Sounds like a great idea. I would definitely like to try it out in my organization. The few problems I see with the approach are:
1. For closed source companies, does this increase the recruiting complexity by requiring potential candidates to sign NDAs as they will be looking at proprietary code?
2. Does it add overhead if you have a lot of applicants? They would all be sending in questions that you need to review. Since the process may take long and is not time boxed, you may lose productivity as you get interrupts from a new channel. From the article it didn't seem as if the author performs any kind of pre-screening
[EDIT]2.1 If the applicant pool is large, this also sounds like a waste of money.
3. For reasonably complex systems (I am currently in enterprise software), you would need to provide a quick way for a new hire to finish setup of your application. There was a time when we expected a new guy to finish the first install of our app in a week (!!). Things are much better now with hosted VMs that you can just fire up with the install being 1 click, but not all companies are going to have that luxury
I am also assuming that to accommodate applicants that are applying while still being employed (they need to pay their bills too!), we would need to ensure that the task to complete is short enough/can be done over the weekend or off hours.
1. For closed source companies, does this increase the recruiting complexity by requiring potential candidates to sign NDAs as they will be looking at proprietary code?
2. Does it add overhead if you have a lot of applicants? They would all be sending in questions that you need to review. Since the process may take long and is not time boxed, you may lose productivity as you get interrupts from a new channel. From the article it didn't seem as if the author performs any kind of pre-screening
[EDIT]2.1 If the applicant pool is large, this also sounds like a waste of money.
3. For reasonably complex systems (I am currently in enterprise software), you would need to provide a quick way for a new hire to finish setup of your application. There was a time when we expected a new guy to finish the first install of our app in a week (!!). Things are much better now with hosted VMs that you can just fire up with the install being 1 click, but not all companies are going to have that luxury
I am also assuming that to accommodate applicants that are applying while still being employed (they need to pay their bills too!), we would need to ensure that the task to complete is short enough/can be done over the weekend or off hours.