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?"

Comments

No, it is not reasonable.

[banbeans]

I won't take them.
I have turned down several jobs over it.

Re:No, it is not reasonable.

[nahdude812]

It is entirely reasonable. Having a degree, and even several (perhaps many) years of verifiable / verified "experience" says very little about your actual qualifications. One of the best developers I know has a degree in history, and within 6 months of beginning development was producing better quality work than some guys who have been developing for years.

Also the number of people who lie about their qualifications is unbelievable. Many previous employers are afraid of getting into legal trouble and so will never give a real reference, either positive or negative. They'll basically only confirm dates of employment.

Finally, this industry is full of really excellent snow job men. People who have convinced their previous employer that they're really a cracker-jack developer, when in fact they are only barely able to cobble together code examples from other people.

Also it's not infrequent for several candidates to have what looks like reasonably similar experience on paper, yet differ widely on actual performance skills.

Last month, we interviewed a guy for a ColdFusion developer job, and when we asked him what the difference between a Struct and an Array were (one is associatively indexed, and does not preserve insert order, the other is sequentially numerically indexed and of course does preserve insert order - an equivalent to a HashMap and a Vector), he sputtered and stammered for a few seconds, then proceeded to read us search results from Google (we all followed along on our end) which were not an answer to the question ("Let's see, you can append a Struct. Oh, but then you can append an Array").

Some consultant firms make money only for placing a body in a seat. So some of these firms actually falsify resumes and provide references which are also false (they employ the people who answer the phone or respond to the email when you check the reference). They even go so far as to have a handful of guys who do the phone interviews - and these are not the same guy who shows up. Some times the guy who shows up has no experience with the technology at all.

Plus, who told you other professions don't get tested? Some jobs even come with personality tests - maybe they're looking for someone hyper aggressive, maybe they're looking for a peace maker. Though such tests are usually for higher up positions, and usually only for the short list of candidates.

It's not degrading in the least to be required to take a test to prove your qualifications. If you have the qualifications you profess to have, you should have no problem with the test.

It's safeguarding the company at hand, and if you wanted to refuse to take the test, we would want to not hire you. It's a matter of there being too many slime balls and con men out there in the world, we can't take you at your word until we know you. Until then we need to ask you to prove yourself to us.

Re:No, it is not reasonable.

[Corporate Troll]

It's even worse than that: As a computer scientist, I pick up new stuff up quickly. So what that I've been doing Java for the last N years, give me a C project and I'll do it (without memory leaks, I know what a pointer is and can use valgrind --- Oh, and exactly this happened this year and I delivered.). That however, seems to be beyond the comprehension of anyone hiring people. Getting a well rounded computer scientist is better than getting someone who knows the buzzwords and can code a bit in one language.

However, I'm sure I'd fail on any Java test or C test. The details (what's usually asked in such tests) do not matter, you'll find them quickly with a Google search because you're trained to know what to search for. Frankly, I don't get it.

Re:No, it is not reasonable.

[aclarke]

It depends on how it's done. I remember back when I had maybe 2 years of experience, looking for a job. I got an interview with a company, drove the 30-45 minutes there all dressed up in my one and only suit. I introduced myself to the receptionist, who handed me a 12 page test and told me to "sit over there" and fill it out.

I sat down and looked at it for maybe 5 minutes. Nobody came out and introduced themselves to me or asked me any questions about myself. I thought, "Is this the sort of place I want to work?", decided the answer was "no", got up and walked out. That was the last I heard of them.

That sort of treatment of a potential employee is disrespectful. If they'd interviewed me, decided they liked me and wanted to verify some skills and asked if I would take a test, that would be completely different.

On a sort of related note, I had an employer later on who was considering making potential hires take a personality test. He asked us for our feedback and I told him that if he'd asked me to take one before being offered a job, I would refuse. In an interview, I have no idea who these people are, and if they're qualified to read a personality test. Those things in the wrong hands are a weapon to limit you more than anything. If the test says you're below par at problem solving, or people skills, or whatever, prepare to be pigeonholed for the rest of your time there, if you're lucky enough to get the job. I'm not saying they're useless in all cases, but it takes a trained psychologist to correctly asses the results and determine where they can be usefully applied and where they cannot.

I think almost any reasonable person reading this discussion would agree that some sort of verification of an interviewee's credentials is a good idea during the interview process. It's how it's done that's up for discussion.

The underlying assumption is not true

[Meshugga]

thus the whole question is futile.

Skill assessment is done in almost all kinds of professional employment situations . yet it depends mostly on the hiring policy of the department of that particular firm if there will be an assessment.

And quite franky, I think there is a good reason why this is done with IT jobs more often: analytic and associative thinking and problem solving are not skills you can learn.

Plus, IT jobbers tend to be more annoyed by moron colleagues than non-IT employees.

And lets not forget that there is a huge amount of moronness out there - I myself did Job interviews with certified whatevers, who applied for a sysadmin position and couldn't tell me what information a notation like "192.168.38.1/24" provides. And thats just the very basic for such a job, but it already weeded out two thirds of the applicants, *completely unrelated* to their educational history or other certified qualifications.

And last but not least, it always depends on the quality of the respective management if such an evaluation is done: and speaking for me and my experience, a company should do it in *all* sorts of positions, no matter how professional, experienced and well educated an applicant is.

Re:Blame it on the idiots who can sell themselves

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Wrong. It is only that incompetence in IT is much harder to cover up than in those professions. When IT systems fail, they can fail spectacularly and effect wide numbers of people. An incompetent IT persons mistake will cause an essential server or the like to fail. If they're not competent to fix it promptly, it will show.

Inversely, when a lawyer, accountant, sales, HR person, etc screws up, the screw up will not be noticed as much unless it reaches epic proportions. It's easier to mask a mistake in these fields, and with the softer ones, e.g. PR, their metrics are so fuzzy that the difference between competence and incompetence is blurry anyway. Plus they are trained in buzz speak which they blurt out like a frighted squid spurts out ink to mask their escape.

Let me give an example

[Moraelin]

1. Yep. Let me even give an example. It didn't happen in a team I was in, but I know several people from that team.

So they got a new guy who had some outstanding experience, according to his resume. He had worked on major enterprise projects, been an architect, ate Enterprise Java Beans for breakfast, etc.

Turns out he was utterly incompetent. He spent about a month just getting used to their architecture and IDE and everything, apparently everything they did or the way they did it was new to him, and he needed some time to accomodate. Fair enough. Then started working on something, but never was quite done with it. Eventually they started asking to see some results. He started randomly changing files and checking them back in. The first few times he even had a good excuse, like "oops, I hadn't worked with this particular versioning system before" or "oops, I forgot some other file that mine depends on." There go a few more weeks, before it's obvious that his changes can't possibly even compile, because they have elementary syntax errors.

Eventually they fire him, but by now he's got several months of "experience" there.

Then someone finds his updated resume online. The guy claimed he singlehandedly improved their architecture, increase performance X times, got project management back on track, etc.

2. 'Nother example, my ex-coworker Wally. Spent two years on a trivial module, whose core someone else rewrote from scratch in 6 hours. It took another two weeks or so, mostly of testing, to get it bug-for-bug compatible with his, since a couple of teams already had their own workarounds for them. (Trying to get him to fix it was a bit like negotiating with the terrorists.) The rewrite was also benchmarked as 40 times faster than Wally's on large data sets. Literally. Measured.

The thing everyone remembers fondly about him, is how he asked for 2 weeks just to estimate the effort to fix a trivial bug. He got it too. (His team leader was a bit a Mr Testicle: technically he was involved, but he kept out of it as much as possible;)

He also massively practiced obfuscation. Any of his modules contained half the techniques from How To Write Unmaintainable Java code (literally) and megabytes of files copied from unrelated stuff to pad the number of lines of code per day. Obviously, it worked on his team leader.

Then he got moved through the maintenance of two other programs (one at a time), and just managed to make them both worse.

There we go, that's his provable 2-4 years employment. Well, ok, 5 in his case.

3. Example number 3: Old Father Williams. I got to think of him that way after a particular fortune on my linux box:

"You are old," said the youth, "and your programs don't run,
And there isn't one language you like;
Yet of useful suggestions for help you have none --
Have you thought about taking a hike?"

"Since I never write programs," his father replied,
"Every language looks equally bad;
Yet the people keep paying to read all my books
And don't realize that they've been had."

Pretty much spent 6 years in a place complaining about everything that everyone else did. Coding style, IDE, OS, _everything_. His first choice of a whine was Windows, which might even have had a point, but when Linux was finally allowed and half the team switched to Linux, plus the servers actually went Linux... he proclaimed Linux to be sell-out crap for idiots, and switched to preaching BSD.

He also caused a reformat-and-commit war in which he was preaching _three_ space tabs, as spaces. And wasn't affraid to check out someone else's project and reformat it, to make his point.

He spent two years, just "modernizing" the build process. Nobody knows what he experimented with on his c

Re:Let me give an example

[Chrisq]

4. Abdul, the apprentice of Wally. He got hired through a workaround, since hiring more coders was on hold at that corporation. So someone hired him as a web designer, then hastily dubbed him programmer. Ironically, he seemed actually decent at web design. As a programmer, the consensus is that he's too stupid to piss holes in snow. Seriously, he doesn't understand even the elementary basics, and is constantly on the look out for someone to pass solving anything onto.

Has that job for some 4 years now, since firing him would face the same problem with hiring a replacement. So he's keeping his job by sheer virtue of being marginally better than nothing.

Companies are really bad at dealing with this. I was in a company who gave a web developer a shot at a trainee programming position. She was an excellent web designer, but a really poor programmer. I was her team leader, so I asked her if she was happy with her new position, and she said "no, I just don't seem to think that way. It is difficult and seems to be quite tedious".

I asked her if she would like to move back to her old position, and she said yes. I thought this would be no problem, as we were noticing that the look & feel of the public site was not as polished since she left that group.

I hadn't counted on HR.

"you can't go from a trainee programmer to a senior web developer, that's two level's difference. She will have to move sideways to trainee web developer" They said. I pointed out her experience, the fact that she had done the job before and had excellent reviews but it was to no avail. They made a "concession" that she could move to "web developer" with a promise of promotion to "senior web developer" with in a year "if she performed OK", but anything else would contravene the HR procedures manual!

We lost her. I don't blame her, she took a senior position in a small web company. Career wise this has been a good move for her, the company has done well and she is now in charge of a department. It was our loss though, sometimes the company is so stupid.

If doctors were that bad, it would be manslaughter

[wisty]

OK, google "fizzbuzz". A large number of people in the industry (especially "qualified" ones, who haven't been selected for skill) have no idea how to work with computers. People plagiarize at university, get friends to sit their exams, and lie on resumes. There is no better indicator than an on-site, in-person coding test. Some tests are better than others (some employers are not too competent themselves), but there is no other way to verify whether a potential hire is remotely competent. It's not the only indicator (other indicators can be used once the candidate has been pegged as potentially useful), but failing to use it is suicide for any business that can't afford to have worse than useless programmers.

Re:If doctors were that bad, it would be manslaugh

[paganizer]

I went to a job interview in '99 for a contract doing Network Admin for a pretty major bank; I had no certs, no degree at the time, but I had been working off and on with Tek systems for several years and they knew I had extremely extensive experience.
The Bank didn't want to interview me, but the recruiter sort of insisted; they were asking for people qualified in NT, Solaris and OS/2, and I was really about the only person they had available at that time with the right mix.
It was a working lunch interview; They started asking questions, and I started answering. then came the question, "what command would you use to upgrade a NT workstation machine to NT server?"
I replied that you would probably be best off formatting the drive, then installing it, as there was no good way to upgrade; Microsoft said you couldn't do it at all, and the workarounds were more trouble than they were worth.
The interviewers sort of grinned, and told me that of the 20+ people they interviews, all of which had at least a MCSE or a comp sci degree, not a single one of them had answered the question correctly.
At the time I had problems believing it, but as time went on and I got in to situations where I was doing interviews it got more believable; in the late 90's if you worked on computers, it was probably because you were a computer enthusiast and actually more or less enjoyed working with them; after about '98, you started running into people that were just doing it because it paid well; they might be damned smart people, but you lose something when you don't actually enjoy working with computers.
I also saw a lot of people who just were not smart enough, but were somehow able to cheat or memorize well enough to get a degree; when you asked them something that wasn't in anything they had studied, they didn't have the core of hands-on knowledge that would enable them to make an educated guess at the answer.
So, yeah, I have to agree, interview everybody no matter what their credentials are.