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I have a hard time believing that you can't detect that someone has absolutely no clue about programming just by asking about his past projects, drilling down on some specific technical challenges he encountered during those projects, quizzing him about his preferences for programming languages, libraries and stuff like that.

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Some people have a very narrow experience, but within that experience, they can actually be pretty darn good programmers.

I worked with a bunch, none of whom ever ventured outside of Visual C++ and SQL, and who would never have even heard of Ruby or Python or Clojure. Despite this, they could still knock out pretty decent real-World code.

In that case, it can be difficult to filter out the bad ones, just based on general conversations, without asking people to actually code on a blank board.

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