There's another group this method hurts: people whose personalities are closer to Mr. Spock than to McCoy. Same goes for the method another commenter suggested about "tell me about your best bug..." (Though perhaps it doesn't hurt too much, because such people usually develop hacks to lessen their natural disadvantage across the board.) Speaking strictly for myself, I don't really feel pride in my code. My identity is completely separated from things I do. When I finish something, there's a sense of accomplishment, but it passes very quickly and I move on to the next thing. If that something was "hard", on reflection it feels easy, because I already did it. And it's not like I've never known excitement and such, or never feel it now. I thought programming was the coolest shit too when I was 14 and I felt the excitement of making a website the color I wanted, and using a for loop to eliminate tons of HTML. I just don't get excited over stuff I feel is "easy", which is everything I've ever done and everything that looks close enough to those things. If you want to make my eyes light up a bit, ask about things I want to do but haven't gotten around to yet. But it still has the highlighted problem of selecting for people who are most enthusiastic about whatever they're talking about, not for people who can best do the job.
All I want from a programming job is to get paid money to spend a lot of time with a computer writing software, and spending time with other humans strictly as needed to advance the computer project. I don't want to sit around a campfire (or water cooler) and trade stories, and I don't have a memory for things like "best bug" and other events people tell stories about. Unless at that event's particular moment I think "Maybe this bug (or whatever) would be good to use as an example for a future interview." and I make a reminder to add it to a file of such life events I review before interviews. It's one of a bunch of little things I have to do that some others don't, which sucks, but considering the whole messed up wasteland that is programmer interviews where pretty much everyone has to do a bunch of BS prep work unrelated to the actual job just to stand a chance, I don't think it's worth complaining much about. Hence the throwaway -- time to move on to other things.
All I want from a programming job is to get paid money to spend a lot of time with a computer writing software, and spending time with other humans strictly as needed to advance the computer project. I don't want to sit around a campfire (or water cooler) and trade stories, and I don't have a memory for things like "best bug" and other events people tell stories about. Unless at that event's particular moment I think "Maybe this bug (or whatever) would be good to use as an example for a future interview." and I make a reminder to add it to a file of such life events I review before interviews. It's one of a bunch of little things I have to do that some others don't, which sucks, but considering the whole messed up wasteland that is programmer interviews where pretty much everyone has to do a bunch of BS prep work unrelated to the actual job just to stand a chance, I don't think it's worth complaining much about. Hence the throwaway -- time to move on to other things.