Perfect time to test an alternate way to conduct interviews too. Give several of the second round candidates paid work on something you actually need to have done (perhaps pick tasks that are a sprint away). It should be a great test of both who can produce working code with tests (production code is way different than white-board pseudocode) as well as who can stay on task remotely. I can't imagine paying three people for the same work would cost more than flying them to your office and torturing them for a day or two. The one downside I can see is that currently out-of-work developers should be happy for a bit of 1099 work. Those who are looking to change jobs may not be so amenable.

This isn’t new. It’s called contract-to-hire and it’s great.

It’s now I got my last three role too. I always ask if I can do it that way to prove myself because I don’t have a traditional background (entirely self taught). I’ve had jobs say no, but I’ve had enough say yes that it got my career to a place where I’ve been very happy.

Right (I didn't say it was new). It's easier for someone who's unemployed to work under a short-term contract so I was encouraging employers to use "contract-to-hire" instead of a tech-interview.

Funny story: I actually did contract-to-hire by accident at one of my jobs. They wanted to hire me but couldn't fit me in their salary scale so I was a contractor for a while. They actually needed about three people and agreed that I could work as many extra hours as I was willing to on the other projects. So I worked 9 hours on my contract software project and most days about another 5-6 hours on the other embedded systems projects (I was young and an early riser, so I still got home before 1800 to play with my kids and have dinner). After about 2 months I got called into the presidents office and was offered a job with a better salary than the rate I'd asked for and was told I had made more than the president the last pay period and it raised the board's eye-brows. Still worked 10-11 hours a day for quite a while (and some ridiculous bursts in years after) since it was a start-up but I really was just trying to impress them enough to get hired.

As a non American, may I ask why the sick leave policy only applies to companies with 50-500 employees? I couldn't find explanations there. Exempting small companies is often done as they likely cannot pay for this measure, but why exempt large companies too?

Small companies with less than 50 employees are exempt because most of them cannot afford to pay employees for two weeks without receiving any labor and continue as a going concern. This is the same reason why most regulations exempt small businesses, because without it the only companies that could last would be mega corporations.

On to companies with more than 500 employees. They are being exempt because they are large enough to afford paying for their own employees to go on sick leave with it only affecting the profit for the year rather than sinking the company.

Now personally I think that 500 number should be 5,000 instead but at the end of the day any line you draw is arbitrarily arrived at (think some countries banning gatherings larger than 10, while others picked larger than 100).

You'd have to ask the Republicans who apparently demanded this; I don't know what logic was behind it (if any).