Actually I would greatly prefer option 1. I am very confident that given nearly any situation I will prove my worth and have never had an employer disappointed

Actually I would greatly prefer option 1. I am very confident that given nearly any situation I will prove my worth and have never had an employer disappointed with my work. I am not as confident I would complete a contrived coding skill challenge on the spot on a whiteboard because I never work like that in reality. My job is to sit here and solve unique problems by any means available to me in a maintainable and scalable way. I do that very well and that is hard to test via whiteboard implementations of contrived examples. That is how it works in other fields. One of our managers asked his friend that owns a body shop how he finds good employees. He basically has a chat with them, feels them out, then hires them. If they don't work out he hires someone else. Perhaps it shouldn't be as stigmatic as "firing" after 30 days but you have instead hired someone on a 30 day contract with option to hire permanently. If they don't work out, that option is not exercised and that person is free to go try somewhere else. I can tell pretty quickly from chatting with a developer if they are a total fraud. I can't tell really quickly who will become a great dev, I just know when someone has the chops to have potential.