While I still believe that a short (paid, ideally) project is a more meaningful test of a developer's skills than whiteboard coding or the like, I thought this

While I still believe that a short (paid, ideally) project is a more meaningful test of a developer's skills than whiteboard coding or the like, I thought this made a reasonable case for a quick set of heuristics to filter out non-starters. I especially like the "bug fix" item (#3), as it contains a variety of different possible issues and seems like it would expose how the candidate thinks and approaches reading code (which they will be doing a lot of, if it's like every programming job I've ever had...), in a meaningful way. Combined with a nice but simple problem like the anagram (#1) question it seems like you could filter the wheat from the chaff rather quickly. Semi-off-topic: Unless I'm mistaken there's a typo in the little "about this author" blurb at the bottom: "David Elbe is web entreprenur..." It also seems like the problem statement for #4 is not quite correct, I'm having trouble parsing it (as some others in this thread also seem to be): "Write a function that takes three measurements in centimeters as input and returns a the volume over a litre" Everything past "and returns..." needs some editing, methinks.