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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?"
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