We found a guy whose Github had solid Rust code and then he walked us through it and it was great how he could explain it. Maybe we were lucky there but he's turned out to also be generally awesome or perhaps that's a good sign.

It certainly looks to me like you have the pedigree to be able to select which employers you'd like anyway, so the loss of the whiteboard thing is probably not a big deal to you.

Man the guy you responded to is right. I've interviewed and mistakenly hired several types of these people.

Here's the thing, you're not too wrong either. I don't doubt that there are tons of great programmers who can't pass a technical whiteboard interview for various reasons.

But without a doubt if you pass a whiteboard interview your success at that interview is highly highly correlated with your success at the job.

You tell me... how do we screen for these master bullshitters and hire people like you? I would love to know because I see no other alternative than to use whiteboard interviews. I want to hire someone like you, but I have no clue how to differentiate you from a person who can really code and a person who is a master bullshitter.

I think whiteboard interviews are more about weeding out false positives than weeding out false negatives. While one might think they would be equally damaging, as in either case you are out one good programmer, the former (false positives i.e. hiring a lemon) is actually more damaging since you are in one negative. For why that might be, see one theory of production, the O-ring model [0].

[0] https://mru.org/courses/development-economics/o-ring-model

I can think of people with all those credentials, and more, who are well known for having no technical chops. (And there are others for which you can make the inference based on the content of their books, problems with their popular but flawed Github projects, and employment outcomes.) Hirers could look at your actual Github code, but that can obscure how fast you write it, whether it is plagiarized, etc.

Nobody should be either afraid or unwilling to do 'whiteboarding', rather, it should be an opportunity. It's not perfect, but reasonably structured it's a good thing.

Academic credentials are not necessarily conducive to great dev talent ... OSS with lots of stars is a much better measure, but even then, it's not a guarantee of anything.

Companies have to be responsible about their due diligence.