"The ideal candidate is somebody deeply familiar with the tech stack we are currently using, preferably having spent at least 6 months working on our code base."
Seriously though, the performance of an interviewee in such conditions are mostly a function of how well the interviewer can "onboard" the interviewee within 4 hours, or how much the interviewer is willing to actively guide the interviewee to the solution (as opposed to letting them figure it out).
Even with a single interviewer this easily introduces bias. I've interviewed many many people over the years, and sometimes I wonder whether I'm giving slightly more hints or less hints based on how subjectively I "like" the candidate. I mean, I try hard to be fair, but I don't follow a strict script, and the variability occasionally makes me doubt myself.
For such open ended tasks as 4 hours of essentially pair programming, I don't know how any interviewer could be objective and fair. Especially presuming that you wouldn't be re-using the same task once it's actually been solved/fixed... (otherwise that's just another artificial problem)
There are a lot more use cases in taxi and food delivery space than in video streaming. At least by an order of magnitude. Consider various user personas for one, legal considerations and so on. Technically each use case might be less demanding than video streaming, but overall much more complex.
Productivity tools don't help you when dealing with people problems. You can't throw a TODO app or some other bullshit on someone who is underperforming or to coach someone for a promotion.
Isn't increasing productivity by solving hard problems why we get paid? My biggest question is, why isn't it even talked about and/or have aspirational goals set up?
Solution Architect Associate is what I'd recommend to start with. Practitioner is for non-technical people, Developer Associate and Sysops Associate are just marginally different than SA, often focusing on services which are marginally useful at best (few people use AWS CI/CD solutions and it makes up most of the difference for developer cert), I wouldn't bother with them. I haven't heard anything about the data engineer one (it seems new).
Funnily enough the site which changed to next.js did, they actually had a lovely offers.json file (~1MB, thousands of offers, just without a long-form HTMLy description) but they were also using it for their transactional needs (meaning that everyone had to load this file before the offers showed up). So they rewrote everything to next.js instead of adding some pagination...
I can already see people bitching about your proposal:
- it's too long
- coding along with another engineer is unrealistic
- it's close to impossible to scale this out to a number of interviewers as there are no strict scoring guidelines
- it's too different from what other companies do
- it's trying to outsource some of the problems your company has
- it's too technology specific
- candidates who know the domain will have an advantage
- candidates who know your tools will have an advantage
I'm not saying these are sensible arguments, but you will hear them against all and any kind of interview you can come up with.