[laeus]

Right, I meant "pulling their weight" in a relative sense, with the understanding that a more experienced and talented employee will do more work or do it more quickly. Maybe my desire is simply to increase the proportion of coworkers who make roughly appropriate contributions to the team effort. I once had to explain how splines worked to a graphics programmer with 20 years of industry experience.

A trial process like this would select against lots of quality developers, true, but that isn't the real question. Instead, I want to know whether the developers who wind up being hired represent a more talented subset. I can't prove that it would, but I feel that this system would be more accurate in letting the right people through.

All that said, I like some of the gray area solutions proposed in this HN thread, including after-hours or weekend remote work on a project already in production. Not a perfect solution, given the inability to evaluate things like culture fit, but it combines many upsides of the alternatives.

[Denzel]

>> I once had to explain how splines worked to a graphics programmer with 20 years of industry experience.

Is the knowledge of splines a major predictor of a graphics programmer's success? I don't understand why it appears to be a point of denigration here. The details of your story are foreign to me, of course, so maybe I'm missing context. But it's always helpful to remember that time is finite when compared to the seemingly infinite amount of things to learn. No one comes to work and says, "I want to suck today!"