This sounds like a great alternative and certainly would work well for me. What I'm afraid of though, is that I'd pass your interview and the aforementioned YCombinator companies would again want to put me through the on-site, high-pressure whiteboard technical interview.
That's definitely something we've started addressing as we optimize the process of matching programmers with the right startups. We're starting to gather data on how the YC companies run their hiring processes (seeing the degree of variance has been fascinating) and we can use that to avoid exactly this happening.
