Testing IT Professionals On Job Interviews? 1057
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. (Score:5, Interesting)
I won't take them.
I have turned down several jobs over it.
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.
Credibility of professional qualifications (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a good thing. (Score:1, Interesting)
Testing is a good thing. Years ago, I ran from interview to interview, but didn't get the jobs. My grades from school were fine, but being a geek, there was one thing I was (and still am) bad at: "Selling myself". When we got to the question "please tell us about yourself", I didn't know what to say. I've always hated that question.
But then at one place, rather than expecting me to talk about how great I am (hey, if I was that good at selling, I would be in the sales department, not IT), they sent me a small programming task. Towers of Hanoi, I know, text book stuff, except the second part required a bit of brain work.
Guess what... I got the job. At the interview itself I probably didn't do any better than all of the other interviews (of course we did talk a bit about my solution to the test, but apart from that). I have no doubt that what made the difference was that I got to show my programming skills, rather than my (lack of) salesperson skills.
At my current job, new people get a simple programming test too (small company, we talk about things at lunch). And according to the manager/programmer who does the interviews, he's had several people who "had lots of experience with exactly what we are doing", but when shown a simple programming problem had no idea how to solve it. Those are the people who excel at regular job interviews. Good salespeople, but not good programmers.
I think it's a good thing (Score:3, Interesting)
A CV can be read in many ways. I think that testing is a good way to see that the skills, CV and open position match. That being said, testing can be done in many ways.
Someone recommended me to Google once, and the Google HR department obviously read my CV looking for the skills they were after. While I had them to a degree, that was only part of the truth. A later phone interview with one of their engineers clarified the situation a lot: He tested my skill set with a bunch of oral test questions that made it obvious to both that my skills were of the right sort but at the wrong layer of abstraction. (Scripting vs. assembly-level knowledge.) That test saved both parties a lot of time.
But like I said, there is good testing and bad testing. Often tests test passive knowledge, but not problem solving skills. Unfortunately the hardest to quantify stuff is also the most essential in terms of actual productivity.
Re:Blame it on the idiots who can sell themselves (Score:3, Interesting)
It is true that it is difficult for an employer to tell a good employee from a bad employee. Sadly, this has lead to what I can only call "hiring voodoo" -- the irrational belief without evidence that a relatively untrained interviewer will mysteriously be able to find out more about "what a candidate is really like" in an hour than the candidate's university or co-workers (references) found out in several years. Even stranger beliefs have cropped up over the years -- eg that artificial toy questions like "why are manhole covers round?" or "... how would you identify the heavier ball in only two measurements?" say anything meaningful about how a candidate thinks, any more so than handing them the Times crossword to have a go at.
There is what's humorously called the oncologist test for the 'puzzle' questions in interviews. "If you had cancer, would you ask your oncologist this question before you let him mess with your body?" After all, your body is both more complex and more mission critical to you personally than whatever it is you're hiring the candidate to work on, so surely it matters much more how the oncologist thinks...
Re:because you never know (Score:4, Interesting)
My experience is that the majority of employers and the majority of employees are equally stupid and deserve each other. If you're at an interview and they seem retarded then you probably want to move on.
Anyway, a person can pass the kind of stupid tests given at interviews and still be a retard. I wouldnt't give such stupid tests to people I hire and wouldn't submit to such a test.
The best thing an employer can look for is a portfolio. Look the work over, ask questions about the work, double check that it isn't just stolen from some open source project. If their work is good, even if unrelated to what you're doing, then they'll be good. If not, or if they lack a portfolio, then toss them.
If you're going to claim to know Java then write a program in Java and put it in your portfolio. If you're going to claim to know Linux then write some tools to make managing a Linux server easier and show you know common command-line programs and config files. Do that sort of thing and then employers can know what you know.
Re:Measurability (Score:2, Interesting)
Any idiot can spend 5 years saying "Thank you for calling Dell", fix their neighbours PC's for a while, read C++ in 24 hours and call themselves a IT consultant without any repercussions.
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.
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
Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:3, Interesting)
A FLOSS(ed) resume helps avoid them. Work on the free/open source programs that you like, then point your employers at commit diffs (as well as your responses to idiotic questions on the respective mailing lists showing that your tolerant and work well with others).
8/10 times, in my experience .. an employer is just as happy to browse my Mercurial repositories as they are to give me a test. Sometimes, though .. they make the test a little harder after viewing my repos :)
When you run into 'head hunters' , they're always going to test you .. as they need to fill a cell in some spread sheet with your results. The same goes for 'Managers' who have never written a real program in their life.
Cater to the head hunters, avoid the clueless managers ... or, catch up on your BOFH, get the job and take over theirs.
Re:Measurability (Score:3, Interesting)
BTW, I prefer self learners as programmers (read: coders) over people with degrees. My experience is that they are more dedicated and know more about real world problems. That's simply because a CS degree is not focused on making you a programmer but a more general problem solver.
So when you want a coder you have to check what he really knows, not what diplomas he's having (that only gives a hint). Story is completely different if you're looking for someone higher up the food chain, of course.
Too many morons in IT. (Score:4, Interesting)
Sadly, a lot of the "IT Professionals" I encounter are plain idiots. Even in-depth interviews can't guarantee that you have someone capable in front of you, but it does filter out those idiots.
I work for a small (5 ppl) IT-only company and when we hire someone, while he will get some basic training, he is supposed to work pretty independantly. But once in such a position you can pretend doing a lot while doing almost nothing, and still make things appear to 'work'. You'd be amazed what an incompetent guy can pretend to be and produce results that on the first glance seem to be OK. And then when his software goes into production you suddenly notice that he didn't use an XML parser, but expected certain data on certain lines and filtered it out using regular expressions - and NO, not using the standard regular expression library - but doing something like this in C:
sprintf(cmdbuf, "/usr/bash /bin/sed -e \"s/%s//\" > /tmp/filename", inputbuffer); ...
system(cmdbuf);
fp = fopen("/tmp/filename", "r");
You get the picture. He btw didn't even write a function to do this, but copy-pasted stuff like this a few 100 times... Software worked in test, client changed 1 insignificant thing in their XML generation (added a tag we didn't use), and our entire system went down. I ended up rewriting this guy's stuff after he was fired.
And that's the main problem with IT jobs, you only notice they're incompetent when things start to go wrong. And then it's too late. So if I have to interview someone for an IT position, I want to be as sure as possible we don't end up in such a situation again. Masking incompetence in an IT position is just too easy.
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.
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'.
If doctors were that bad, it would be manslaughter (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Possibly to weed out the fakers? (Score:4, Interesting)
CV: Two Years Oracle Database Experience
Real life: I wrote some hibernate code that ran against an Oracle database.
CV: Experience of XML and XSLT
Real life: I configured tomcat, that's XML. XSLT? Isn't that the same thing?
CV: 5 years. Java, C and Python. Real life: I wrote some C five years ago and changed it again recently. (his Java experience was fine). I edited a python program once when the input format changed, no I really couldn't write anything from scratch.
One of these actually got the Job, because he apologised for his CV and then gave a real account of what he knew that matched our tests. He said the agency put all that rubbish in after he filled in a check-box questionnaire!
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.
Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't tell you how many times I've interviewed some "Guru" with lots of experience or certifications (and whose resume puts mine to shame) who couldn't explain to me simple stuff. (For example, what makes a language "object oriented"?) Some of them had no people skills whatsoever to boot. I certainly don't want to work with them.
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.
Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
The testing isn't to see your skills. It is to see if you (a geek) ever grew beyond that age range where you treat everyone like you've got aspergers.
The Real Purpose of Such Tests Is.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Address the problem, not the symptom (Score:1, Interesting)
The problem lies in what I've been saying for 10 years: There's a much bigger range of expertise between managers and workers within the IT field than in any of the others you mention.
In other words, a "manager" in HR, accounting, or law can perform the tasks of the people they manage to a much greater degree than can an IT manager.
The HR manager knows enough about HR to spot someone who doesn't. The same applies to nearly every other profession - except IT.
IT managers often know very little about the technologies, tools, and languages used by the people they manage. Therefore they have to rely on tests to determine whether potential employees are "BS'ing" or not.
The IT industry grew into existence much faster and very differently than other industries, and because of that the management structure evolved very differently, and in a much more reactive way.
The only solution is to change the qualifications used for IT management. If IT management positions are filled by individuals who possess the same level of expertise in their field as as that of management in other fields, there will be no need for these tests.
Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Professional certification (Score:4, Interesting)
"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?"
Others have already pointed out that lawyers and accountants (CPAs at least) submit to testing and are certified by professional organizations. You can't market yourself as a lawyer, CPA, or even an engineer in some places without having the backing of a professional guild.
What I'd like to know is why, in the face of offshoring and job losses, the IT industry hasn't coelesced around a professional society or guild. A professional guild, with some rigid certification testing, would be more effective than even unionizing since it produces a win-win for both employees and employers. Is it just that the need isn't perceived to be there yet?
With professional certification, employers would know they are getting skills without expensive testing and competent IT professionals can be assured that they won't be working with "IT Professionals" whose sole IT experience is that they took one Visual Basic course.
There are lots of vendor specific certs (MS, Novell, Oracle, IBM) but to me, that's more akin testing accountants for having skill in using QuickBooks.
The Open Group has IT Architect certification (http://www.opengroup.org/itac/) which looks to be a start, but it doesn't appear to have gained much momentum. IBM offers cross-certification of its internally certified architects but even within IBM, not all departments bother to pay the fee for TOG certification.
I also see that there's an Institute for Certification of Computer Professionals (http://www.iccp.org/iccpnew/index.html) that's been around since 1973, and a lot of people on its web page have important looking letters next to their names (CCP, CDMP) but outside of this web page, I've never run across an IT person with this on their business card nor a company that insists on this certification.
So I ask the exact opposite question that the poster asks, "Why don't we insist on recognized industry certification testing for IT professionals?"
JoAnn
Re:Measurability (Score:1, Interesting)
funny enough I know more self-taught IT pros that know what the fuck they're doing than the certified "pros" who look lost when a real problem arises.
Most IT tests are jokes anyway, most dont reflect real world situations at all.
knowing what each OSI layer does in the OSI model and how to convert an IP address into binary arent used in the real world.
the other problem is these tests require one to cram and just learn for the test, same with the certification courses.
you learn how to take each quiz then learn how to take the final test.
They need to create a test (for networking professionals) that requires them to tackle a real world issue. intentionally fuck things up and then require the students to fix it with what they know.
Programmers are Artists (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the fundamental justification for a test is that many people in IT (programmers especially) are more artists/craftspeople than professionals. Sure, thinking is a large part of the job, but mental product isn't the sole output (as it is in law, HR, and other professions you mention that don't get tested). Just as you would expect to see work from a carpenter, plumber, or film maker before you hired them, an employer can very reasonably ask you to demonstrate your skills. Just because someone has degrees, certifications, and experience doesn't necessarily mean they have elegance, finesse, or artistry when it comes to writing code or debugging systems. A lot of what the industry values in its employees can't be taught, but it can certainly be tested. Giving a potential hire a code sample with a subtle bug you can judge their process in ways you can't with mere questions. Similarly, asking an interviewee to answer questions on the spot allows them to demonstrate how they code in an ad-hoc environment. This is especially useful for identifying people who don't have enough experience to develop independently.
Also, many professions, such as the law, have certifying authorities (such as the bar) where practitioners must pass a minimum standard in order to join the profession (and can be kicked out of). Because IT has no such standards body, and because so many people in IT are self taught or taught on the job, it's very difficult to know how much someone knows. There is no 'cannon' of IT training, no standard practice, nor even much agreement over what constitutes an adequate body of knowledge. The fact that people with no formal training regularly conceive and develop systems far superior to those with certifications, training and experience continues to speak to this fact.
Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:1, Interesting)
What is the difference between an Apple and a Pear?! You have Ten seconds to answer! Go!
The hardest question I got on my last interview was something like this... Actually it was "Mac or PC?" from a HR person which resulted in a bit of explanation of linux/bsd and how what he was really asking was "Windows or OS X" ...
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.
My company uses an essay question, doesn't work (Score:4, Interesting)
Then, as part of the interview process, we have a few questions we ask you to write essays for. One is based on design of a product we already built, one is based on design of a product we're currently building, and third... Is actually a riddle. My project manager came up with this idea, his thinking is "Let's see what kind of inductive/deductive reasoning this guy will use". Sounds like a good idea.
Turns out? All this crap is worthless. Case in point... We have a guy fresh out of college (no experience in the trenches) who we interview, and later get hired. His code is quite beautiful at a glance (not breaking down every line to profile it or anything), plenty of comments, nice style, etc. His essays are OK, they're passable.
But, he sits down, and we've got -multitude- problems. Let's start with one example: We're web developers, and in the first couple weeks, he needed to modify UI. In this case, he needed to use a few images for something. What kind of images did he put into our repo for versioning? BITMAPS! No, no, not a proper raster file-types like a PNG or a JPG, a bitmap -- BMP. Just cause Professor Dinglethorpe requires you to comment and indent your code properly doesn't mean you have a clue what really happens when you get down to production.
But, the real problem? COMMUNICATION! The kid just can't freakin' communicate with us. If he were bad AND would take the time to talk to us about what he's working on, we could stand it. We'd know what was happening when he did jacked up stuff in the code, and we later have to maintain his mess.
However, he doesn't take time to communicate with anyone. He's too busy leaving important meetings to take phone calls from his ultra insecure live-in girlfriend who calls him 18 times a day (for such important things as "Should we make lentil soup tonight?" and "What are we going to name this cat?"), reading I can has cheezburger and the failblog. Meanwhile, he slips under the radar. Our company plays to your competency level. So while I have taken on huge projects, become a stand-in for our system administrator, and the liason between customer service and information services (a pretty important role, they buy the important bugs -first-) -- this kid is getting assigned tasks like "We need to put hyphens between these words per the marketing dept". Good thing we get paid the same. Nice to get paid the same as the guy who's mastered reading I can has cheezburger. He can has cheeseburger, and I'll be the one to shove it up his... nose.
So, don't believe a technical test is going to determine if the next guy you work with is legitimate, and competent. If he can't communicate, and he has no work ethic -- frankly, you're screwed.
Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:3, Interesting)
Where do you get the code samples from? Do they bring them, or do you ask them to write something while they're there?
It's true that real savants might be bad interviewers, but that's why asking them to write a code sample works, and that certainly is a test!
When someone says "test," they're not talking about a fill-in-the-circles test, they're talking about interview questions that, instead of asking "what do you hope to accomplish at SoftwareCo?" they ask "How would you [solve some problem]." THAT's the test.
Also, at large companies, simply hiring someone can be an expensive and time consuming process. Firing people can be extremely difficult, and also costly.
Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually a psychologist that trains other psychologists assured me that you get nothing other than total bullshit out of the small number of questions that HR people think they can use to determine your personality. I know in my case I treat it as an exercise in choosing which answers are most likely to impress. These tests actually make me angry since my employment depends on a minor footnote of real science being turned into psuedoscience and interpreted by the sort of people that drifted into "Human Resources" as their only job option (there are good people in that field but I've only met the barely employable). You might as well use phrenology or a polygraph instead of five silly questions.
With the anecdote above I suspect the HR people that drafted the test would misinterpret it as a sucess. They would think their test scared off an unqualified candidate instead of the reality of it offending a potential employee to the point where they left.
As a manager who has administered tests... (Score:1, Interesting)
I feel they are critical.
We used to give a very simple test. Write us an EJB application (simple calculator webapp) that will run on jboss. They had a few hours to do it.
We only had two people out of over 50 that recruiting companies sent us over the years who actually completed it in the time allotted.
Now I should say we were less interested in them actually solving the problem than in their approach to solving the problem. They had full access to the internet and could use any open source or free software/tools they felt necessary.
- We had people who spend their whole time downloading Eclipse and plugins to build the app for them.
- We had someone writes us several pages in english on paper how they might write the application.
- One ended up getting the computer stuck in an endless cycle of reboots.
- A number just gave up
- Most really didn't knwo what an ejb was or how to write one (as part of the review we checked browser history).
All of the candidates were sent to us as Advanced Java developers with years of experience writing enterprise apps.
We told people up front, completing the test was not a pass/fail thing. (Although if someome completed the test they were hired on the spot.) We were looking at their work to assess:
-creativity
-troubleshooting skills-
-focus on the task at hand
-coding style under a tight deadline
-research ability
-how tool dependent they were
In the end, the only two that actually wrote the damn thing (outside of the internal developers we timed) just used notepad.
Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:3, Interesting)
However, I'm sure I'd fail on any Java test or C test.
Not necessarily. At my last job we would administer a C coding test to all of our prospective employees. I had an astonishing number of them that were syntactically perfect, would even execute correctly, but were simply awful. They would produce nothing but a main() function, or they would hard code to the sample data (eg I'd see lines like 'if ( id == 10 ) printf("Fred");')
And sometimes I'd get some samples where the syntax was shot, the functions didn't exist, had the arguments in the wrong order, or were just plain missing arguments. But thrown in with those were a sense of organization. Even though the code wasn't perfect, it was obvious what the guy was trying to accomplish and how he had split up the parts of the task. More than that, the code would show some flexibility. Minor changes to the input wouldn't require massive changes to the code.
The language of choice is important insofar as I want the candidate to at least know what C syntax looks like. It's also there because if I want a code sample, it has to be in some language, and I as the interviewer am going to make sure that it's a language I'm familiar with. But it's not what's most important to me. Syntax, function names, and various language trivia (i=i++ bad!) can all be learned in far less time than good design.
Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:3, Interesting)
I read your linked post. All a test does is maybe help you with #2. The other items won't be determined by any amount of testing.
Personally I'm okay with some basic knowledge tests to make sure that you do indeed know what you say you know on your resume. The tests I have problems with are the ones that require you to have memorized parts of an API or some esoteric features of some given language. As an employer I want to know how you're going to solve a problem and not whether or not you have memorized some readily available documentation.
Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:3, Interesting)
I had a screening test once where the manager asked me to write a simple SQL JOIN without saying so directly. On paper. He said look, I don't care if the syntax isn't perfect, I just want to know if you basically know how to do it.
I think I got to the word "JOIN" and he said yeah, you know, 90% of the people I interview can't do that.
So that's why they have those tests: 90% of "SQL Developer" candidates don't know about JOIN.
Re:No, it is not reasonable. (Score:2, Interesting)
That's because, dear sir, like humans of yesteryear, you can think but can't memorize. The regurgitate on demand schools of today have created the dogmatic programmer. Back when the Earth was cooling (and yes Olivia, I worked with punched cards and paper tape) we were taught how to solve problems and carry that knowledge from problem to problem.
I couldn't pass a C# test for beans, but I have written my own utilities to fix things I hate in WinXP and even have my own desktop manager so it is like Linux with all the trimmings.
Recently someone asked me in an interview why I should be hired even though I had no Microsoft certifications. I laughed, got up, and never looked back. Word to the wise: If they care about certs, they are clueless about what takes real I.T. skills. Run, do not walk, to a competent employer.
Re:Good Testing == Getting Paid. (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't get the job, but found out several weeks later that they implemented my exact solution, as the guy they hired for the job EMAILED ME WITH QUESTIONS and quoted the entire email.
I submitted it to their billing department at my standard consulting rate and minimum bill, with a note attached that since there was prima facie evidence that they were using my solution. . .it was pay or go to court.
The check arrived via FedEx the next morning . . .
Re:The underlying assumption is not true (Score:2, Interesting)
A few years ago, I applied to a Fortune 500 company for a specific position. The posted job requirements and my resume were practically mirror images of one another. The interviews went well, and then came... the test.
The test was done online. It was one of these idiotic automated C++ tests with multiple choice questions. Most of the questions, about 80%, were parlor tricks, ie. syntax arcana. It was multiple choice, so the questions all had predetermined solutions, even when the correct answer was something totally different. What do you do when the Solaris 2.4 compiler throws an error 5718 on multithreaded code? Well, I don't know what you do, but when I get an error message I've never seen before, I read the compiler manual and/or help file, and check Sun's website and comp.lang.c++. Of course, none of those were options. You were expected to know, off the top of your head, what compiler option to add to suppress the error. The fact that suppressing a meaningful error was a bad thing to do was obviously lost on the test maker, as well.
Needless to say, I bombed. Apparently, so did everyone applying for this position who was over the age of 30. The ones who passed were those who were two years or less out of school, ie. fresh from an academic environment. Consequently, they hired a cadre of programmers exclusively under 25, and had an 18 month development cycle that would be kindly called disastrous.
What struck me about this test, which the company put great stock in, was that there was absolutely no way for anyone to show initiative, ingenuity, or creativity, which is what they were supposedly looking for. It was a coding test that didn't permit you to actually code. The presumption was that good coders were keen on arcane syntax, and those who were keen on arcane syntax (ie. language lawyers) were excellent programmers.
In my experience, that's not only untrue, it's completely inverted. Coders who delve into the arcane aspects of multiple inheritance while creating polymorphic templates are the sort of coders that build disastrously over-architected systems that no one but they (and sometimes not even they) can understand. Testing to see if the candidate was a "clever" coder was a recipe for disaster.
Since then, if I've ever been asked to take tests in interviews (and I have), I insist that it be a human-reviewed test. When people ask why, I show them the printout of that online test.
Now, I've got 20+ years under my belt, so I realized that this was nonsense. I feel sorry for the guys who were 5 years out of school who were crushed by that test; I met one who felt he must be a complete incompetent because he flunked it.
Tests are okay (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a systems architect with many years experience. No real programming skills which the coding bunch will find odd and look down upon. Simply I hire programmers when I need them and usually have several on staff. I design, they code, I deploy.
Working on a big deployment my company hired a third party contractor for programming. The guy they sent was ok but seemed to be struggling with the project. I stepped in and reviewed the software and requirements and discovered he was doing it all wrong. He was fired and someone else finished the project.
Time passed and I applied for a job at another company. Was given a brief programming test which half of it I couldnt complete. Not a programmer and I explained that to them. They didnt care too much. As for the test I didnt mind and think its a good idea especially if its a programming position.
Now for the punchline... I did not get the job. It went to a guy who completed the test. The "same" guy we fired for incompetence on our project.
Anybody can write code. Its what you do with it thats important :)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)