As a previous CTO and hiring manager, we did do trials, and it worked great. At the time I found an article showing that traditional interviews resulted in an 1

As a previous CTO and hiring manager, we did do trials, and it worked great. At the time I found an article showing that traditional interviews resulted in an 18% true-positive expectation of how they would perform, while a week-long trial got you to something like 73%. We paid them for the week like a contractor, and made an evaluation at the end of the week. It weeded people out who were great at code but bad culturally, or people who worked great. Sometimes we couldn't get a whole week to commit, but just a few days -- but these days made a huge difference. Now, I work at a FAANG company and _hate_ the interview process. Give me 3 months and I think I could teach just about any CS interview how to pass it (without being specific to any particular FAANG company), but that doesn't mean they would be good engineers. They are loosely related but different skills.