Alternatively, with that time limit it's just going to select for candidates who've been churning out Django/Rails/etc. webpages recently and have all the details committed to memory.
That feels like premature optimization to me. I can see how it'd find generally good web developers, but I can also see how it'd produce just as many false negatives as Google's interviews do. So is it really that much of a step forward?
I completely agree with that. I was thinking, 'yeah, you could hand this to a kid who only knows surface UI and he could crank this out using Rails or something, but it would just be the same garbage that you couldn't maintain later and it wouldn't prove much more than he knows how to write simple apps.' But then maybe that's all they want?
I dunno...I've worked with a lot of people who could code a simple app but completely fail when it comes to serious programming.
That feels like premature optimization to me. I can see how it'd find generally good web developers, but I can also see how it'd produce just as many false negatives as Google's interviews do. So is it really that much of a step forward?