life balance. If I was cynical, I would wonder whether this test's purpose is to filter for that reason.

I agree. I probably wouldn’t complain about a 6 hour take home. I’d probably just ghost them. There’s no way I’m spending 6 hours just to get to an on-site when I can do it after at most, a recruiter call and a ~1 hour phone screen.

I remember getting a 6 question take-home assignment from GE, after telling me they will pay me lower than I'm currently making for a higher position, in a higher COL area. Promptly never responded to that email thread

Why didn't you just tell them those reasons in literally one sentence? Why do people think ghosting or not responding back is some sort of power move that's worthy of bragging? It lacks even basic courtesy.

Almost every time I didn't get a job offer during the interview process I got ghosted. They probably do this for liability reasons. But why would I afford them the same courtesy?

> But why would I afford them the same courtesy?

Because you're NOT affording THEM the courtesy. You're doing it for US as a community of software engineers.

I read a lot of complaints on here about companies do x, y, or z in their hiring processes and we don't like it.

Fine: tell them.

You know why? Because companies often listen to this feedback. Sure, some don't, but plenty do, and we certainly do.

If you are hearing the same thing over and over again from great candidates about why they don't want to go through your hiring process[1], and you're not able to hire engineers in the calibre and numbers you need, you'd be pretty obtuse not to do something about it. Even if you are able to hire the people you need, you might choose to make changes so that even unsuccessful candidates have a good experience and are more likely to speak well of you, as well as to increase your pool of better candidates. Sometimes those changes will take an awfully long time to occur, but companies do listen, and they do make changes.

(There are of course some companies that have so many people who want to work for them that they can afford to have what many of us would perceive to be an unduly arduous selection process and they're not going to change however many people complain about it, because they have no need. They have a different problem that they're optimising for.)

You might complain that this is not your responsibility, and that's fine: it's certainly your choice. But, if you want to see a net improvement in hiring practices across industries that hire engineers, you may want to take some very small portion of the responsibility that we can all choose to take for making that happen.

Let me be clear: it is much more effective for you to give companies with poor practices feedback directly (and politely, even if through gritted teeth!) than to complain on a substantially anonymous internet forum.

With all of the above said I'm now going to move into perhaps more controversial territory.

Not everything is about how good an engineer you are. In fact, your technical skills, whilst absolutely essential for the job, are not the most important factor.

We care about character. We care about how well you're going to work with others. We care about attitude. We care about maturity. We care about entitlement (or rather we have a strong preference for the lack thereof). We care about listening skills. We care about humility. We want people with initiative and skill, but we don't want divas.

Sadly this sometimes feels like we're spending more effort on weeding out negative traits than selecting for positive ones. Still, as I've said these character attributes are quite a bit more important than candidates' technical skill.

Fundamentally, we want to work with people who are easy to work with because in a team context you want everyone to rub along well together. We want people to treat eachother courteously. We want to avoid unnecessary drama.

[1] I've chosen that phrase carefully: I'm deliberately not discussing people who don't want to work for you, because there can be many reasons for that that have nothing to do with hiring process, culture, salary, or whether you're actually a good place to work (location, product, sector, etc.).

[2] Note: character, not personality. I don't mind what your personality type is (extroverted, introverted, whatever). We can work with anyone, as long as they're not an asshole.

Take one look on glassdoor for almost any company and you'll find a slew of feedback on their interview process. How much of that is taken into account when updating their process? I've found almost none. I can almost always use glassdoor negative interview reviews as a accurate indicator of what the interview is like - 9 times out of 10 no hiring team incorporates the feedback. And why should they? I'm sure right after my interview they'll find someone who 'gels' with whatever process they came up with and hire them. Sometimes, why even go through that process? If I hear something upfront I don't like, rather than listen to a hiring manager tell me they'll log me in to their system and try to barter and convince me to overlook their company's flaws, I'll ghost them with no remorse.

And also I've worked at a company that was linked to a callcenter, I can say with 100% certainty, how someone behaves during an interview is never an accurate portrait of how they behave on the job

Some hiring processes are accidentally bad and benefit from feedback. Other processes (like 6hr take home tests) show an irreconcilable difference in value systems that mean it was never going to be a good fit. No amount of feedback is going to change that.

That's a good point.

It literally doesn't make a difference in those cases. Companies of that size have position leveling and paybands for each level. They set those bands based on market reports from companies that collect salary data in part for this exact purpose. They'll target percentiles of the market rate for hiring based on their budgets and the minimum level of skill they need to function (they're not looking to "hire only the best"; that's a polite fiction that everyone sees through).

It isn't intentional usually, you just procrastinate the rejection until it has gone so long that it would feel weird to respond.

I have never ghosted anyone or anything, but I can see the appeal if you are not a very confrontational person.

A lot of people get angry if you tell them the truth. If you try to soften the blow then they misunderstand and clearing up the misunderstanding then leads to them getting angry.

I've had the same experience. After two on-site interviews, an assessment, and a series of tests. I got offered 2k/month for a full-time job (despite my current job making about 25% more at the time). I declined on the spot, then got a mail with the same offer (including the standard "we are confident we're giving you a good offer". I mailed them that I declined, got no reply, and got called the next day (during work) if I could please respond to the mail.

Weirdest interview experience ever.

There is no harm in responding and letting them know. I did this for a job and after they investigated they overhauled their process quite publicly.

Agreed, I just turned down an online coding interview as it required 3 hours dedicated time, especially for those of us with families 3 hours at home is precious and not usual uninterruptible. Companies who set tasks like this probably aren't the sort of company you want to work for.

Prior to having a family, I'd spend 12 hours on a test but claim it was only 6, now I'd be pushed to spend 3.

It’s fine to have different priorities, but don’t expect to get rewarded for them. In financual firms where I have worked, everyone puts in at the very least 10 hours a day, and at least 8 hours total on the weekend, regardless of whether you have a family or not.

People who give their firm everything they have generally get rewarded for it. Those that don’t in some industries (like finance) are quickly fired. In others, it just means you get passed up for promotion and make less.

Just realize that everything has an opportunity cost and that nothing comes for free (both spending time with your family and spending time at work). Also that people have different priorities so don’t make blanket statements about what people want.

> People who give their firm everything they have generally get rewarded for it.

The first job I got out of college, there was a sea of Solution Architects. They all worked around 60 hours a week, if not more. If a boss said jump, they would always ask how high. If a boss told them they needed to take a red-eye tonight, they always did it. Yet every time I went into the main office, the group was entirely different.

That's an example of a group of people who drank the Kool aid, who were "generally" supposed to be rewarded.

> Just realize that everything has an opportunity cost and that nothing comes for free (both spending time with your family and spending time at work).

It's a sign of a deeply sick culture when everything has a transactional value.

Opportunity cost is a property of time, not culture. Unless we figure out how to live forever or stop time, this will always be the fundamental constraint on life.

> Opportunity cost is a property of time, not culture.

I'm aware, I have a degree in economics. I'm talking about cultural values that force constant optimization onto individuals as being deeply sick.

Regardless of if every action has some minmax strategy, it's not healthy to have individuals constantly running Bayesian analysis into if they should spend time with their family, or take a second job.

Do you have an alterate paradigm?

Letting people breathe

As someone trained in economics you should already be aware that everyone chilling isn’t a stable equilibrium. For example let’s say that everyone only works one day a week. Now I can double my output by working two days. So we can look at the relative productivity gains of working one extra day as a function of how many days on average everyone else works:

1 day: 100% 2 days: 50% 3 days: 33% 4 days: 25% 5 days: 20% 6 days: 16% 7 days: 0%

As you can see, the less everyone else works, the more value your extra work is. I’m not saying that the equilibrium is gonna be 7 days. But it’s not gonna be less than 4, at the very least. This is also the reason why the 20 hour work week will never catch on.

> As someone trained in economics you should already be aware that everyone chilling isn’t a stable equilibrium.

Wow TIL.

> As you can see, the less everyone else works, the more value your extra work is.

It's surprising someone like yourself subscribes to the Labor Theory of Value.

LTV is a fundamentally classical liberal idea, so it really shouldn't be that surprising. Even so, the supply and demand model offers a much more coherent vision of prices in the marketplace.

As such, we can view working more than anyone else in supply and demand terms. People who produce the most are always in high demand, and the less of them there are, the more value a high productivity individual provides.

Ah yes the soothing feeling that at any one time no matter what I am doing I am loosing out on doing something else. Such are the inner workings of the ever rational and goal focused financier who embraces this reality in its fullest form and yet still decides it best to prioritise their pride. "Do not fear the doubters" says the fund manager "they are simply jealous of your achievements and commitment to the fund". Of course this is not said out loud but rather communicated subtly through the language and the ideology that underpins the language of finance.

I would do the 6 hour test, but not if they told me the following:

Finally, we would all vote again, and this time, a “hire” decision needed to be unanimous to move forward.

Maybe they better start with the social part first then, not wasting your time for in case in the end someone happens to not like your face.

Exactly, the ease with which companies put you through multiple rounds of timewasting just to reject you on something small (or even not telling you the salary range) is staggering.

I've gone through rounds of interviews and take-home assignments and calls just to be given a very low offer. Start with that, save time for us both!

Very recently went through 5 rounds with a company before they told me my salary ask was too high.

They’re probably not going to convince you anyway so filtering you out at the top of the funnel is helpful to them.

I once had a founder offer to intro me to other companies if I wasn’t interested in his, which I thought was a pretty brilliant move that ended up saving us both time.

As the first stage of the interview, we give a take-home test with no constraints. We just ask them to put together some code that works with one of our public APIs.

I think this is decently respectful of the candidate's time, while giving us the opportunity to review some actual code written by them. And yet, most of them don't even bother... Well, I get that you are busy, but I don't feel comfortable investing time in an on-site interview without seeing any code first.

Disclaimer: If they provide a link to their github with some solid projects or OSS contributions, we skip the take-home altogether.

So I have a slightly different take. I actually prefer take home tests (that are time bounded to say 3-4 hours at most) as that gives me the ability to think "naturally".

But, I would only do this for companies I am desperate to get into (Ironically FAANGs for 'now' as they are the ones who are least likely to pull a WeWork/Uber/Theranos on me) and if I was pitched this by someone puritanically Id show them a finger. I do take my job search seriously and any hint of a company devaluing my personal time is a huge affront to me (and my family).

How would you give an interview that is challenging, fair, and quick?

I've had the most success doing a remote, one-hour pair programming exercise via screen sharing with the candidate. They're allowed to look at docs, do any google searches, and I don't penalize them if they don't finish. I'm more interested in the process and the way they navigate their environment to solve problems. I continually coach them to speak aloud whatever they're thinking, especially if stuck on something. My last hire was someone who didn't finish the exercise, but I really liked their approach to solving the problem. It's the closest thing to "what would it be like to work with this person" that I've found. This has been super effective for me after many years of making bad hires through "technical interviews" and take home assignments.

I encourage you to drop the whole "see how they think" process. You can't read minds, and it's not possible to see how they think.

I don't like complaining without a suggestion, so... consider letting a candidate code on their own, and then ask them to walk you through what they did. You won't be disturbing the process by staring at them, and you'll get to see a bit about how they work independently & articulate what they've done. Unless you're a pairing shop, that's really what you're looking for anyway, yes?

There is no “one true way” for hiring people. It depends on the position you’re hiring for, the team, the office environment (if there is one), the project, the budget, and so many other things.

The right hiring process for one position may be completely wrong for another. And that’s OK.

I have a strong dislike for the 'see how they think' or 'code like you would in production' style instructions for take-homes - they're not specific enough.

I don't think that necessarily applies to real-time pairing exercises though. The interviewer has significant latitude to interactively question and prompt to get at the skills and values a candidate possesses.

One time a guy asked me to bring in my laptop with some code I had written.

I showed him, we talked about it, he asked me to add a simple feature, I think I taught him something about the tech stack that he didn't know. It worked well for both of us.

Do a bunch of algorithm whiteboard interviews with a super huge false negative rate.

The trick is to get them to review your code, rather than the other way around.

Had one company paid me for my time developing their test interview app. That was the first and only experience I had. Took a day to do, but I made sure it was really polished.

We pay our applicants $50/hour for the later stages of skills tests because they can take 15+ hours to complete. More details on previous comment if interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20710884

If you pay only for the later stages of skill tests that's 4-8 hours. You probably don't pay over $250.

But you do use the work to build your backend/office applications. In the end you are paying someone $250 for a 15 hour project + two days of in person development time.

Great idea. Many with follow.

"The costs of travel and lodging are compensated at this stage, but we are not paying them hourly. The work they do for us is not customer based work and does not generate revenue for us."

> What’s so compelling about your company

Paying for the interview is compelling. Almost nobody does that, so it's a differentiator. My first assumption on hearing that is "it sounds like they respect their engineers as professionals more than most companies do".

3-4 days of testing with two being on site.

They don't hire people who have jobs because no one would/could do this.

We often hire people with jobs. At most, it's three work days needed. If that's a problem, we can do the proctored skills test on a Saturday and we can cut the on-site down to 1 day. That's then one business day needed.

Most devs with existing jobs have good jobs with decent vacation/PTO policies. So they have days to invest if they want to.

Don't be so quick to assume the worst. :)

I think, it ends up being different strokes for different folks. We have a very detailed, and for some, a very compelling job description and offer. The time commitment is relatively small up front and as they engage with us, they get a sense of who we are, how we operate, and they like it. So, by the time we ask if they want to put the time into the skills test, they've had a chance to evaluate us and ultimately feel like it's worth it.

Simplisticly, it might boil down to something like a preference for quality* interviewing over quantity.

* not saying our process is definitively better than others, just that some candidates want fewer interviews that they feel are a better potential fit for them.

I get paid for it, and also get to work more closely with potential future teammates to better test the relationship.

Having had interviews at companies where it was NOT as advertised during the interview phase, I'd value that.

If I was already interviewing for another job outside of my existing one, I'd gladly take a week off to do it.

But if they were trying to get me to leave a job I already liked, I wouldn't commit that much time for it.

I had a YC startup invite me to work for them for a week, for which they paid me a decent sum of money. I was able to push a decent amount of code, considering the onboarding process was “here’s a laptop with the repo and some basic tools on it.” They did not hire me.

You should highlight them by name, more companies should do this.

Those answers should be “yes,” and “no,” respectively, because this scenario is properly a very short term contract. The employer should issue a 1099.

Some payouts are under $600, so we just cut them a check. Over $600, we issue a 1099.

Yes, it was basically a contract work.

This doesn't really satisfy the "quick".

You have stumbled upon the iron triangle of interviewing software developers.

This is especially true if the startup is unknown or not perceived as glamorous/prestigious. It may have the effect of skewing the experience curve towards younger/less experienced candidates.

indeed. it is selection bias.

Just an FYI. Every company talks about the great culture, work life balance, competitive pay and excellent benefits they offer. Jobseekers have to assume you are lying about those things, because most of your colleagues are. (this is why I suspect firms like new collage grads, they haven't learned that you have to give a price for a 50 - 70 hour week even though "overtime is rare") You can't really know how a company really is until you have spent some time and worked through a crisis or two. I used to think I worked at a great place, then the day my daughter was born I received dozens of slack messages and phone calls about testing environments and people were legitimately upset that I spent time with my daughter on her first day on earth rather than help them with their poor planning that could and did wait for me to get back.

Wanting me to jump through a bunch of performative hoops makes me assume you are in the "call you on the day of your daughters birth" camp.

So - the purpose of the take home task is to weed out the people who are not interested enough in the company?

I mean in the article you say "The strongest candidates take their job search seriously and are willing to devote a fair amount of time to landing the right job." the times when this has been true of me has been times when I do not have a job. If I am being headhunted for a job and I am already in a good job, I have a hard time envisioning a scenario where the job being offered would be so enticing that I would be happy to make a significant investment of my time although I might do it grudgingly if the offer is good enough.

When I took the job at a small agency I'm in now I had stopped a consultant task that had run out of funding. I was in a hiring process with four other companies, the small company in the interview asked me how much I wanted I told them my price they said "that's a lot but we expected it would be something like that so it's ok" and then they said something that really cemented my interest in working there than any of the other places that I was interviewing with - they said "we generally have a coding task to do but in your case I think we can skip that".

thank you for saving 4-6 hours out of my week! My family thanks you too!

In fact now that I think of it this testing is another reason why I give people a significant raise as a requirement for moving from my current job. I am earning pretty high up for my market, the market is like many tech places a sellers market. When recruiters ask me to interview with the companies they're selling I name a 18% increase of my current wage and equivalent perks as a requirement to consider moving. Maybe I would only want 10% if I knew that trying for the job wouldn't require me doing a bunch of unpaid work.

> it only makes sense to invest time in someone who really is excited about switching.

Is this necessarily the case? The Clippers had to bend over backwards to get Kawaii Leonard on their team. They almost certainly would never have gotten an NBA Finals MVP if their philosophy was only go after people who were already excited.

The point is there some tradeoff in the design space. It's nice to have people who are excited to work for you, but chances are the superstars that will take your team to the next level, already have a dozen suitors. Kawaii Leonard isn't doing a six hour take home tests.

I'd suggest that maybe Firebase's experience here is not representative. It was one of the hottest startups in the Valley at the time. So maybe it could put up a lot of onerous requirements and still have talented engineers beating down the doors. If you're the Lakers, Lebron James comes to you. But for the 99% of hiring managers that are at the equivalent of the Clippers, maybe the same approach doesn't work.

Professional sports performance is the probably the most visible and normalizable of any profession though. The problem with software is that talent is infinitely harder to evaluate, especially in the context of different teams, systems and domains.

Whenever I am ready to move jobs, I have 2-3 recruiter chats/phone screens per day on top of my normal job as well as some time researching potential employers. I've never joined a company that's given a project because it makes the process slower, it takes more energy and time (during a period where those are typically in short supply), and it's really hard to find multiple uninterrupted periods of time for a project compared to a timeboxed phone call or onsite.

I'm not against projects in concept and I've never complained about them to my point of contact, but they make the process slower (your process takes about twice as much of my time as everyone else's) and less exciting. Every other step of the recruiting process is really fun - talking to people about their company and the work they do, but a project is just homework that I have to do alone after work or on the weekend. I've really liked some companies that gave me a project, but I struggled to find time and then I got to the offer stage much faster with other companies that I also liked, at which point its hard to find the motivation to complete the project knowing that it isn't even the final step.

While you say you never lost a candidate due to the project, I would challenge you to consider whether you lost candidates due to the perception (fair or not) that your process was less enjoyable and more time-consuming than your competitors' and so candidates received and accepted other offers first.

How can any candidate without a solid networking connection inside your company possibly have enough information to be genuinely excited about switching to it?

"We want the best".

"We don't want the best if they are happy in their current job".

This comes across as really arrogant. And is a big big red flag for me.

It's not arrogance, just heaps of confirmation bias and mistaking a large amount of luck for skill.

I don’t think it’s arrogant, just realistic - if you aren’t interested in leaving your current job you probably aren’t going to no matter what the company trying to poach you does. So for them bend over backwards to convince you to interview is a waste of time.

That’s a huge false assumption, of course you might consider leaving if the interview process was less demanding and impractical? It doesn’t seem realistic at all. The company is just continuing with their bad interview process with their head in the sand, telling themselves “it’s okay, the people who don’t like our interview process probably aren’t any good or wouldn’t move anyway!”. I mean how would they know.

Agreed - that is why I said the statement may still be true.

The unasked question is where you believe the engineers are who can make your project a success? Are they out looking for work? Or are they happily ensconced in other work?

There was a prevailing belief, at least a number of years back, that the best engineers were not found on the open market, so you had to actively seek them out. Maybe that isn't the way hiring managers approach the field anymore, though.

Ahh, I understand what you're saying.

My blog post goes through the process for inbound candidates, which accounted for the majority of our hiring. We did actively try to poach folks as well. I spent literally 4 years trying to recruit one of my friends out of Microsoft.

For these folks, you need to sell, sell, sell your vision, product and team. They're not going to switch unless they're really pumped. All of this work to get them excited happens before the interview process even begins.

I think for these people the difficulty of the interview process is a small issue relative to the risk of switching away from a job they already like.

I was going to comment something very similar before I saw this.

Speaking from the candidate's perspective, as someone with performance anxiety, I abhor live coding sessions. Best case, I'm thinking at an impaired level due to the anxiety. Worst case, I can't think at all and freeze up completely.

Therefore, I absolutely love it when companies offer a take home project. And you're right: I'm probably not going to do it unless I'm really interested in the company.

I'm actually going to be doing one this weekend, and I don't mind spending 4-6 hours on it, because at this point in the interview process, I'm really excited about potentially working for this company.

I hate both. Take home exercises require far too much time. White-boarding is just so hit and miss as to whether a solution comes into my head at that time. And its kind of annoying / distracting having someone watch you code / think.

I get the sentiment - but at some point, a hiring company absolutely has to test your ability to make a judgement about whether to hire you. Speaking from experience on both sides of the table, I'd rather that be through writing actual running code than through some awkward or irrelevant whiteboarding exercise.

As I pointed out in another post, the best interview experience I had was when the guy asked me to bring in my laptop with some code.

I brought in my half finished side project. We talked about it, he asked me some questions, I showed him a couple of things about the tech stack that he didn't know. He asked me to add a basic feature. It worked well for both of us. If I had been faking it I think it would have shown.

I think that's a great approach. I agree absolutely about not being able to fake it either; in practice I've never caught anyone putting forth someone else's code as their own, and I don't think it's a huge concern for the reason you mention.

Do also spare a thought for the people who don't have side projects, or any code that they can legitimately share. There are plenty of talented engineers in that position, and it'd be a shame to have a hiring process that leaves them out in the cold.