I love this idea in theory, but in practice this would just mean coming up with some throwaway project and then paying them a full day to build on it. I've never had a job where there wasn't at least a few days of onboarding (often times a few weeks) before somebody could productively contribute to our applications. If it's a brand new project then sure, but how often does that happen? And when it does, do you want your completely unknown candidate doing it or one of your senior engineers who understands the big picture, how it will fit in, your company culture/values/etc?

Companies constantly talk about how expensive it is to hire people because your most valuable employees have to spend time prepping for interviews, reviewing homework, discussing results etc.

In the era of full remote work I don't understand why you don't just have a small greenfield project that you can quickly onboard prospective employees with. Have a brief personality / resume griller screening, then hire them for a week and toss them at a few bugs or issues for this project with a semi-public slack. Then see what they output and decide at the end.

That would likely be less expensive then all the other nine layers of interviewing hell they maintain and get better results.

I think this is impractical without at least some filter first. Some jobs get thousands of applications and some of those are fully fraud. I'm all for a paid work stint but where do you draw the line, how do you evaluate it fairly, and how do you make that possible and attractive for people already working?

That's a bad idea in general. A paid day of work may be legally impossible for some candidates who are currently employed and have signed an agreement with their current employer regarding IP rights and/or conflict of interest.

> If you think they're good, why not do a paid day of work then?

not many people could take the time away from their current job, so you'd be automatically filtering out people who are currently employed (which, i would imagine, is a signal that they're already sufficiently good).

So only those who could take the time can come to this style of interview, and it introduces a systemic bias.

If you know you're good, why don't you offer to pay to do a day of work for them? The potential upside seems massive if you actually get the job. You would also be able to offset the costs of borrowing another engineer's time to get up to speed somewhat.

This would be at least partly my solution. Issue as I see it is, hiring someone is expensive largely because you're committing to giving them a prolonged position thats difficult to terminate.

I think contract hires need to become more of a norm.

Managing all those 1099s come tax day as an IC looking for a job sounds nightmarish, let alone from the company's perspective.

> They'll probably be querying LLMs all day after you hire them anyway.

At least they hey will know when LLMs make mistakes.