I just had a thought: How about having a phone round first, and ask all applicants to provide a sample of their coding skills, like suggested in the article. Th

I just had a thought: How about having a phone round first, and ask all applicants to provide a sample of their coding skills, like suggested in the article. Then, in the second round you leave each applicant for a couple of minutes to analyze the code from someone else and find out what it does and what's so special about it. That way your work of looking into the code samples will be minimized. Even better, you'll get an idea of how well a coworker with a similar skillset can cope with that code. You can also judge how well people are at dealing with code from their coworkers and don't have to come up with examples yourself. It does sound pretty good, no?