>But what is in your opinion a better signal for junior or new grads?
They are juniors, I don't expect them to be experts, I expect eagerness and passion. They spent 4 or more years focusing on schooling, show me the results of your projects. Let them talk and see how well they understand what they did. Side projects are even better to stand out.
And you know... apparently people can still fail fizzbuzz in 2025. If you really question their ability to code, ask the basics, not if they can write a Sudoku verifier on the spot. If you aren't a sudoku game studio I don't see the application outside of "can they work with arrays?"
>I don’t know about you, but most interviewers out there don’t have the ability to judge the technical merit of a bullshitters’s contribution to a class or internship project in half an hour, specially if it’s in a domain interviewer has no familiarity with.
everyone has a different style. Personally I care a lot less about programming proficiency and a lot more about technical communication. If they only wrote 10 lines of code for a group project but can explain every aspect of the project as if they written it themselves, what am I really missing? The odds of that sort of technical reaspning being accompanied by poor coding is a lot rarer than the alternative of a Leetcode wizard who can't grasp architectural concept nor adjust to software tooling, in my experiences.