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Will the Solve-the-Riddle Hiring Trend Affect IT?
An anonymous reader wonders: "It's probably harder to find a good developer, than for a developer to find a job. Seems to be a Google-riddle trend; rather than caring about references/diplomas/resumes, employers are using solve-this-and-you-have-a-job approach, not even caring about any usual information. Does that give decent graduates/talented unexperienced devs/homegrown coders a chance at the corporate job, or does it alienate potential matches?"
I suspect that its not necessarily that you solve the riddle this instant, they probably want to get an insight into how you think and how you solve problems.
Problem solving is a huge part of developing software and an important quality to have in a candidate
Is your hiring policy so brain-dead that any blot on a criminal background check is an automatic disqualifier? Or is a potential candidate given a chance to explain? We live in times when it seems that everything is illegal. No one gets through a day without doing something illegal. No one gets through a month without committing a serious crime. (Well, at least that's true if you have a half-way fun sex life.) Is your requirement for a negative background check absolute? If so, why?
Out here in Orange County, IGN Entertainment is infamous for their tests. I went in and nailed the interview. The next level to advance to was a test. The test was to implement a small web server (GET/HEAD commands basically) in C++ using *no external libraries of any kind*. They stated the test should take 3 - 4 hours. The specs were extremely vague and any attempt I made to get clarification was met with "do what you think is best".
They also mailed me the test late on a thursday evening, and were calling asking where it was the following monday morning. Problem being I was currently working 50/60 hours a week as well, and it just happened to be the weekend I was moving :(
I ask you then, how is anyone who currently *has* a job and perhaps a family supposed to complete a test like this? It seems like the most talented candidates would *HAVE* jobs and therefore find it much more difficult to complete the test. I rushed the program together because -- what choice did I have? It did not represent me well.
Looking back, the only appropriate response on my part would have been to say "Your requirements suck, and this is not a 3 to 4 hour job. Thanks but no thanks." The entire thing was a waste of their time, waste of my time. Maybe that was the test, to see if I'd tell them to fuck off.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Isn't a college degree just a symbol that says, "Look, a whole bunch of people with good reputations threw a bunch of puzzles at me.
No, it's mostly proof that you can play the game.
There are two games.
1. The technical education which is the following game.
They ask a question.
You determine what the real question is.
You find the right book.
You read how to answer the question.
You answer the question.
2. The People game.
You learn how to make people happy and play the politics and admin game. I think this is the real reason most education administrations are described as a nightmare, it's actually part of the learning experience.
Later you play the sales/job interview game. They're pretty much the same, only the product changes.
Exactly. They may not have actually wanted a complete working product.. they probably wanted to see what you thought of their task, see what assumptions you made, see if you could convince them that their timeline was infeasible, etc.
I knew a guy who went into an interview and was asked to solve some intractable problem. He was able to point out that their request wasn't feasible and provided some alternate options. This story wouldn't be interesting, of course, if he hadn't gotten the job.
I suspect that even if a person couldn't have written a webserver in C++ in 4 hours, they might still have had a shot at the job depending upon how they approached the problem.
I was taken to a conference room, given a hardcopy chunk of code, and told to figure out what it did. On the way out one guy said, "Oh there might be an error in there too". So I did my 'Russell Nash' thing and ran the program step by step in my head and figured the program out. I ran a few more calculations, and I determined there was a problem given a certain numeric precision. The guys came back in about 30 minutes after they left. First they asked to see any scrap paper I used determining the solution. I told them I didn't have any, except for a couple of numbers I wrote on the code pages. They were stunned, but I explained exactly what the program did, which one of them confirmed. Then I explained the error I found. At this point they got very defensive. It seems this piece of code was pulled from their production systems, and "didn't have any errors". I explained what I found to them, and one of them wandered off.
Oddly I didn't get the job. They said I lacked the ability to document. Funny since I graduated with a degree in technical writing. Maybe they just wanted people to come in an debug for them in interviews.
Amen, brother.
I once had an interview where they handed me a few lines of abberent C code and asked what's the output. I answered that it didn't matter, because C code should never be written like that. Production C code should never look like an entry in the Obfuscated C contest.
That was the wrong answer, of course, and I didn't get an offer, but I figured a sysadmin job at a place that wanted me to be able to read obfuscated C entries probably wasn't the place I wanted to work anyway.
Geoff
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso