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Written Tests for Interviews?
University Tech asks: "I am a technician
at a small private university in the process of hiring a new technician. Everything here is done by committee. One of the committee members was very offended that we were giving the interviewees a written test after we had finished the oral part of the interview.
How many of you have had written tests as part of a job interview? I think I have had one at every tech job interview I have ever had (six interviews) and even two hands on tests. Most of my co-workers and friends have as well. Is this perhaps a regional thing or is this normal for us techies?"
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I used to teach. When I was looking for my first public school contract, I applied to close to 20 school systems. EVERY one required a written essay on the application -- some typed, some handwritten. Later, when I worked in a residential treatment program, they had me sit in a room with my future supervisor and write a few paragraphs on a given topic.
As a teacher, I found that there are MANY people, children and adults who may have good verbal skills, but are completely incapable of using the written word.
Now that I'm running my own business, I would not conceive of hiring ANYONE (except a sanitation engineer) without a written test. They can be offended or not, it's their choice. If they find it demeaning, or offensive that my company requires a written test, they don't have to work for me.
I realize it is the University people, not applicants, who are shocked, but it is necessary to know how someone can express him/herself in writing. I'm sure any college/university administrators are in their own world, where their peers all have a Master's, or Ph.D., so their writing skills have been proven in a thesis. You may want to point out to them that you are not hiring someone in the circles they run in, but someone who will need good writing skills. Without testing an applicant, how will you know if this person can write well?
Another note: at the grad and post grad level, you are in an instutition that deals with a completely different type of education than someone who has had to teach people (from kids to adults) to read and write. I can tell you, from experience, there are MANY people out there who can express themsleves very well verbally, but can't write a coherent paragraph for any reason.
On the far side of this question, my firm is rather unusual, and I will be requiring many creative and technical people, all working together in a strongly interactive and interdependent atmosphere. I've even talked with my laywer about requiring job applicants to go through a ropes course (or other group building exercise) with other applicants as part of the application process. We figure it would be one of the few ways to see if a person REALLY believes in teamwork, or just claims to. It seems (and perhaps is) extreme, but I've worked with too many people that claim to be one thing (and may even believe what they say), but are really something different. We want to see what a person is like when they have to work with a group of other people to sovle a problem and cope with stress.
Perhaps you should form a sub-committee to investigate if that act is offensive. And then another sub-committee to liase with the offended person and to properly record their feelings. Then form a sub-sub-committee to assess the performance of both sub-committees.
Perhaps at that stage everyone will have forgotton why any of the committees was formed in the first place and it the whole thing will blow over.
Personally, I feel they are ridiculous. Inevitably, you end up getting asked things like:
In SunOS 2.x, what was the command used to check how much belly lint has migrated into your power supply?
What is wrong with this piece of code? (inevitably written in your least favorite language)
In Perl, what is the function that returns the Hebrew date given the Latvian date?
I'm exaggerating a little-- but only a little.
The basis of most of these tests is simple-- rote memorization, and forcing the hapless test-taker to perform tasks with paper and pencil where they would ordinarily have 5 ORA books, a half dozen colleagues on AIM/ICQ/Yahoo! Messenger/MS Messenger to chat with, and Google.
Needless to say, this is not only unfair, but comically (tragically!) unrealistic.
Unfortunately, the only meaningful test of a programmer is the one thing they cannot do in an interview setting-- have the candidate perform a real, everyday assignment, with full access to everything they would usually have access to, without the artificial and performance-damaging stress of the test environment (remember, many of us get conditioned to stress out when in a testing environment. Remember all those horrid nail-biting Calc/Physics/Chem exams from High School and College?). But since that can't be done...
Personally, when I give interviews, my technique is to grill users on their general coding/SA philosophy, and their TRUE background-- that is, not only things they've done for corporations, but things they've done for non-profits, things they've done at home, things they've done while sitting on the john in Penn Station... It doesn't matter where you coded something to me. But unfortunately I seem to be alone with that opinion, and most employers only want to hear about things that you did in a commercial, for-profit environment.
A sad fact of the market nowadays is that a large proportion of job applicants are grossly underqualified. Most of my job, as I've explained to coworkers, is weeding out, for instance, Unix SA job applicants who've never adminned a Unix box ("But I have a certificate from Sun!")... programmer interns whose greatest programming achievement thus far is "I opened a Visual BASIC program's source code, and changed its background color"... and the like. (Both of these are actual examples pulled from my interviewing experiences. Scary.)
I personally feel the job of interviewing is easy, if you're a serious hacker yourself. Hackers can always recognize other hackers. Even though many of us lack much ability to 'sense' people (remember how many geeks are autistic, e.g. with Asperger's Syndrome or whatnot), a geek can almost always sense another geek, if they are AT ALL paying attention.
Of course, in some cases, The Boss specifically does not WANT a geek. If you are lucky, this sentiment will fizzle out before the end of the interviewing process, leaving you to select a geek for the job. But once, I recall my boss telling me she wants a "regular, ordinary" (suit-wearing) person to help SA our Unix boxes. The result was a disaster. We interviewed a number of of really well-presented, suit-clad, well-educated, polite young (and older) men-- absolutely none of whom proved qualified to even TOUCH a live Web site, let alone one of our size.
After sitting in on an interview, my boss admitted that I was right-- that looking good in a suit and having a few certificates from Sun does not a Unix SA make.
Anyhow, just my 2c... YMMV. Sorry for rambling.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Our rationale was that we would discuss experience during an interview, but too often during tech interviews, someone would be asked questions such as "What would you do if the system came up with error xxx?" That isn't representative of the work environment.
So, we sent a series of questions, letting the person know they had a few days to work on it and that they should use whatever resources they could. That way, we could more directly test their ability to discover the answers to the problems they would face in the job.
Surprisingly, we often would find out more about the person's personality than their technical skill. Some wouldn't reply. Others grumbled. Others sat down and really researched the questions, answering with their own experience. It seemed in some cases, people would put on a happy face when they put on a suit, but when doing "homework," you got to see their true work attitude. Overall, I thought it was an effective measure of how much they would work on a problem and what skills they had to research a problem.