I'd like to know a little more about the end... he says they switched back to private salaries and then a bit later half of the team left and half got merged in

I'd like to know a little more about the end... he says they switched back to private salaries and then a bit later half of the team left and half got merged into another company. Uh, that sounds like a bad result (but may have been totally orthogonal to the salary change). And he's right. This works really well for programmers who like things to be algorithmic. It doesn't necessarily make much sense to the non programmers. That doesn't mean it's wrong, just "different" for them. We do audition style interviews... meaning when you come to interview for a programmer position you write code all day. If you come to interview for a sales position, you will be selling all day during your interviews. If you come to interview as an office manager, you will be doing those tasks during your interview. We don't sit and have long conversations about where you see yourself in five years. I can tell you that we've never had a single programmer that thought this interview style was strange. We had two office manager interviewees walk out during the middle of the interview. That style of interview was just strange to them and freaked them out.