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Agreed that this is a great approach, but the major downside is that you are limiting yourself to candidates who either:

a) have the time to do real work outside of their day job and aren't on a restrictive contract preventing them from moonlighting, or...

b) are currently unemployed

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I was a college student at the time. I was long on money and short on cash. I was also far less experienced than I was so there were a lot of new things for me then, like those fascinating "callback" thingies I had to figure out.

Nowadays if I were given roughly the same assignment it would have taken me about 3-5 hours at best, which, given my graduated-and-employed hourly rate, is actually quite in line with what I was paid. So it paid as much as I would have charged for a Saturday hack.

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