The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that interviews and interviewers are unsuitable for the task they are used for (i.e. selecting the best candidate). Assuming this applies to programming interviews as well, then your opinions of these programmers (both good and bad) could be just as incorrect as the Israeli army training example given by the psychologist in this article:
"Because our impressions of how well each soldier had performed were generally coherent and clear, our formal predictions were just as definite. We rarely experienced doubts or formed conflicting impressions. We were quite willing to declare: "This one will never make it," "That fellow is mediocre, but he should do OK," or "He will be a star." We felt no need to question our forecasts, moderate them, or equivocate. If challenged, however, we were prepared to admit: "But of course anything could happen."
We were willing to make that admission because, despite our definite impressions about individual candidates, we knew with certainty that our forecasts were largely useless. The evidence was overwhelming. Every few months we had a feedback session in which we learned how the cadets were doing at the officer training school and could compare our assessments against the opinions of commanders who had been monitoring them for some time. The story was always the same: our ability to predict performance at the school was negligible. Our forecasts were not much better than blind guesses."
Another recent article was about the author was discussed here:
"Daniel Kahneman: How cognitive illusions blind us to reason" http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/oct/30/daniel-kahnema...
"Because our impressions of how well each soldier had performed were generally coherent and clear, our formal predictions were just as definite. We rarely experienced doubts or formed conflicting impressions. We were quite willing to declare: "This one will never make it," "That fellow is mediocre, but he should do OK," or "He will be a star." We felt no need to question our forecasts, moderate them, or equivocate. If challenged, however, we were prepared to admit: "But of course anything could happen."
We were willing to make that admission because, despite our definite impressions about individual candidates, we knew with certainty that our forecasts were largely useless. The evidence was overwhelming. Every few months we had a feedback session in which we learned how the cadets were doing at the officer training school and could compare our assessments against the opinions of commanders who had been monitoring them for some time. The story was always the same: our ability to predict performance at the school was negligible. Our forecasts were not much better than blind guesses."
Another recent article was about the author was discussed here:
"The King of Human Error" http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/12/michael-...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3219240