Well, you certainly made an unanswerable argument for why personal interviews are necessary! In my experience, writing any significant piece of software is inherently as much a social skill as a technical one. Virtually all of the major advances in software engineering in the last thirty-five or forty years have been in how people work together, not in syntax or language features. In fact, I can't think of a single truly new language feature that's come along in the thirty-five years since I got my last degree. Yet magically, the "Software Crisis" is now a distant memory. Three things changed: management techniques, sophisticated tooling for working together, and the culture of programming. All are fundamentally social changes. To say a guy like that is a great programmer is like saying that the guy who barrels through traffic at 110 miles an hour, passing trucks on the left, and frantically slaloming through heavy traffic at 40 mph faster than the prevailing speed is a good driver. Well, I guess, in a very limited sense.