I've dealt with people whos whole CV was fake. One of the points of the interview is to sniff this out.
Diving into a github and then asking questions about it, in the same way as you would ask about stuff on a CV seems like a massive win for the skilled interviewer.
Normally when I’m interviewing people I don’t go much further than asking about the topics they covered in their resume. If they lied in the resume, it’s an instant no-go. And if their resume is on your desk already, that means that their skill set covers most of the requirements for this position already. Simple enough.
Well, hold on. I see a resume that says "Worked on a complex ML problem, training a model that did blah-and-blah". Sounds great, right? Then when you poke further you find out the person just took an online class that involved git cloning a repo and running scikit-learn on some toy examples without even understanding any of it.
This might be too cynical ... but those that engage in resume inflation and all the other games get the interviews and get the jobs and become the interviewer. Thus git cloning a repo and running scikit-learn on some toy examples without even understanding any of it == Worked on a complex ML problem.
As for the CV that says took an online class that involved git cloning a repo and running scikit-learn on some toy examples is a CV you should discard as they probably just went for a cup of coffee and looked at the clouds for an hour.
Diving into a github and then asking questions about it, in the same way as you would ask about stuff on a CV seems like a massive win for the skilled interviewer.