The Technical Interview Is Dead 
The technical interview is overwhelmingly the primary screening method of choice at the world's most competent software development companies. The team that builds the match engine for the electronic exchange, the team that builds the boot ROM for your smart phone, the team that builds the Google crawler and indexing, the teams building kernel SAN storage code --- these teams are hired by technical interviews.<p>The "audition project" is a trend story with, from what I can see, very little empirical evidence to back it up. When the most notable example of a company routinely employing audition is Treehouse --- all due respect to Treehouse, but still --- that's a red flag.<p>The bigger red flag is that the paid audition project method has obvious flaws. The top 20% of software developers are almost uniformly employed. Prospective new employers for these people court them actively; in fact, the problem of companies luring top developers out of other companies is so challenging that large SFBA tech companies have entered into illegal compacts to stifle the practice. Companies are so hard-up for talent that they'll "buy" startups just to get access to their teams.<p>In this environment, why would a top developer, who has their choice among tens of different high-paying interesting jobs, <i>moonlight</i> for a prospective new employer just so they can make sure the relationship's going to work?<p>Most technical interviews are terribly flawed. They aren't standardized and they aren't rigorous so you can't compare candidates on any apples-apples basis and you can't correlate them to job performance to make them more predictive. Most of the developers tasked with conducting them suck at interviewing; many use interviews as a sort of hazing ritual, and most use them as opportunity to project their own subjective views about how software should be built onto candidates. Many technical interviews are trivia games punctuated by awkward attempts at working through code on a whiteboard or a piece of paper in a high-pressure environment.<p>The solution to this problem is to improve technical interviews. It's not to pretend that the whole market for devs has suddenly embraced temp- to- perm hiring. It hasn't. It's getting <i>harder</i> to find good developers, not easier, and the notion that companies have the luxury of inflicting "audition projects" on candidates is counter to reality.