[yangchi]

>The solution we came up with was to invite people to work on projects for a weekend at no cost other than their time.

I see more and more companies doing this small projects type of initial screening. I like it. But time is actually an expensive cost. Suppose your candidate makes $130,000 per year, which isn't even a high salary in bay area. Then if he/she spends 15 hours on this project, then we are talking about 1000 bucks. Now that is quite a cost, isn't it?

Honestly compared to a white board programming puzzle, such projects always make more sense to me. But most companies will still do white-boards during on-site after the initial project. And although I like most of those projects, even in my case, if I happen to be busy, then I do feel like they are annoying. I'd rather spend my time doing what I was busy doing, or learning new stuff, or working on my pet projects, rather than working on a project that may or may not make sense to me, just to show to other people that I can code, and I can write clean code. Let alone I happen to know some friends who just hate those projects and will never do them unless it's from their dream company. Plus, there are people who are better communicator when they talk face-to-face. Then it's really hard to say if such project is really better than white-boarding for that type of candidates. But it's still way better than those 30-minutes online coding over a phone interview. That's the one I hate most.. Even Skype interview is better than phone interview.

[eloisant]

One solution is to give a free pass for people who have public open source projects to show off.

Instead of presenting the "screening project", they present their open source project and its source code.