It's not that it's overrated, but rather that it doesn't fit into the company's interviewing process.
He said they gave him a test: that implies they have a set way of evaluating the code he produced and they want him to meet their criteria. They're not going to value unknown OSS over a test they created themselves.
We only give "coding" tests to people with no professional experience. Even there we don't care much about the code. We care about the process you use to arrive at the answer: the code is written while the interviewer watches and asks/answers questions. You can make all kinds of mistakes and I'll still give you thumbs up if you know what you were doing but were just nervous.
I hired someone with impressive OSS experience, but never looked at their code. I care less about code than I do about design, knowledge of how to architect something, deal with bugs, etc. I can learn all that stuff and more in 30 minutes of interviewing; it would take a lot longer than that reading your code to get the same information.
I've yet to meet a good designer/architect who couldn't code well, but met lots of good coders who couldn't design their way out of a paper bag.
He said they gave him a test: that implies they have a set way of evaluating the code he produced and they want him to meet their criteria. They're not going to value unknown OSS over a test they created themselves.
We only give "coding" tests to people with no professional experience. Even there we don't care much about the code. We care about the process you use to arrive at the answer: the code is written while the interviewer watches and asks/answers questions. You can make all kinds of mistakes and I'll still give you thumbs up if you know what you were doing but were just nervous.
I hired someone with impressive OSS experience, but never looked at their code. I care less about code than I do about design, knowledge of how to architect something, deal with bugs, etc. I can learn all that stuff and more in 30 minutes of interviewing; it would take a lot longer than that reading your code to get the same information.
I've yet to meet a good designer/architect who couldn't code well, but met lots of good coders who couldn't design their way out of a paper bag.