Programming Job Skills Test?

eclecticgeek asks: "I've recently finished a CS/SD degree at uni and the interviews are starting to come thick and fast. I've yet to have a skills test for any of them, and it's only a matter of time before I do. I'm hoping to do one this week and I will get the choice of language. The position is quite broad and they're more after competent programmers in general, rather than any one specific language. So I'm wondering, have you done a developer skills test? What type of things did you get asked?"

Comments

Re:Simple tests

[Matthew Weigel]

"What is the proper format for the program main method?"

You should get a blank stare. "Typically two tabs in" is another reasonable response.

Sorry, but when you're testing the knowledge of the candidate, your knowledge is being tested too. The worst developers I've had to share code with haven't known what a "function signature" was, and I figure that's a pretty good rule of thumb.

Re:General Logic

[nate nice]

That's pretty much what I thought too. If being given this upon an interviw my first thought would be how this relates tomy job, reading specifications for clear detail, ie unambigious, and caught this as something that could be interperated in more than one way and ask to clarify that I am not indeed in the middle of somewhere.

When clarified I would then pursure to come up with some fantastic, amazing, impossible method of surviving in nowhere (somewhere?) until I could be rescued.

And as a side note, if I did come upon that set of circumstances and was not ever going to be rescued, I wouldn't think that would be such a bad life considering you can survive, etc. I htikn I would do alright as I've done "rough" things before, but I also believe some kind of nature and instinct would really kick in.

It would be a challange I guess, but I definitly would not try and build a raft home if I had to go 1000 or so miles. Hell, I would even try to start brewing my own beer and see if I could make a paper and use the volcano ash as a writing material. Beer is way more important though.