Small project, on your own time, expected to take about 3 hours or so. Automated tests can do the very basics of evaluation. Then, 1 to 2 hours explaining the d

Small project, on your own time, expected to take about 3 hours or so. Automated tests can do the very basics of evaluation. Then, 1 to 2 hours explaining the decisions made, and adding one more feature to the project. It lowers stress levels of the candidate, as they get to a lot of the thinking in advance. It's practical, as it requires more detailed programming skills. It provides a better sample of the candidate, as 5 20 lines of code snippets don't compare with a larger codebase, and makes the candidate explain something they really did themselves. Total time spent by the candidate is probably about the same, but the employers saves engineering time. I've been through that system a couple of times, it was both more enjoyable and gave people a far better picture of my skills than just how well I remember a tree traversal algorithm that I haven't had to write in forever, as data structures often handle their own traversal.