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Then you applied at the wrong companies. For people with a real GitHub repo with a project or contributions, I always skip all programming tests and jump on the real code. It's a real pleasure to have an excited candidate explaining reasons for architecture or choice of tools etc. compared to fizz buzz. I can only encourage everyone to bring a small side project, it will make your interviews easier.

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You can say this as much as you want but it's an industry practice. Almost every company I interviewed with in the bay area never looked at any source code for projects I did. (Not even a project that had over 50,000 users - they just installed it and said, "Oh, yeah, that's sweet. Thanks! Now finish writing this sudoku checker and then doing a spiral matrix traversal.")

They're using a standardized interview format and they don't care about anything else. I've interviewed with others where I did have projects up, they viewed the source code, and it went over well with them - but that was extremely rare (I can only recall 1 at the moment out of the 100+ companies I've interviewed at).

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