If you can make this hiring process work, that's probably a good sign about your code base. It can be difficult to find a meaningful and reasonably self-contai

If you can make this hiring process work, that's probably a good sign about your code base. It can be difficult to find a meaningful and reasonably self-contained project in a large code base, but if your code is very well organized, it's possible. The thing I really don't want to experience, ever again, is to be dropped into a horrendous project that nobody else wants to deal with, usually with an assignment along the lines of "nobody ever wrote tests for this - writing tests is a great way to learn a code base, so write some unit tests for this monstrosity", usually followed by a chirpy "Ping me on IM if you get stuck!" If I were able to contribute meaningfully to a code base during my interview, that would give me a lot of confidence that I'd be able to succeed on the job and enjoy my work day. The downside to this is that even very a very well organized code base often runs into a glitch that takes a couple hours to debug, and if this happens, you have a new candidate sitting next to a programmer muttering to himself as he messes around with config files trying to figure out out why the paths are all broken.