Agreed that it's a positive thing to actually pay people for nontrivial amounts of work.
Downside is that, as a company paying someone to accomplish a task, I'd want to give a different task to each applicant, so that if they do a good job, it provides value to the company.
And this is a problem because rarely are two programming problems exactly as difficult as each other, so the test isn't normalized. Interviewing is hard enough when you keep all the variables that you can control the same.
Make the number $250 and give everyone the same problem (which you have to change every so often because of glassdoor and the like).
That's less than you're already spending on salary for the interview slate, so you're at most doubling your already small costs for a critically important function for your company.
I mean, a bad hire is going to cost me thousands of dollars - if not tens of thousands of dollars. $500 is pretty cheap to figure that out up front on a candidate I am otherwise ready to hire. I am not going to do this to 100 people and pick the best, I am going to do it for someone that in every other way is a good to hire dev.
I don't think I would give out the same work to multiple people, let them put it into production on their first day and get the pride going ;)
Downside is that, as a company paying someone to accomplish a task, I'd want to give a different task to each applicant, so that if they do a good job, it provides value to the company.
And this is a problem because rarely are two programming problems exactly as difficult as each other, so the test isn't normalized. Interviewing is hard enough when you keep all the variables that you can control the same.