I love real work. I hate doing basic stuff on whiteboards; puzzles and toy problems suck. But I firmly believe that doing what amounts to an internship is filte

I love real work. I hate doing basic stuff on whiteboards; puzzles and toy problems suck. But I firmly believe that doing what amounts to an internship is filtering out people that you would be ecstatic to have at your company. Most of the really good engineers I've worked with can go anywhere. When they're available it's by their own choice, and they're gone damned quick. (One fellow recently got fed up with things over a couple of months, made a call, and the email he got back said in part, "Apparently you aced your interview. When should we tell HR you can start?". Seriously, how do you compete with that?) The people are not on the street. These people will not suffer the gauntlet you have decided is necessary. They're going to think to themselves "That's cute," and look elsewhere. I won't do a weeks-long project. I know very few people who would. You CAN assess someone well in eight hours; if you can't get a good handle on someone's skills in that amount of time then you seriously need to improve your own interviewing skills. The message you are sending right now is, "We mistrust our interviewing expertise to the point that we want YOU to take a multi-week risk, really a very high risk, just so that we can be sure." Now, there are undoubtedly people who want to work at your company, and they are willing to go to any measure to do so. If you are all happy with each other, then I see no reason why our paths should cross. I guess this is the point where you can publically rationalize your strategy by bucketing me as a jerk, "sour grapes," someone you wouldn't want to work with anyway because of red flags and such. I won't steer you away from this, since I can't offer any proof that I'm not. But I'm darned sure you're missing good people, even if you're convinced I'm not one.