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> With this approach, he claims he can always understand if someone is a competent programmer, and he has never seen it fail.

I'm curious, how can he be so sure? How does he know that he has never failed a competent programmer or that he has never passed a poor programmer?

Just because he hasn't seen it fail, it doesn't mean his process hasn't failed.

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I’ve seen it fail, having tried it for a few years. There’s a type that passes this no problem but isn’t productive.

I switched to a battery of knowledge questions centered on the type of programmer I was looking for, it works much better and is even predictive of coding ability as it helps you learn this stuff.

There's not much ways you can spot a skilled but unproductive BSer from interviews.

False positives are easy to spot if you have to work with them.

False negatives are harder, but in small, close knit industries you sometimes hear of a person you rejected doing well

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