I've hired about 50 full-time w2 on-site developers over the last decade and maybe 3 or 4 of them were total duds (due to extreme mis-representation of technical skills) once employed. I'm not sure how this ratio compares to others but it certainly seems to be an issue that the industry talks about, so I'd be surprised if it were ultra rare.

> Only if you pay me for my ten hours. Otherwise, you've already indicated that you and your company don't value me or my time.

My favorite way to hire is short term consulting project into full time position. Not every candidate is willing or able to do this, but it has produced the highest success rate in terms of hiring signals. By the way, this underscores that it's not a money problem - hiring the wrong person is a lot more expensive than paying five candidates to produce something meaningful (and find the best one of the five).

That's pretty good, I know people who've had worse results.

Some of them were former coworkers who leaned very heavily on algorithm problems and whiteboarding because they were terrified of people who couldn't code at all (though wouldn't that be the easiest kind to let go?). But they still missed sometimes. Both on people who'd studied purely for algorithm questions and got through, despite having little practical ability; and on people who could knock out a task but had no ability to reason about its place in a larger system, so created more work for others than they contributed themselves.

I agree with your approach. As a junior developer I got my big break by agreeing to join as an hourly contractor while I proved myself, with the hope of being brought on full time should my performance be sufficient. Lucky for me, the company was not lying and they brought me on and the rest is history. We all have heard those horror stories about companies who claim to do the contract-to-hire thing but have no intention to make good on the promise, so this is a risky path for the candidate.