There needs to be a better way to vet engineer applications before a first call in 2025. I haven't read a resume in years. In 2023 what worked well is I'd ask for a portfolio of silly side projects or links to various things they hacked on to see if the person could ship. And that would work really, really well. Thing is now nearly anyone can ship and vibe code up a sufficiently complex app + send me a link. And, while I'm still very very happy to see these it still makes it difficult to understand skill level/knowledge depth. It is really hard to know if a person can do stuff that isn't easily promptable once you're 4-6 weeks into a somewhat complex product like: Debugging why memoization is breaking on a table with 1000s of rows in React, figuring out why a websocket is disconnecting after exactly 47 seconds on a version of Chrome, etc. Again, main problem is just deciding to take that first call or not. I want every engineer I work with to be cracked at Claude Code. But, I also want some proof they can figure out stuff Claude can't when the going gets tough. At this point I'm 100X more excited to talk to a person who spent 6-12 months on a single complex project/ stuck through the difficult bits versus a big portfolio of random hackathon stuff/weekend projects.

@narsagna "highly skilled" hmmmmm 🤔