>> it can be a good signal for whether you have practical experience with X.
This should be vetted out well in advance of an interview, especially for a developer. If you don't have at least a half dozen repos somewhere with code examples of sites or apps you've built, then there's a very high chance you're not going to get an interview. I've only been coding for 7-8 years and I have an extensive GitHub page, can point to close to 200 public sites I've built (both dynamic and static) and have a portfolio full of images from other projects I've worked on.
If you can't ascertain whether a person has practical experience with a tool, software, or language then you're not doing your due diligence.
Not everyone has or needs an extensive GitHub page. I'll use myself as an example. I've got over a decade of experience working in large teams to ship commercial products. As a general rule, you won't ever see my code unless you also work for the same company. The kind of companies I work for want me for the experience from my day job. I can easily prove I worked on the projects I worked on but any company interviewing me would have nothing beyond my word for what exactly I contributed to each project. It's totally reasonable for them to ask questions that can confirm I know how to do things I claim to have done.
I mean, that's great if you build things that screenshot well, or can open source. But say you've worked on closed source network code for the last 8 years. Stuff poking around with embedded systems or fpga's aren't really clone and run, you need some hardware.
If someone is working on proprietary software most of the time and has kids to raise, they may not have focused time to spend working on projects outside of their job.
This should be vetted out well in advance of an interview, especially for a developer. If you don't have at least a half dozen repos somewhere with code examples of sites or apps you've built, then there's a very high chance you're not going to get an interview. I've only been coding for 7-8 years and I have an extensive GitHub page, can point to close to 200 public sites I've built (both dynamic and static) and have a portfolio full of images from other projects I've worked on.
If you can't ascertain whether a person has practical experience with a tool, software, or language then you're not doing your due diligence.