This hiring process is great, but requires lots of time, for the applicants and especially for the hiring manager - I suspect the author was targeting unemploye

This hiring process is great, but requires lots of time, for the applicants and especially for the hiring manager - I suspect the author was targeting unemployed people, so they would have time for this long application (he put his job advert on the New York Times). To be honest, that is what surprised me the most in this article: that someone who runs a statistical arbitrage desk has the time for all of this. I wonder if companies could collaborate to create this hiring process. It would save hiring manager's time, applicants' time since one application will count for different jobs, and then a system could be set for candidates to rank their employees, then the candidate who performs the best get his first wish, the second candidate gets is first wish if there is still room, otherwise he gets his second wish, and so on - a similar system is being used in France for students to chose in which universities they want to go after competitive exam entrance, basically lots of universities pool exams together. On one hand it would scale hiring process, on the other hand it's not flexible and offers have to be transparent (it's currently not the case but maybe that would be a good thing), and it would hurt the pride of companies who are ranked in the last position. In the case of the article, I am sure someone who is able to solve in a language he recently learn the non trivial software that are mentioned will be able to land a job at some point. It was written in 2004, maybe Github, Stackoverflow and Open Source in general are now contributing to that selection.