Testing IT Professionals On Job Interviews?

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?"

No, it is not reasonable.

I won't take them.
I have turned down several jobs over it.

Re:No, it is not reasonable.

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 ;)

Re:No, it is not reasonable.

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.

Re:No, it is not reasonable.

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.

Re:No, it is not reasonable.

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.

Re:Interview question - universal answer!!

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!

Re:Interview question - universal answer!!

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++."

Blame it on the idiots who can sell themselves

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

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.

Re:Blame it on the idiots who can sell themselves

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.

Let me give an example

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:

"You are old," said the youth, "and your programs don't run,
And there isn't one language you like;
Yet of useful suggestions for help you have none --
Have you thought about taking a hike?"

"Since I never write programs," his father replied,
"Every language looks equally bad;
Yet the people keep paying to read all my books
And don't realize that they've been had."

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

Re:Blame it on the idiots who can sell themselves

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.

because you never know

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

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

It's also possible that the interviewers feel that specific IT knowledge becomes obsolete very quickly. If you've been around since the 80s for example, then the specific skills you had when you started are no longer relevant (general skills are another matter of course). If you haven't used a relevant technology that the employer needs in at least two years, the interviewers may feel the need to test you on it.

Possibly to weed out the fakers?

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.

The why...

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

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.

Better environment?

Personally I wouldn't accept a job that /didn't/ test me on my competence because that means they probably didn't test the guy before me on his competence either

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

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?

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

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

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.

Re:Careful there..

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

Re:Sheesh

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?