It's an interesting idea, but there are lots of problems this article doesn't address. At most of the companies I've worked for, there is a bunch of up front r

It's an interesting idea, but there are lots of problems this article doesn't address. At most of the companies I've worked for, there is a bunch of up front ramp up before someone can complete even a simple task. You have to become familiar with a team's frameworks, the business context, and the structure of the code base. To do one real task then requires all that ramp up first (or else, you'd need to simplify it so it's not a real task). How big a task? If you are interviewing new college grads, it might not matter, but people who already have industry experience either have to use a large chunk of vacation time or leave their current job if the task is non-trivial (taking, say, a sprint or two to do). How much do you pay? Do you have a fixed bounty? Do you pay senior engineers more? I get how you want to see someone do this for real, but I've already built something like this 20 times. If a company trying to recruit me asked me to build this, I could spend a few hours building it again, or I could just tell you about the times I did something like that (and the challenges I ran into), which would take 30 minutes.