At a previous employer, our approach was to give candidates 5 options and ask them to select 3 to complete. One was fizzbuzz, another was "reverse a string", an

At a previous employer, our approach was to give candidates 5 options and ask them to select 3 to complete. One was fizzbuzz, another was "reverse a string", and I forget what the others were. But they were all around the same basic level of complexity... basically just trying to ascertain "can this person fundamentally code something". We gave them as much of a headstart as we could too: a dedicated laptop with an IDE already running, a "skeleton" program for each of the five options already in place, etc. All they had to do was finish the program in order to produce the correct output. The only thing we didn't really allow was using the Internet to look up answers (the machine in question had its network connection intentionally disabled). I think we usually gave about 30 minutes for this, but even that wasn't a hard cutoff that was strictly enforced. Despite that, it was sad how many people not only couldn't complete this test, but frankly didn't even come close. Note that the "skeleton" code was in Java, but this was for positions that were specifically advertised as expecting Java experience. IIRC, we also later added a Python version. And frankly, if somebody had come in and said "I can do this, but can I use (R|C++|COBOL|Brainfuck|Whatever)?" I'm pretty sure we would have said "Yeah, sure, have at it. We just want to see if you can code."