Ah, of course. My personal experience from several employers has been that people who believe that they can judge programmer skills by listening to their bullshit end up hiring bullshit artists. I have also worked with programmers who could easily spin a tale that covers all your questions but still couldn't write a single working line of code. Coincidentally, they were masters at explaining why the project is delayed.
I'm in Europe, so it's not easy to fire wrong hires after trial period, but I have never even seen anyone admit that they made a wrong hiring decision.
As an interesting case, one company I worked at hired an architect who had failed their rather trivial coding test but interviewed well. That person, together with company management, ended up driving away several competent engineers.
I won't work any more for employers who don't require a programming test. Your experience may be different.
I'm also in Europe now (Germany). If you haven't figured out by the end of the trial period that the person can't do their job, it's not he who's the problem.
It has also been my experience (20+ years) that sociopaths and egotists (the ones who will try to bullshit you beyond a few ham-fisted attempts) are in such a minority that they're not worth basing your interview process around.
The only cases of hiring engineers who couldn't code that I've ever heard of directly from colleagues over my entire career (that weren't third-hand re-tellings) have been where he either was not interviewed at all, was only interviewed by someone non-technical, or was hired by someone non-technical over the objections of someone technical.
I'm in Europe, so it's not easy to fire wrong hires after trial period, but I have never even seen anyone admit that they made a wrong hiring decision.
As an interesting case, one company I worked at hired an architect who had failed their rather trivial coding test but interviewed well. That person, together with company management, ended up driving away several competent engineers.
I won't work any more for employers who don't require a programming test. Your experience may be different.