Getting rid of the litmus test and embracing the idea that the first thing you cut your teeth on might be alien to good developers are both amazing ideas. Worki

Getting rid of the litmus test and embracing the idea that the first thing you cut your teeth on might be alien to good developers are both amazing ideas. Working on a toy problem is a terrible way to figure out whether a person will actually be beneficial to an organization. They might take twice as long but produce 1/10 the bugs, they might be someone willing and able to dig deeper than anyone else to solve those long-running problems, or something else amazing. Even giving them a meaningful task manipulating the organization's code might be bogus - with the complexity of current tech stacks there's a damn good chance they've never used yours. If you happen to give them a problem which touches any part of the tech stack they aren't familiar with, they are likely to come up with a clunky solution or no solution at all, no matter how good they are, simply because they are not familiar with the idioms.