> Literally setting up a paid one week period for a senior level candidate would cost, optimistically, a few hundred dollars for evaluating a single candidate.

> Literally setting up a paid one week period for a senior level candidate would cost, optimistically, a few hundred dollars for evaluating a single candidate. It’s unworkable for anyone who is already employed. What am I going to do: use a week of vacation for this “interview”? (The fact that I’d be paid is immaterial: I lose vacation time. Plus, the more senior you are, the more of your compensation is in equity. Will I get a week’s worth of an FTE’s both salary and equity just for doing the interview? And at what job level? The highest for which I’m being considered? This wouldn’t be viable for private companies because it would bloat the cap table with a massive number of insubstantial stockholders; and I believe that companies run into SEC compliance issues when they have more than a certain number (1000?) of stockholders. Additionally, when I’m looking for a new position, I don’t just interview with one company. I typically aim to get between five and six offers (on a ~5 year cadence) to get an understanding of the spectrum of market rates for engineers, and to see what options are available. There’s no way I could spend weeks interviewing. Maybe I would consider this if it was my “dream job”; but I’m not sure that the signal from such a trial would be better than typical interview. Many companies have substantial technology stacks of proprietary infrastructure that you need to learn and become proficient with in order to be effective at your job. At recent employers, engineers have felt it takes 1-2 years to feel fully up to speed and effective using the company’s tech stack. With this kind of ramp up time, a one-week trial would only be useful with a make-work fake project. My current employer spends six weeks full time just training all engineers who join the company - before they even begin to have actual responsibilities for doing work on their team.