I like it! And from a fellow Texan, too. :) Our dev team is even smaller than yours, and we also spend a lot of time getting to know developer candidates, of

I like it! And from a fellow Texan, too. :) Our dev team is even smaller than yours, and we also spend a lot of time getting to know developer candidates, of course. We've found it helpful to assign a programming project, but usually one that takes around 20-30 hours to complete. We like to pay them market rate for this work because we are busy with our work and personal lives and know they probably are too, plus we often try to give them a module we've been meaning to get started on, so we actually plan to incorporate their work into our codebase. It seems to be a very unique experience for developers applying to our company, and so far it's been very successful.