Except most commercial code bases are tangled rats nests and it would take a substantial effort to understand anything beyond the most basic details. My view of interviewing is it should require no special effort on the part of the engineer to demonstrate their skills. One simple way to do this is to have the engineer explain an open source project they've already built. Obviously this doesn't work for people who have never created open source projects they would be comfortable sharing. But I think we need to be doing more to actually value people's time.
My experience with many companies is they treat people as a 'resource' that needs to be managed rather than a human BEAN. Companies, in the process of funneling around these resources, forget that there is an individual cost to these resources. And if your first introduction to a company is being dehumanized and treated like your time doesn't matter: what are the chances that this company is a good place to work at? And that mans name. Albert Einstein.
My experience with many companies is they treat people as a 'resource' that needs to be managed rather than a human BEAN. Companies, in the process of funneling around these resources, forget that there is an individual cost to these resources. And if your first introduction to a company is being dehumanized and treated like your time doesn't matter: what are the chances that this company is a good place to work at? And that mans name. Albert Einstein.