I do not agree with the premise that the best way to hire engineers is to follow the hire—chef model of restaurants. I don’t think it’s fair in any way to ask someone to work for free for few days, while you keep the candidate guessing whether you will give the job to the candidate or not. Also how can one plan to hire engineers who already have day jobs? Should the engineers take 3 days leave from their employer every-time they try to interview?

This kind of model is way too biased towards employers and gives them too much power to exploit, in an environment where employers anyways have a lot of power as compared to one employee (prospective candidate in fact, not even employee). This reasoning works well for companies whose job is to recruit or help recruit engineers. After all, they are being paid by the employer and not the candidate, so they want to make the process optimal for the employers. But as much as I like the doing the right thing for customer attitude, this seems like taking that to an extreme and exploiting everything that isn’t paying.