Indeed.

It kinda takes the fun out of programming. Sometimes you just don't bother with error-checking and with making code production-grade, because you just wanted to publish this small thing that other people might find useful. If people find it useful but find bugs, they might as well send pull-requests.

And let's be honest: error checking is important and everything but it's quite a chore.

Often in your toy project it's okay to be optimistic.

And often the purpose for writing a project is to explore a topic, not to release a production grade project.

Literally looking for their wallet under the lamp post because it's easy to pick nits in your homework assignments, but difficult to determine whether you could be a productive team member today under completely different circumstances with complete different incentives and forces on your choices.

> Oh, that was a learning project (or prototype code). If I were to write this code again, I would do $X

...where X is something like "use a unique ptr" or "assign ownership of this object to this other object instead".

They must have no training for their interviewers or maybe a training specifically to make them hostile gatekeepers?

I agree.

The most important phrase here is at the end:

    one candidate just got bumped to the next 
    stage based solely on the fact that in they
    had a “Making awesome pancakes” in the CV, 
    which made me laugh.

And, it's fine.

Junior candidates have to be aware of this and don't get demotivated.