I dig this, a lot. Seems like theres an intentional selection bias here in attracting people that love distributed systems, and I think that's cool.
As an aside, I think a conversational version of these challenges work well as a middle ground for anyone that think the take home coding approach may be too heavy-handed or not time efficient. That's how I do it in my funnel (sharding a database from scratch) and it only takes about an hour of face-to-face time. Most of the time you don't even need a whiteboard.
Thanks! These challenges aren't part of our hiring process. We do an at-home code challenge and then we do a short "workday" on our Slack instead. We wrote up some details about the process a while back: https://fly.io/docs/hiring/hiring/
Our workday is very much conversational -- it's hard to have whiteboards in Slack! We're fully distributed so Slack workdays are a good way to gauge how comfortable people are in that form of collaboration.
As an aside, I think a conversational version of these challenges work well as a middle ground for anyone that think the take home coding approach may be too heavy-handed or not time efficient. That's how I do it in my funnel (sharding a database from scratch) and it only takes about an hour of face-to-face time. Most of the time you don't even need a whiteboard.