zlacker

I felt that the live interview was fairly ok at that. A staff engineer watched you code and debug stuff, asked you how you would do XYZ, etc. This took a few hours so must have cost the company $100s in engineering time. I can see why they don't do it any more. There's not much more they can do in a compressed time frame. Lately a bunch of companies want you to do unpaid multi-day take-home assignments before they even talk to you, but that is nuts. An alternative could be a paid brief engagement, like an NBA 10-day contract. I've done some things like that, which worked ok.

>>throwa+(OP)
interviews are good for weeding out the absolute no's and that's about as good as you can get with those. a live coding session gives you marginally more information in that regard, but won't give you definitively more.

a 10-day contract is better, since it's real work, for pay, but the relatively short duration doesn't tell you much about the candidate's intrinsic motivation or how relationships develop past the honeymoon stage.

so really, it'd be best and easiest if we all explicitly assumed that jobs had 6-12 month trial periods, for both parties, and that after that time, either can walk away without hard feelings (or negative judgment), other than in the most egregious cases (i've seen a couple cases that'd fall in this category). again, this is primarily about jobs that have the most variability. less variable jobs don't need as long of an evaluation period (but do need more than a few weeks).