[davedx]

I'm currently involved in the recruitment process for our team -- this mostly means administering programming tests, and very occasionally an interview.

My feedback on this "get them to work in your team for several days doing real work" is that this would cause a massive productivity drop for our project, and we would almost certainly miss deadlines. It's possible, sure, but the time just to find a brand new person something that's possible to do, introduce them to the code-base, review their code afterwards and still manage the rest of the team would be a serious drain.

I also question the value of evaluating different people doing different bits of work, which this seems to imply. Surely a programming test is better because then you're measuring against the same thing with each different person? It's not "real work", but I don't believe you can accurately measure someone's "real productivity" from a 1-2 day crash course anyway.

It's always good to try out new things, and I'm happy it worked for the company who did the interview, but for us I don't think we could afford to hire this way.