I don't see how any of those other options you mentioned ameliorate the concern of requiring contextualizing the work for the candidate. You're still going to h

I don't see how any of those other options you mentioned ameliorate the concern of requiring contextualizing the work for the candidate. You're still going to have to contextualize the fake work. It also continues to favor weird gauntlets and puzzles without any basis for what kinds of gauntlets or puzzles are meaningful to create, nor whether or not you'd know how to interpret the results even if one could squeeze useful meaning out of them. I also assume you know well ahead of time what kind of work you're hiring for and what kind of work (in general shape) your team will be doing, so that you can schedule the interview or the team's work to appropriately coincide? I have to hire people who either have an esoteric skill-set or people who will have to rapidly learn one (formal methods, vehicle hacking, control theory, microkernel architecture, etc.), and I've yet to find a decent substitute for just planning ahead and setting up the environment to get the existing team and the candidate directly engaged on something immediate and real. I've seen a ton of bad hires made trying to contrive scenarios and meaning from more traditional methods. :shrug: