[Deestan]

My company is up to ~40 programmers in my regional office, and our method appears to scale well enough for now.

We let everyone who asks take a very relaxed programming test. Simple (if you know basic algorithms, at least) problem, 4 hours deadline, work from home or in one of our free offices, programming language up to the interviewee. The delivered program is then rated by a few of our programmers who give some comments and a thumbs up or down. If thumbs are generally up, the candidate goes to the interview. The ones who get to the interview almost always end up hired.

So, basically, we have 3 tasks:

* Answer emails, send out tests, receive deliveries, and schedule interviews or say "sorry" to each candidate: This is the most stressful, so we rotate that every once in a while.

* Going over code and commenting: Enough people consider this a somewhat fun break from normal work that we don't have any problems scaling this.

* Interviewing: This has to require the R&D leader and at least one senior programmer. Since the people who get this far are almost always hired, it takes up no more of their time than it has to.