I would hope "you just broke the user experience for 50 million people, there are 30 internal teams screaming your name" is higher pressure and stakes than an o

I would hope "you just broke the user experience for 50 million people, there are 30 internal teams screaming your name" is higher pressure and stakes than an onsite interview loop. You can make or break your career in that situation too. I had to deal with a crisis this week that boiled down to a poorly optimized SQL query or two. Of course, the manner in which they failed meant our DB started disk swapping and hurting our availability. Contract to hire is something we do but it is rare. An initial try out period doesn't do us much good since the learning curve is long. I don't trust take home assignments unless their solutions can't be googled. And it's a lot of work to create and evaluate problems of that nature. You want them just long enough, not a huge time sink for you or the candidate. You want them to demand a range of solutions so there are many ways to fail and succeed. I agree we should not be doing riddles/puzzles. For me the most straightforward way to gauge a candidate's ability in an hour is to ask them to program on the spot and see how they act. Yes, it's a game and the candidate can learn to beat the system and oversell themselves. But the vast majority of people I don't want to hire do not go to these lengths.