Public engineering work can provide useful evidence when the candidate explains its purpose, their contribution, and its limitations. A repository’s popularity or a polished demo is not a substitute for that discussion.
Make public work optional. Candidates may have substantial experience they cannot publish, and time available for side projects varies.
Choose a relevant artifact
Ask the candidate to select something connected to a responsibility in the role. This could be code, a technical explanation, an issue discussion, or a small demonstration.
Confirm that they are comfortable discussing it and that the material is public or otherwise authorized to share. Do not ask for a former employer’s private repository.
Review the reasoning behind the artifact
| Area | Prompt |
|---|---|
| Purpose | What problem was this intended to solve, and for whom? |
| Contribution | Which parts are yours, and what came from collaborators or dependencies? |
| Tradeoffs | What did you deliberately simplify or leave out? |
| Verification | How did you check that it worked? |
| Maintenance | What would become difficult if the project had real users? |
| Learning | What would you change now, and why? |
Inspect a small, relevant section together. A guided discussion can reveal more than an interviewer silently scanning a large codebase.
Account for context
A weekend prototype, a research experiment, and a maintained library serve different purposes. Judge decisions against the intended use while asking what would need to change for the job’s environment.
Do not mistake lack of production hardening in an explicitly experimental project for inability to operate production software. Conversely, a candidate should recognize where a prototype is incomplete.
Discuss assistance transparently
Ask about collaborators, generated code, templates, and AI tools in a neutral way. The useful question is what the candidate understands and can verify, not whether every character was typed unaided.
If something fails during the discussion, observe the debugging approach rather than treating a flawless presentation as the objective.
Offer equivalent evidence routes
Candidates without public work can use a generalized project discussion or a bounded fictional exercise. Assess the same capability through a different artifact.
Use the project deep dive and AI tool interview policy to keep expectations clear. Discuss an engineering search with Refery.