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Testing IT Professionals On Job Interviews?
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?"
Because it is far easier to get "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" without a shred of competence in our field than in most others.
because you (the employer in this case) never know.
a person can work in various places, have diplomas... and still be unbelievably stupid.
i'd argue that other professions should gain some tests (i know a lot of them actually do, though those tests usually involve more generic skillset, like being able to work in a stressful conditions or under external noise, ability to quickly analyse particular information of the field etc).
Rich
A simple answer is that IT knowledge is a more quantitatively measurable than many other professions. Another factor is the high percentage of self-learned IT professionals. You don't see any "self-learned" lawyers, but self-learned IT pros are commonplace. Lawyers have been tested previously (bar exam) while the IT pro may never have passed any formal testing.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
When I've been holding interviews, I always make up a set of tests just to make sure what they put on their CV is accurate.
The number of times I've had someone put on their CV they can do something we are after, but in reality they know Sh*t about it, has only really come out when they do the test. It also helps to pick up those who are good at taking exams but don't know how to handle themselves in the real world.
Unlike the other professions, IT doesn't have a legal backing. i.e. lawyers and accountants have qualifications that are backed by some law or another so if they write bullshit on their CV then it can come back on them. Not with IT unfortunately.
Java gaming nut - http://www.retep.org/ or for the rail http://uktra.in/
You are a technician, not a professional.
The "professional" bs is just a way to put you on salary rather than an hourly wage.
While "professional" sounds nice, there are only a few real professions.
A nice law passed a few years back reclassified several technical fields as professional, allowing employers to really screw their employees by changing their pay to salary from hourly.
If you are going to be that flexible in the interview its probably good for both you and the employer that you aren't working for them ;)
Personally I wouldn't accept a job that /didn't/ test me on my competence because that means they probably didn't test the guy before me on his competence either
Mopping up after some idiot with "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" that's a total clueless retard isn't my idea of fun and rewarding employment.
The reason it's done is a combination of great variability in skill among IT applicants, compared to professions with time-tested accreditation bodies like lawyers and accountants, and skills that are fairly amenable to formal testing, compared to professions like sales and HR, at least with respect to weeding out duds (if someone can't write a simple program in an afternoon, given a language reference, they should not be hired). More generally, I can't imagine why it's unreasonable for an employer to test skill.
Competent IT professionals accept it because it's in fact beneficial to them to be distinguished from their less competent peers. (If the test itself is poor, they complain about that, and don't whine about the indignity of taking a test in general.) Paternalism is forcing someone to do something for their own good. This is not. I can assure of I have no intention of refusing tests of skill when applying for jobs.
Employment history, certifications, and degrees do not ensure competence. Probably most of the people on The Daily WTF passed such basic screening.
I frequently interview programmers, and having them take a short test (approx 30 minutes) and then discussing this with them in their interview is incredibly useful to determine their skillset. I could ask similar questions directly and have them work through the answers on a board, but then they would be under pressure to provide an answer on the spot to questions that probably deserve some thought before providing a solution.
None of the questions on the test are unduly taxing - any person we interview who has a few years professional c++ experience under their belt should be able to provide at least a working solution, with potential better solutions open to discussion face to face.
I've had 15 years doing what I do, and I'd be happy to take a test if asked - if I can't pass whatever hurdle the company sets, then I'd rather not sit there for a few more hours trying to win them over with my sparkling personality, and if the test is a pile of rubbish I know early on that I probably don't want to work there.
It can be annoying, but I hardly think it's that big of a deal. I don't work in IT, I work as a creative in advertising, but I've had to take 'tests' when applying for a job. I'm given a sample brief and asked to come up with a campaign concept.
I'm given those tests because agencies work differently with different accoutns and some people are just not good fits from one to another. I would imagine the potential exists for an IT professional with a glowing CV to still be a poor choice in a particular company. At least they're not testing your social skills as well.
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex.
In my experience, which ia way more than your 10 years, very few folks in IT actually know how to interview and what traits to look for. Being tech folks and not having people skills, they think that some test will tell them what they need to know about a potential applicant. Not true.
A lot of the tests are language lawyer things (knowing about public static final in Java) which doesn't get to what they really need to know. There are lots of folks who know the language lawyer tricks that will be lousy employees. You need folks that are bright, have a demonstrated track record of being able to learn new things and that will fit with your culture/environment.
That is true.
I am interviewing them just as much as they are interviewing me.
Life is too short to work someplace where I wont be happy.
99.9% of the time the person doing the interview won't understand the answers anyway.
Maybe I am just getting old.
Taking a test during a job interview means that they are serious about the situation.
The worst thing isn't tests at job interviews it's the work climate at the site where you are going to be located. Is it micro managed or is it goal managed? And job satisfaction is very important for IT workers.
The question is rather why other types of workers aren't tested as much. Why not test lawyers, accountants and administrators?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Interviewer: OK, so you know C? what is the result of i=0; i=i++; Joe Blow: Uhhhh...I....uuhhhh...it's compiler dependent!!
Is the correct answer!
Without an output statement you'll never know, a compiler could legally optimize the whole lot away!
I speak as a member of "IT" as well, so I'm accusing myself here too, fairly and squarely.
I don't know (nor care) about the non-technical professions, but the standard of professionalism in Computing is a lot lower than in Engineering.
I can say that with confidence after a long career spanning both Electrical/Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, both in academia (PhD, postdoc, lecturer) and in industry. It took me the better part of a decade in the computing industry to realize that I had been (unwittingly) deluding my Software Engineering students when I taught them "Do it like this, or you will be laughed at as amateurs when you get out into industry." The sad fact is that 98% of computing in industry is utterly amateurish, as I eventually discovered for myself. Even huge, "properly" managed projects are in practice just hacks like all the rest, but with better documentation and QA/testing.
While computing is my current love, and bread provider, I recognize that we're at the stage of gazing at chicken entrails in this discipline. It's a bit sad, although I still love it. But when they say "Bridges would fall down every other day if they were built like we build software", they are 100% right. Looking at it from the perspective of my old engineering days, it's a bit distressing, but that's how it is.
We're still in the early days of Computing, and to call it a professional discipline is stretching the definition rather severely.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
It doesn't matter if it's compiler-dependent or not. The correct answer to that question is: "This code is badly written. It never makes sense to write i = i++. You probably mean i++."
Opinions expressed above are mine, and not my employees'.
Actually, it says something about your company's (lack of) internal QA that that garbage code ever made it to a customer site!
As long as you're tested by a human who understands the very background for the questions asked, tests are good.
However, that's not what happens out there. The hiring companies have multiple-choice tests that are evaluated by a system, and the humans administering the test don't understand it. And more to the point, the people who made the tests didn't understand the questions either, but looked them up in a book.
So very many of the questions are based on semantics and finding the exact phrase a certain text book used for a situation, instead of testing the understanding.
In your example, the typical test that's being used would likely have asked:
In 192.168.38.1/24, what does "/24" mean?
1 [ ] Subnet mask
2 [ ] CIDR
3 [ ] C Class network
4 [ ] Shorthand for 0.255.255.255 in IOS 10 or newer
Of these, only one will be accepted. And more likely than not, the wrong one.
I flunked one of these tests on DNS knowledge. Despite having written a DNS server, and installing and running multiple ISPs' DNS servers. Thousands of domains, including split internal/external, IPv6 and secure updating from DHCP. I can query a DNS using UDP from the command line, without requiring "host", "nslookup" or other specialized tools. I can write BIND zone files from scratch if I have to.
I know DNS, dammit -- better than most sysadmins out there.
The reason I failed (well, scored less than 50%, which I call failed) was that I couldn't answer questions like "Approximately, how many DNS servers are operating world wide?", "Does an active domain controller resolve DNS queries?", "What is the command for looking up your current WINS server?" and "Which Windows versions support running without netbios?". Apparently the test maker had looked up some questions in some DNS for Windows Dummies type book, and thought that was what it was all about. Not a single question reflected real DNS knowledge.
Other tests ask you questions that you don't bother to remember, because it's so easy to look it up. Like parameters to commands. /path /path /path /path
How do you list the size of a file system in 4k blocks in Unix?
1 [ ] df -b 4096
2 [ ] df -B 4096
3 [ ] df -s 4096
4 [ ] df -s 4k
Only those who don't know what they're doing have to remember these things. The rest of us would try "--help", "-h" or look at the man page to check command syntax, and not bother to remember little used options. Only those with a need to memorize everything because they can't figure out how to look up things would know this. Or those who by chance happened to do this yesterday.
As is, the tests are not very useful. They might weed out some of those that know absolutely nothing about a subject, but they also weed out those who understand the subject better than the test author, but don't bother remembering irrelevant or OS-specific details.
Please, please people, remember that a job interview is also your chance to evaluate an employer. If there's any aspect of a job interview that makes you feel like you are being disrespected, you can bet that this will be a company that will show you little respect as an employee. Humiliation on a job interview is an excellent indicator of future happiness at that company.
If you believe in your skills, if you believe yourself to be valuable, do not be afraid to say "no thanks". The reason many workers feel like they are being treated badly is because they are being treated badly.
You are going to be spending the major part of your waking hours at your job. You should be choosing very carefully.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you weren't an Anonymous Coward, I'd mod you up. If you weren't a poster on slashdot, I'd give you a big hug and a wet Bugs Bunny kiss.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
In 2001 I worked as a supervisor in a callcenter(by now bankrupt and bought out) that specialized in tech-support for consumer software and hardware. At one point our recruiter asked me to test an applicant she didn't have a good feeling about. The applicant had numerous impressive looking certifications on her resume and quite a confident demeanor about her abilities. She claimed to be specialized in Microsoft operating systems. Note that this was your typical callcenter full of pc enthusiasts, many of whom had no formal education in IT whatsoever.
Long story short, at the time we also did support for a company that distributed a number of very popular pc games, so I gave the applicant a game consisting of 3 cd-roms and asked her to install it on a typical win98 workstation. After watching her struggle for about 10 minutes, while completely ignoring the big autorun window with the huge "Install game" button on it, we decided perhaps hiring her would not be such a good idea after all...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
We only have ourselves to blame. Why do you think the interviewers want a test? Because somewhere along the line, in some capacity, they were burned by an unscrupulous IT person who lied about their level of competency.
Right because being burned by incompetence doesn't happen in any other field right?
Actually it does happen in other fields, the whole premise of this article is wrong. I'm a statistician/epidemiologist and every post I've ever applied for has had some kind of techincal test. Some have been more formal than others. Anyway if I was applying for a post that needed a high level of technical knowledge I would expect to be tested on it.
Exactly.
Yet another example...People applying for research/academic faculty positions at universities usually come and give what are known as "job talks" where they talk about (some of) their research and the current faculty are allowed to ask questions, etc. This is absolutely an assessment of their skills and abilities within their field.
Another point I'd want to make is that many fields, such as law or medicine, have formalized, comprehensive tests that are administered and scored by a recognized organization, e.g. the bar exam or medical board exams. IT certifications come nowhere near those tests in so many ways and as such, technical interviews for a technical position in IT shouldn't be considered out of line with what other professional fields go through, as I see it...
Additionally, they do have to take a test. It's called Bar Exam, CPA certification, etc...
These are standardized tests that everyone agrees is robust enough to demonstrate competence. There is no standardized test for IT workers. No, passing MSCE and A+ crap does not count. A+ is somewhat standardized, but honestly there is no IT test that is worth a crap. Arguably some of the Cisco tests are adequate to demonstrate Networking knowledge, but that doesn't mean you are worth a crap when it comes to fixing a broken down Unix machine or even a Windows machine. It also doesn't mean you can build/rebuild a computer.
The field of IT is so broad that coming up with a standardized test is not really feasible. The technology field also moves so fast that a standardized test would be outdated by the time it was developed and agreed upon.
Since you only have 2 - 4 years of verifiable employment at each company, I would question your abilities as well. 2 - 4 years is just enough to get a job and for the company to find out you are totally incompetent and then fire you. If you had said 6 - 8 years per company, then you might have a case.
I remember, in particular, a 2002 ad looking for people with 5 or more years of Windows 2000 server experience.
Or the people looking for 10+ years of experience in JAVA in 2003 (which only debuted in 1995. . . do the math. . .)
The real problem, is the clueless tyrants in HR. . .
It's also an easy way to filter out the bullshitters. About nine years ago I had to help hire for an entry level web programming job. Every asswipe that could spell HTML had 4 years of it on his resume. A test might have saved everyone some pain.
And you don't have to look at testing as a punishment. It's just another way to show off your skills. And it can be a valuable insight into the company - a stupid test may warn of PHBs in your future.
Besides, I think we would all be better off if all professionals (especially CIOs) were given tests prior employment.
Hell is other people's code.
Many jobs in marketing, pr, and administrative have writing tests. Also, let's take a look at the other professions mentioned: law - they have the Bar exam; accountant - CPA and CFA exams; sales - commission-based with low base salary, so less risk to hire; HR - well, there would be no HR "professionals" if they had to be accountable for knowing anything.
FizzBuzz is great; we use it on every single interview for a programming position, regardless of experience. I've seen people come in with 10+ years of programming experience, and completely screw it up.
More importantly than just showing whether or not somebody can code, it shows whether or not they can handle simple tasks under pressure. I'm sure most of those applicants could have completed it at home when they're not being watched, but if they can't do it in an interview, then how are they going to perform on-site at a client, when a major bug just popped during a production push?
Money I owe, money-iy-ay
I understand where the poster is coming from (since I've been there) and I also see it from the side of the employer (where I am right now).
The biggest problem I run into when hiring an "IT Professional" is that a good 60% of them either outright lie or hilariously exaggerate about their experience/training.
I'd much rather hire a person whose honest about what skills he/she does/doesn't have but demonstrates solid problem solving skills.
If you've never administrated a SAN, don't tell me that you have and not expect me to ask a few probing questions....
Referring to yourself as an ESX guru but then not knowing what vmotion is won't win you any friends (or a return interview).
As a general rule, before my boss is going to let anybody loose in the server room, expect to spend a couple of hours in a conference room in front of a white board.
Expect to be asked about your experience and expect to demonstrate problem solving skills related to those skills.
Expect to be given some theoretical problems and be asked to solve them. Also, an answer of "I'd have to check google" is actually okay.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
1996, and I'm being interviewed by Chrysler (over the phone, no less, as I was 2000 km away) for a position as a web application designer.
The interview is going well, and then the interviewer starts asking a rapid fire sequence of obscure programming trivia questions - things like the arguments to certain system functions, that sort of thing.
After about the third or fourth punt (these questions were really obscure), I started to get a little angry, and I told the interviewer that if that particular question ever came up in my code, that it wasn't necessary for me to have the answer memorized. Man pages and paper manuals exist for a reason (this was before the all-knowing Google) and if I really needed to know the answer, I would look it up. In fact, even if I was reasonably confident of the answer, I'd STILL look it up because the time spent looking up the answer and ensuring it was right was very much less than the time spent guessing, getting it wrong, and debugging the error.
"Real work" I said "is an open-book test".
The next thing she said was "When can you start?"
I don't need to have an answer immediately at hand to every question. What I need is to know how to FIND the answer to a question as quickly as possible given the resources at hand.
If you want to test me during an interview, I'll look at the test. If it is related to problem solving or general concepts (ie, explain the differences between a "foreach", "while", and "do until" loop) - OK, I'm game. But if it is trivia, I won't play, and I'll explain why. If you insist... I will seek employment elsewhere, because I'm not interested in working for someone who insists on procedure for procedure's sake.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Those are fake jobs, used to justify the need to import (cheap) labor, principally from India (as far as IT goes, nurses get hammered by H1B visa's too). They advertise a job, no one applies since the requirements are mathematically impossible to fulfill and the "vacancy" is filled by an H1B.
Note: I'm not against immigration, I say if they are really worth it (H1B visa), give them a permanent green card immediately. Make the company pay for it (verification, testing, etc) and make them hold a bond equivalent to a foreign investor visa. That saves the taxpayer, the immigrant who can now freely change jobs w/o need for further sponsorship and the native worker who would otherwise have to compete with non-free labor.
H1B's require sponsorship to stay, so they are not free as in freedom workers.
Or maybe your company bothering to check references would have saved everyone some pain!
Sure. So they have to go through a dozen "references" for every Tom, Dick and Harry who's claimed to make a website. "Yeah, see www.example.com? I designed that. Yeah, yeah, I designed that one. Oh, and here's a list of ten more rando.. er.. samples of my work!"
Takes way too much investigative research to find fakes from reality. It's much, much easier to just give someone a simple test. Here's an example layout, here's content. Do x, y, and z with the content. Make this part dynamic. Would you like a coffee or tea while you work?
My final exam for Web Page Authoring in college was essentially like that. Here's a range of data; create a simple database, input the information, make the webpage give me data based on this list of criteria and lay it out in a functional manner. I got delayed because there were no working computers left so I lost the first 30 minutes of a 90 minute exam session but I was still the first one done. If you know the material it'll be a breeze. If you don't you'll flounder around and you won't get the job.
Wait - wasn't it a complaint of IT professionals that every jackass with a home computer came into the IT industry and called themselves a pro?!? Since we don't have a trustworthy certification body for the industry wouldn't it be prudent to expect skills tests to assure an employer that you're an actual professional rather than somebody's nephew who, like, really knows computers and stuff?
BD Phone Home!
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