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Testing IT Professionals On Job Interviews?
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Sep 15, 2008 04:15 AM
from the what-did-you-know-and-when-did-you-know-it dept.
from the what-did-you-know-and-when-did-you-know-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "After having my university degrees, a couple of IT certifications, and over ten years of work experience in the industry, with 2-4 years of verifiable employment with each employer, working with a wide range of technologies, is it reasonable to ask me to take some test on a job interview? The same companies don't ask other professionals (lawyer, accountant, sales, HR, etc.) to submit to any kind of in-house tests when they are hired. Why are IT professionals treated differently and in such a paternalistic way? More importantly, why do IT professionals accept being treated less favorably than members of other professions? Should IT professionals start to refuse to be treated as not real professionals?"
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Submission: Should IT professionals be tested on job interview by Anonymous Coward
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No, it is not reasonable. (Score:5, Interesting)
I won't take them.
I have turned down several jobs over it.
Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are going to be that flexible in the interview its probably good for both you and the employer that you aren't working for them ;)
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Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
That is true.
I am interviewing them just as much as they are interviewing me.
Life is too short to work someplace where I wont be happy.
99.9% of the time the person doing the interview won't understand the answers anyway.
Maybe I am just getting old.
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Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you weren't an Anonymous Coward, I'd mod you up. If you weren't a poster on slashdot, I'd give you a big hug and a wet Bugs Bunny kiss.
It breaks my heart to see talented young people walking into a job interview as if they were being called to the principal's office.
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Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:5, Interesting)
Right because being burned by incompetence doesn't happen in any other field right?
It couldn't be the fact that most companies haven't a clue how to properly manage IT and grasp for any available opportunity to quantify work done and qualify decisions made even if doing so grossly inappropriate.
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Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Right because being burned by incompetence doesn't happen in any other field right?
Actually it does happen in other fields, the whole premise of this article is wrong. I'm a statistician/epidemiologist and every post I've ever applied for has had some kind of techincal test. Some have been more formal than others. Anyway if I was applying for a post that needed a high level of technical knowledge I would expect to be tested on it.
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Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly.
Yet another example...People applying for research/academic faculty positions at universities usually come and give what are known as "job talks" where they talk about (some of) their research and the current faculty are allowed to ask questions, etc. This is absolutely an assessment of their skills and abilities within their field.
Another point I'd want to make is that many fields, such as law or medicine, have formalized, comprehensive tests that are administered and scored by a recognized organization, e.g. the bar exam or medical board exams. IT certifications come nowhere near those tests in so many ways and as such, technical interviews for a technical position in IT shouldn't be considered out of line with what other professional fields go through, as I see it...
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If doctors were that bad, it would be manslaughter (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:If doctors were that bad, it would be manslaugh (Score:5, Interesting)
I went to a job interview in '99 for a contract doing Network Admin for a pretty major bank; I had no certs, no degree at the time, but I had been working off and on with Tek systems for several years and they knew I had extremely extensive experience.
The Bank didn't want to interview me, but the recruiter sort of insisted; they were asking for people qualified in NT, Solaris and OS/2, and I was really about the only person they had available at that time with the right mix.
It was a working lunch interview; They started asking questions, and I started answering. then came the question, "what command would you use to upgrade a NT workstation machine to NT server?"
I replied that you would probably be best off formatting the drive, then installing it, as there was no good way to upgrade; Microsoft said you couldn't do it at all, and the workarounds were more trouble than they were worth.
The interviewers sort of grinned, and told me that of the 20+ people they interviews, all of which had at least a MCSE or a comp sci degree, not a single one of them had answered the question correctly.
At the time I had problems believing it, but as time went on and I got in to situations where I was doing interviews it got more believable; in the late 90's if you worked on computers, it was probably because you were a computer enthusiast and actually more or less enjoyed working with them; after about '98, you started running into people that were just doing it because it paid well; they might be damned smart people, but you lose something when you don't actually enjoy working with computers.
I also saw a lot of people who just were not smart enough, but were somehow able to cheat or memorize well enough to get a degree; when you asked them something that wasn't in anything they had studied, they didn't have the core of hands-on knowledge that would enable them to make an educated guess at the answer.
So, yeah, I have to agree, interview everybody no matter what their credentials are.
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Re:If doctors were that bad, it would be manslaugh (Score:5, Insightful)
In 2001 I worked as a supervisor in a callcenter(by now bankrupt and bought out) that specialized in tech-support for consumer software and hardware. At one point our recruiter asked me to test an applicant she didn't have a good feeling about. The applicant had numerous impressive looking certifications on her resume and quite a confident demeanor about her abilities. She claimed to be specialized in Microsoft operating systems. Note that this was your typical callcenter full of pc enthusiasts, many of whom had no formal education in IT whatsoever.
Long story short, at the time we also did support for a company that distributed a number of very popular pc games, so I gave the applicant a game consisting of 3 cd-roms and asked her to install it on a typical win98 workstation. After watching her struggle for about 10 minutes, while completely ignoring the big autorun window with the huge "Install game" button on it, we decided perhaps hiring her would not be such a good idea after all...
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Re:If doctors were that bad, it would be manslaugh (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Please, please people, remember that a job interview is also your chance to evaluate an employer. If there's any aspect of a job interview that makes you feel like you are being disrespected, you can bet that this will be a company that will show you little respect as an employee. Humiliation on a job interview is an excellent indicator of future happiness at that company.
If you believe in your skills, if you believe yourself to be valuable, do not be afraid to say "no thanks". The reason many workers feel like they are being treated badly is because they are being treated badly.
You are going to be spending the major part of your waking hours at your job. You should be choosing very carefully.
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Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:5, Interesting)
I sat down and looked at it for maybe 5 minutes. Nobody came out and introduced themselves to me or asked me any questions about myself. I thought, "Is this the sort of place I want to work?", decided the answer was "no", got up and walked out. That was the last I heard of them.
That sort of treatment of a potential employee is disrespectful. If they'd interviewed me, decided they liked me and wanted to verify some skills and asked if I would take a test, that would be completely different.
On a sort of related note, I had an employer later on who was considering making potential hires take a personality test. He asked us for our feedback and I told him that if he'd asked me to take one before being offered a job, I would refuse. In an interview, I have no idea who these people are, and if they're qualified to read a personality test. Those things in the wrong hands are a weapon to limit you more than anything. If the test says you're below par at problem solving, or people skills, or whatever, prepare to be pigeonholed for the rest of your time there, if you're lucky enough to get the job. I'm not saying they're useless in all cases, but it takes a trained psychologist to correctly asses the results and determine where they can be usefully applied and where they cannot.
I think almost any reasonable person reading this discussion would agree that some sort of verification of an interviewee's credentials is a good idea during the interview process. It's how it's done that's up for discussion.
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Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:5, Informative)
Surely being given an opportunity to demonstrate one's skill/flair isn't disrespectful?
It depends on how it's done.
Exactly. I'm in the camp that says some sort of programming test is fair for any level. If you're really a "Senior software engineer" with "excellent $LANGUAGE skills" then writing something like fizzbuzz will only take you two minutes, right? The number of people I've seen come to an interview making that sort of claim who could not code fizzbuzz is scary. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my tolerance for taking this sort of test myself increased significantly when I crossed from being an experienced developer who just found them patronising to having the kind of role that also involves sitting on the other side of the table from time to time and seeing what some of the other candidates are like.
On the other hand, I rather doubt I'll ever be working for the kind of place that has a whole-day interview process that consists of solving an endless series of trivial programming problems, followed by a load of "Have you seen this one before?" questions like the 1/2/5/10 problem. These tests are only useful as a block for the low end prankster, not as a way of gauging how good someone competent really is. After the first couple, if it seems like there are going to be more, I will take control of the interview and, usually, end it shortly thereafter.
This is a valuable reminder that interviewing is a two-way process, and that those applying for higher positions with more responsibility should be entitled to ask "difficult" questions that any competent employer should have no difficulty answering, too. Just as a significant proportion of interviewees are a joke, so are a significant proportion of interviewers/employers. These days, I'll basically let a prospective employer run the first interview, but if I'm called back for a second interview so I know they are serious, I will ask to see a sample of their production code and a sample of their development documentation, I'll ask straight questions about their software development process, company culture and working conditions, and if I'm still ambivalent perhaps I'll ask to speak privately with a current employee who is doing a similar job to the one I'm applying for.
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Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
It can be annoying, but I hardly think it's that big of a deal. I don't work in IT, I work as a creative in advertising, but I've had to take 'tests' when applying for a job. I'm given a sample brief and asked to come up with a campaign concept.
I'm given those tests because agencies work differently with different accoutns and some people are just not good fits from one to another. I would imagine the potential exists for an IT professional with a glowing CV to still be a poor choice in a particular company. At least they're not testing your social skills as well.
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Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:5, Interesting)
It is entirely reasonable. Having a degree, and even several (perhaps many) years of verifiable / verified "experience" says very little about your actual qualifications. One of the best developers I know has a degree in history, and within 6 months of beginning development was producing better quality work than some guys who have been developing for years.
Also the number of people who lie about their qualifications is unbelievable. Many previous employers are afraid of getting into legal trouble and so will never give a real reference, either positive or negative. They'll basically only confirm dates of employment.
Finally, this industry is full of really excellent snow job men. People who have convinced their previous employer that they're really a cracker-jack developer, when in fact they are only barely able to cobble together code examples from other people.
Also it's not infrequent for several candidates to have what looks like reasonably similar experience on paper, yet differ widely on actual performance skills.
Last month, we interviewed a guy for a ColdFusion developer job, and when we asked him what the difference between a Struct and an Array were (one is associatively indexed, and does not preserve insert order, the other is sequentially numerically indexed and of course does preserve insert order - an equivalent to a HashMap and a Vector), he sputtered and stammered for a few seconds, then proceeded to read us search results from Google (we all followed along on our end) which were not an answer to the question ("Let's see, you can append a Struct. Oh, but then you can append an Array").
Some consultant firms make money only for placing a body in a seat. So some of these firms actually falsify resumes and provide references which are also false (they employ the people who answer the phone or respond to the email when you check the reference). They even go so far as to have a handful of guys who do the phone interviews - and these are not the same guy who shows up. Some times the guy who shows up has no experience with the technology at all.
Plus, who told you other professions don't get tested? Some jobs even come with personality tests - maybe they're looking for someone hyper aggressive, maybe they're looking for a peace maker. Though such tests are usually for higher up positions, and usually only for the short list of candidates.
It's not degrading in the least to be required to take a test to prove your qualifications. If you have the qualifications you profess to have, you should have no problem with the test.
It's safeguarding the company at hand, and if you wanted to refuse to take the test, we would want to not hire you. It's a matter of there being too many slime balls and con men out there in the world, we can't take you at your word until we know you. Until then we need to ask you to prove yourself to us.
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Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:5, Funny)
What is the difference between an Apple and a Pear?! You have Ten seconds to answer! Go!
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Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's even worse than that: As a computer scientist, I pick up new stuff up quickly. So what that I've been doing Java for the last N years, give me a C project and I'll do it (without memory leaks, I know what a pointer is and can use valgrind --- Oh, and exactly this happened this year and I delivered.). That however, seems to be beyond the comprehension of anyone hiring people. Getting a well rounded computer scientist is better than getting someone who knows the buzzwords and can code a bit in one language.
However, I'm sure I'd fail on any Java test or C test. The details (what's usually asked in such tests) do not matter, you'll find them quickly with a Google search because you're trained to know what to search for. Frankly, I don't get it.
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Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:5, Funny)
So you're saying she'll be an average lawyer?
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Re:Interview question - universal answer!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Interviewer: OK, so you know C? what is the result of i=0; i=i++; Joe Blow: Uhhhh...I....uuhhhh...it's compiler dependent!!
Is the correct answer!
Without an output statement you'll never know, a compiler could legally optimize the whole lot away!
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Re:Interview question - universal answer!! (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't matter if it's compiler-dependent or not. The correct answer to that question is: "This code is badly written. It never makes sense to write i = i++. You probably mean i++."
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Re:Interview question - universal answer!! (Score:5, Informative)
Why not get the compiler to do the work for you:
$ gcc -o test -Wall -W -ansi -pedantic test.c
test.c: In function `main':
test.c:5: warning: operation on `i' may be undefined
$
Lo and behold. It's undefined behaviour.
$
i = 0
$
And look. I don't get the same results as you. (Probably depends on the precise version of gcc and also maybe the optimizations selected.)
Tim.
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Blame it on the idiots who can sell themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it is far easier to get "university degrees, a couple of IT certifications, and over ten years of work experience in the industry, with 2-4 years of verifiable employment with each employer, working with a wide range of technologies" without a shred of competence in our field than in most others.
Re:Blame it on the idiots who can sell themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it is far easier to get "university degrees, a couple of IT certifications, and over ten years of work experience in the industry, with 2-4 years of verifiable employment with each employer, working with a wide range of technologies" without a shred of competence in our field than in most others.
No, its not. However, the craft of coding can be tested in an interview. Software engineering mostly cant (because it includes strategic and long termn decisions).
There is not much craft in "most other fields" - they depend more on virtues like thoroughness etc. - which cant be tested in an interview.
Skills can be tested in an interview, virtues less so.
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Re:Blame it on the idiots who can sell themselves (Score:5, Interesting)
Wrong. It is only that incompetence in IT is much harder to cover up than in those professions. When IT systems fail, they can fail spectacularly and effect wide numbers of people. An incompetent IT persons mistake will cause an essential server or the like to fail. If they're not competent to fix it promptly, it will show.
Inversely, when a lawyer, accountant, sales, HR person, etc screws up, the screw up will not be noticed as much unless it reaches epic proportions. It's easier to mask a mistake in these fields, and with the softer ones, e.g. PR, their metrics are so fuzzy that the difference between competence and incompetence is blurry anyway. Plus they are trained in buzz speak which they blurt out like a frighted squid spurts out ink to mask their escape.
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Re:Blame it on the idiots who can sell themselves (Score:5, Informative)
I have used "effect" as both a noun and a verb for the majority of my life, in both the written and spoken word.
"to effect" is a verb. The only problem is that it is synonymous to "to cause", and not to "to impact".
"The effects of an earthquake can effect large numbers of people."
Which, when replacing "to effect" with its synonym, becomes:
"The effects of an earthquake can cause large numbers of people."
Yes, I assume that after an earthquake, there's not much else to do until the electricity comes back on.
The "correct" form however, offers no justification for itself other than its own inertia.
The "correct" form offers the justification that it has a completely different meaning than the incorrect one. That should be sufficient.
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Let me give an example (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Yep. Let me even give an example. It didn't happen in a team I was in, but I know several people from that team.
So they got a new guy who had some outstanding experience, according to his resume. He had worked on major enterprise projects, been an architect, ate Enterprise Java Beans for breakfast, etc.
Turns out he was utterly incompetent. He spent about a month just getting used to their architecture and IDE and everything, apparently everything they did or the way they did it was new to him, and he needed some time to accomodate. Fair enough. Then started working on something, but never was quite done with it. Eventually they started asking to see some results. He started randomly changing files and checking them back in. The first few times he even had a good excuse, like "oops, I hadn't worked with this particular versioning system before" or "oops, I forgot some other file that mine depends on." There go a few more weeks, before it's obvious that his changes can't possibly even compile, because they have elementary syntax errors.
Eventually they fire him, but by now he's got several months of "experience" there.
Then someone finds his updated resume online. The guy claimed he singlehandedly improved their architecture, increase performance X times, got project management back on track, etc.
2. 'Nother example, my ex-coworker Wally. Spent two years on a trivial module, whose core someone else rewrote from scratch in 6 hours. It took another two weeks or so, mostly of testing, to get it bug-for-bug compatible with his, since a couple of teams already had their own workarounds for them. (Trying to get him to fix it was a bit like negotiating with the terrorists.) The rewrite was also benchmarked as 40 times faster than Wally's on large data sets. Literally. Measured.
The thing everyone remembers fondly about him, is how he asked for 2 weeks just to estimate the effort to fix a trivial bug. He got it too. (His team leader was a bit a Mr Testicle: technically he was involved, but he kept out of it as much as possible;)
He also massively practiced obfuscation. Any of his modules contained half the techniques from How To Write Unmaintainable Java code (literally) and megabytes of files copied from unrelated stuff to pad the number of lines of code per day. Obviously, it worked on his team leader.
Then he got moved through the maintenance of two other programs (one at a time), and just managed to make them both worse.
There we go, that's his provable 2-4 years employment. Well, ok, 5 in his case.
3. Example number 3: Old Father Williams. I got to think of him that way after a particular fortune on my linux box:
Pretty much spent 6 years in a place complaining about everything that everyone else did. Coding style, IDE, OS, _everything_. His first choice of a whine was Windows, which might even have had a point, but when Linux was finally allowed and half the team switched to Linux, plus the servers actually went Linux... he proclaimed Linux to be sell-out crap for idiots, and switched to preaching BSD.
He also caused a reformat-and-commit war in which he was preaching _three_ space tabs, as spaces. And wasn't affraid to check out someone else's project and reformat it, to make his point.
He spent two years, just "modernizing" the build process. Nobody knows what he experimented with on his c
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Re:Let me give an example (Score:5, Interesting)
4. Abdul, the apprentice of Wally. He got hired through a workaround, since hiring more coders was on hold at that corporation. So someone hired him as a web designer, then hastily dubbed him programmer. Ironically, he seemed actually decent at web design. As a programmer, the consensus is that he's too stupid to piss holes in snow. Seriously, he doesn't understand even the elementary basics, and is constantly on the look out for someone to pass solving anything onto.
Has that job for some 4 years now, since firing him would face the same problem with hiring a replacement. So he's keeping his job by sheer virtue of being marginally better than nothing.
Companies are really bad at dealing with this. I was in a company who gave a web developer a shot at a trainee programming position. She was an excellent web designer, but a really poor programmer. I was her team leader, so I asked her if she was happy with her new position, and she said "no, I just don't seem to think that way. It is difficult and seems to be quite tedious".
I asked her if she would like to move back to her old position, and she said yes. I thought this would be no problem, as we were noticing that the look & feel of the public site was not as polished since she left that group.
I hadn't counted on HR.
"you can't go from a trainee programmer to a senior web developer, that's two level's difference. She will have to move sideways to trainee web developer" They said. I pointed out her experience, the fact that she had done the job before and had excellent reviews but it was to no avail. They made a "concession" that she could move to "web developer" with a promise of promotion to "senior web developer" with in a year "if she performed OK", but anything else would contravene the HR procedures manual!
We lost her. I don't blame her, she took a senior position in a small web company. Career wise this has been a good move for her, the company has done well and she is now in charge of a department. It was our loss though, sometimes the company is so stupid.
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Re:Blame it on the idiots who can sell themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
Man you guys who think this is an IT only thing, really need to get out and look around.
Yes you can't test for everything, but you can get a decent feel if if the person has some competency with the code for a programmer.
I've seen mechanical engineers asked to design a solution to a problem. I've seen drafters/designers given tests with the software they use. Welders get tested before being hired. Divers get tested before being hired.
I don't understand what the big problem is. Programmers write code and can at least be tested on their ability to write code. Maybe they can't engineer a program, but at least they can weed out the idiots just selling themselves.
What are you going to test an accountant on? Can you add 2+2? Seriously, accounting has a lot of rules, but it's quite honestly easy, boring as fuck, but easy. How are you going to test your attorney? How are you going to test an HR or sales person? This is why a lot of jobs usually have a 30/60/90 day trial/probation period.
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Re:Blame it on the idiots who can sell themselves (Score:5, Informative)
And it is so hard for your references to know if you're really any good or not because unless you're in a large technical group a lot of them wouldn't really know what it is that you actually do, or how to tell if you do it well.
Most companies won't provide a reference other than "Person X worked for us from (date) to (date)." It's just too easy to say something which could be misconstrued as being negative and used to sue the company which issued the reference.
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because you never know (Score:5, Insightful)
because you (the employer in this case) never know.
a person can work in various places, have diplomas... and still be unbelievably stupid.
i'd argue that other professions should gain some tests (i know a lot of them actually do, though those tests usually involve more generic skillset, like being able to work in a stressful conditions or under external noise, ability to quickly analyse particular information of the field etc).
Measurability (Score:5, Insightful)
A simple answer is that IT knowledge is a more quantitatively measurable than many other professions. Another factor is the high percentage of self-learned IT professionals. You don't see any "self-learned" lawyers, but self-learned IT pros are commonplace. Lawyers have been tested previously (bar exam) while the IT pro may never have passed any formal testing.
Re:Measurability (Score:5, Informative)
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Possibly to weed out the fakers? (Score:5, Insightful)
When I've been holding interviews, I always make up a set of tests just to make sure what they put on their CV is accurate.
The number of times I've had someone put on their CV they can do something we are after, but in reality they know Sh*t about it, has only really come out when they do the test. It also helps to pick up those who are good at taking exams but don't know how to handle themselves in the real world.
Unlike the other professions, IT doesn't have a legal backing. i.e. lawyers and accountants have qualifications that are backed by some law or another so if they write bullshit on their CV then it can come back on them. Not with IT unfortunately.
Re:Possibly to weed out the fakers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not quite,
at school you can guess quite well what the questions will be, so with a bit of 'educated guesswork' you can pass any exam without really knowing 'everything', let alone 'understanding' it. Heck, you spend over 10 years learning to 'work' the system, it's no surprise one gets good at it.
When we hire people we try to prune out those that either simply wrote the right words on their CV and/or those that worked their way through education purely based on the above way. Not because we think they 'cheated', but because we are looking for people to help us with a certain task that involves certain skills. (This is for development job, I'm not sure how the Sales department does it's selection =)
It's amazing how often people will write to be 'very good' at eg. SQL while all they know is that it stands for "Structured Query Language". When asked to write a query 'out of thin air' to get the most recent date from a simple agenda-like-table and they are unable to come up with ANYTHING, then we both know where are wasting each others time.
Before we tested people, we got burned once too often by people who bluffed themselves into the company but turned out to be more of a burden than a helping hand =( By introducing simple tests we now only waste time at the interview level, we don't have to put time into educating them something they claim to be expert in already. That said, we sometimes DO hire people who /fail/ the test, simply because they show potential and we ARE willing to put time & effort in them. You'll find though that this will is a lot less present when the candidate's CV turns out to be 90%+ 'vapoorware'.
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The why... (Score:5, Funny)
Because unlike Accountants, Lawyers, etc we actually have to work for a living...
If we're bad then stuff just doesn't get done. If an accountant is bad they still get $100k a year.
Doctors still have to prove themselves multiple times just to be able to get into the interview. Years and training and testing.
I like to think of us more like Doctors than professional bureaucrats.
The underlying assumption is not true (Score:5, Interesting)
thus the whole question is futile.
Skill assessment is done in almost all kinds of professional employment situations . yet it depends mostly on the hiring policy of the department of that particular firm if there will be an assessment.
And quite franky, I think there is a good reason why this is done with IT jobs more often: analytic and associative thinking and problem solving are not skills you can learn.
Plus, IT jobbers tend to be more annoyed by moron colleagues than non-IT employees.
And lets not forget that there is a huge amount of moronness out there - I myself did Job interviews with certified whatevers, who applied for a sysadmin position and couldn't tell me what information a notation like "192.168.38.1/24" provides. And thats just the very basic for such a job, but it already weeded out two thirds of the applicants, *completely unrelated* to their educational history or other certified qualifications.
And last but not least, it always depends on the quality of the respective management if such an evaluation is done: and speaking for me and my experience, a company should do it in *all* sorts of positions, no matter how professional, experienced and well educated an applicant is.
Re:The underlying assumption is not true (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as you're tested by a human who understands the very background for the questions asked, tests are good.
However, that's not what happens out there. The hiring companies have multiple-choice tests that are evaluated by a system, and the humans administering the test don't understand it. And more to the point, the people who made the tests didn't understand the questions either, but looked them up in a book.
So very many of the questions are based on semantics and finding the exact phrase a certain text book used for a situation, instead of testing the understanding.
In your example, the typical test that's being used would likely have asked:
In 192.168.38.1/24, what does "/24" mean?
1 [ ] Subnet mask
2 [ ] CIDR
3 [ ] C Class network
4 [ ] Shorthand for 0.255.255.255 in IOS 10 or newer
Of these, only one will be accepted. And more likely than not, the wrong one.
I flunked one of these tests on DNS knowledge. Despite having written a DNS server, and installing and running multiple ISPs' DNS servers. Thousands of domains, including split internal/external, IPv6 and secure updating from DHCP. I can query a DNS using UDP from the command line, without requiring "host", "nslookup" or other specialized tools. I can write BIND zone files from scratch if I have to.
I know DNS, dammit -- better than most sysadmins out there.
The reason I failed (well, scored less than 50%, which I call failed) was that I couldn't answer questions like "Approximately, how many DNS servers are operating world wide?", "Does an active domain controller resolve DNS queries?", "What is the command for looking up your current WINS server?" and "Which Windows versions support running without netbios?". Apparently the test maker had looked up some questions in some DNS for Windows Dummies type book, and thought that was what it was all about. Not a single question reflected real DNS knowledge.
Other tests ask you questions that you don't bother to remember, because it's so easy to look it up. Like parameters to commands. /path /path /path /path
How do you list the size of a file system in 4k blocks in Unix?
1 [ ] df -b 4096
2 [ ] df -B 4096
3 [ ] df -s 4096
4 [ ] df -s 4k
Only those who don't know what they're doing have to remember these things. The rest of us would try "--help", "-h" or look at the man page to check command syntax, and not bother to remember little used options. Only those with a need to memorize everything because they can't figure out how to look up things would know this. Or those who by chance happened to do this yesterday.
As is, the tests are not very useful. They might weed out some of those that know absolutely nothing about a subject, but they also weed out those who understand the subject better than the test author, but don't bother remembering irrelevant or OS-specific details.
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Better environment? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mopping up after some idiot with "university degrees, a couple of IT certifications, and over ten years of work experience in the industry, with 2-4 years of verifiable employment with each employer, working with a wide range of technologies" that's a total clueless retard isn't my idea of fun and rewarding employment.
why not (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason it's done is a combination of great variability in skill among IT applicants, compared to professions with time-tested accreditation bodies like lawyers and accountants, and skills that are fairly amenable to formal testing, compared to professions like sales and HR, at least with respect to weeding out duds (if someone can't write a simple program in an afternoon, given a language reference, they should not be hired). More generally, I can't imagine why it's unreasonable for an employer to test skill.
Competent IT professionals accept it because it's in fact beneficial to them to be distinguished from their less competent peers. (If the test itself is poor, they complain about that, and don't whine about the indignity of taking a test in general.) Paternalism is forcing someone to do something for their own good. This is not. I can assure of I have no intention of refusing tests of skill when applying for jobs.
Employment history, certifications, and degrees do not ensure competence. Probably most of the people on The Daily WTF [thedailywtf.com] passed such basic screening.
Why not take a test? (Score:5, Insightful)
I frequently interview programmers, and having them take a short test (approx 30 minutes) and then discussing this with them in their interview is incredibly useful to determine their skillset. I could ask similar questions directly and have them work through the answers on a board, but then they would be under pressure to provide an answer on the spot to questions that probably deserve some thought before providing a solution.
None of the questions on the test are unduly taxing - any person we interview who has a few years professional c++ experience under their belt should be able to provide at least a working solution, with potential better solutions open to discussion face to face.
I've had 15 years doing what I do, and I'd be happy to take a test if asked - if I can't pass whatever hurdle the company sets, then I'd rather not sit there for a few more hours trying to win them over with my sparkling personality, and if the test is a pile of rubbish I know early on that I probably don't want to work there.
Because so few know how to conduct interviews (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience, which ia way more than your 10 years, very few folks in IT actually know how to interview and what traits to look for. Being tech folks and not having people skills, they think that some test will tell them what they need to know about a potential applicant. Not true.
A lot of the tests are language lawyer things (knowing about public static final in Java) which doesn't get to what they really need to know. There are lots of folks who know the language lawyer tricks that will be lousy employees. You need folks that are bright, have a demonstrated track record of being able to learn new things and that will fit with your culture/environment.
Standard of "professionalism" is lower in IT (Score:5, Insightful)
I speak as a member of "IT" as well, so I'm accusing myself here too, fairly and squarely.
I don't know (nor care) about the non-technical professions, but the standard of professionalism in Computing is a lot lower than in Engineering.
I can say that with confidence after a long career spanning both Electrical/Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, both in academia (PhD, postdoc, lecturer) and in industry. It took me the better part of a decade in the computing industry to realize that I had been (unwittingly) deluding my Software Engineering students when I taught them "Do it like this, or you will be laughed at as amateurs when you get out into industry." The sad fact is that 98% of computing in industry is utterly amateurish, as I eventually discovered for myself. Even huge, "properly" managed projects are in practice just hacks like all the rest, but with better documentation and QA/testing.
While computing is my current love, and bread provider, I recognize that we're at the stage of gazing at chicken entrails in this discipline. It's a bit sad, although I still love it. But when they say "Bridges would fall down every other day if they were built like we build software", they are 100% right. Looking at it from the perspective of my old engineering days, it's a bit distressing, but that's how it is.
We're still in the early days of Computing, and to call it a professional discipline is stretching the definition rather severely.
You'd rather your company didn't test them...? (Score:5, Funny)
How 'bout we start employing people based on what they claim, not what they can do? Sounds good to me.
Re:Careful there.. (Score:5, Funny)
As a consultant, I consider myself part of the world's oldest profession. After all:
I charge an extortionate rate
I'll be whatever you want me to be
I spend a lot of time in hotel rooms
I have a pimp that gives me a fraction of what I make and sends me to do things that I really don't want to do
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Re:Sheesh (Score:5, Insightful)
Taking a test during a job interview means that they are serious about the situation.
The worst thing isn't tests at job interviews it's the work climate at the site where you are going to be located. Is it micro managed or is it goal managed? And job satisfaction is very important for IT workers.
The question is rather why other types of workers aren't tested as much. Why not test lawyers, accountants and administrators?
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Re:Sheesh (Score:5, Informative)
You mean like with the bar exam, cpa exam, the useless PMP exam, certified professional engineer, etc.
Other professions are tested, but it is before the job interview.
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Re:Too many morons in IT. (Score:5, Insightful)
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