1. Interview questions for fresh grads are very CS oriented. For example, I have seen candidates immediately dismissed for not being able to estimate algorithm complexity. Same for memory requirements. Same for variants of knapsack problem. Same for not being able to get to alternative approaches. Good luck getting those questions right without spending 4 years doing CS.
2. Internship. CS grads get 2-3 very solid internships on their resume. This comes up during the evaluation as a big factor.
3. The "he is not a CS major" comment popping up during the reviews unintentionally.
4. Cultural fit (very true for other industries as well). People hire people like themselves. CS grads have a lot more in common with other CS grads.
Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon/Apple/LinkedIn/etc are at the top of the food chain. If you want to be the best, you have to compete with the best.
Change majors, do a second major, etc. "Assuming I know the relevant programming languages and have some experience" is a big assumption. Computer Science (or any science major) is very hard to pick up part time. For your first job you will be competing with CS grads. I bet it will be an eye opening experience for you since CS grads do get an unfair advantage in the industry. The chances are you will have to take a much less lucrative position and will be playing catch up for many years. Ask yourself - why go that route?
If you decided to do programming - do programming. Consider yourself lucky to have it figured out while you are still in school.
Ask yourself if you trust your partners. If you trust them, then don't even worry about head-hunters and recruiters. If you do not, then you should not be in the business together anyway.
There are so a lot more patterns of high availability architectures other than load balancing.
Distributed Queues, Pub/Sub, Gossip just a few that come to mind.
In your example, you are using what is called a classical three-tier web architecture - a Load Balancer + Stateless Nodes + Scalable Storage. The most interesting part of HA setup in a three-tier web architecture is HA setup of the persistent storage component. It looks like you actually haven't figured that out that piece yet and are waiting for a vendor (Microsoft) to solve this for you.
You can improve availability of your persistent storage (MSSQL) in several simple (or not so simple ways):
1. Use a SQL proxy load balancer (or a cluster setup) - a similar load balancer HA pattern you are already using
2. Shard. You will scale writes and significantly reduce the probably of your system becoming completely unavailable.
But how an audition will improve anything? The marginal improvement in the new hire quality that you get from doing an audition is not worth the time and money spent on auditions plus the cost of lost candidates who took offers that did not require auditions.
This is often times the case. However, you loose several weeks doing the audition and you loose a few good candidates who took the offers that did not require the audition.
Well, if you end up firing a lot of people, give recruiting to someone who's a better judge of character.
Firing when things do not work out is an honest act. What does it have to do with disposability? Both parties will be better off moving in separate directions.
Also, I don't see how an audition will improve anything.
Life changes are the biggest risk to employees performance. No matter what you do, you are not going to predict life changes during the interview.
General Counsel gets a fat paycheck to take care of that.
Avoiding litigations is simple too - do not hire dicks; ever.
If you hired a decent person in the first place, and after two months things are clearly not working out, you can part ways in a civil fashion.
Again, you say that you want to weed out prima donnas. Yet, you act like a prima donna yourself with "we're not equal". Do everyone a favor - don't even invite people to the interviews when you don't think they are your equals - you are wasting their time.
You whole argument tells me you never actually hired people to work for you. Sitting on interviews and writing feedbacks is very different from hiring people to implement your ideas i.e. when your job depends on the work people you hired produce. Making talented people work for you when they don't have to is not an easy thing. Sitting on a high horse, like you are, it is pretty impossible.
This question says a lot about the interviewer too.
To me, the interviewer who asks the biggest weakness question is either clueless or a dick. Nice HR ladies who have this question on their checklist for "leadership assessment" are an exception - the checklist is sacred to them.
You are saying that you ask this question to gauge the attitude, creativity and interest. Yet, you ask the most uninteresting and unimaginative question to assess creativity and interest. What does it say about you?
1. Interview questions for fresh grads are very CS oriented. For example, I have seen candidates immediately dismissed for not being able to estimate algorithm complexity. Same for memory requirements. Same for variants of knapsack problem. Same for not being able to get to alternative approaches. Good luck getting those questions right without spending 4 years doing CS.
2. Internship. CS grads get 2-3 very solid internships on their resume. This comes up during the evaluation as a big factor.
3. The "he is not a CS major" comment popping up during the reviews unintentionally.
4. Cultural fit (very true for other industries as well). People hire people like themselves. CS grads have a lot more in common with other CS grads.
Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon/Apple/LinkedIn/etc are at the top of the food chain. If you want to be the best, you have to compete with the best.