I don't disagree with you when a candidate has already been through a thorough interview process but the company has some concerns around a special and unique a

I don't disagree with you when a candidate has already been through a thorough interview process but the company has some concerns around a special and unique area of concern. It is very fair IMO to ask someone to do a little test around that special area or go through a more detailed interview there, I've done this for specific candidates myself too. But that area needs to be something so considerably unique to your business that the person can't have conceivably done it 20 times before. What is ridiculous is asking them to solve a puzzle unrelated to the job, or write loops or look up data from a database when all those things are something they have done likely 100's of times and you can easily ask questions around. In this specific case, I don't think a small test is out of line at all, as long as it is paid and short and the person knows they are the short list ready for an offer, or an offer has been made contingent on the test. What I object to is all these companies that do a 10 minute call (or not even) and then ask a candidate to spend many unpaid hours doing a test before they even bother seeing if the candidate is a fit for the position. And frankly, even paying for it doesn't make it fair for most experienced engineers. For example, I have seen most companies that do offer to pay, offer typically around $50 for 4 hours or $20-40/hr and they want an NDA that contains non-compete clauses many times. I have seen 5 startups doing this in the last few months, one was a company I had been mentoring off and on, the others were mainly companies friends had applied at and were dumbfounded. But if you take my scenario where the test is legit, you are testing something that is specialized knowledge and isn't useless to the company so you need to pay a fair consulting wage for the time, not a discount amount. Hopefully that makes sense, it does in my head but I am not sure I articulated it well. The overall goal is move through interviews fast, find smart candidates that will solve problems and don't put so much emphasis on meaningless details. I have seen a few companies doing a solid technical interview and they do ask quite a few algorithm based questions. I normally would disagree with algorithm questions when they are done just as a CS question. But when they are being asked because the candidate will literally need to be implementing them or understanding them at a deep level because the product and position being interviewed for is handling millions of distributed transactions a second or something similar, then they are legit and very necessary questions. But they are more or less useless (with a few exceptions) when you are a startup and you don't even have a working product or customers, in that case, the company just needs people with experience to get the product out the door and stop worrying about crazy algorithm questions or useless tests.