Tough Tests Flunk Good Programming Job Candidates

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister discusses the use of quizzes and brain-teasers in evaluating potential software development hires, a practice that seems to be on the rise. 'The company best known for this is Google. Past applicants tell tales of a head-spinning battery of coding problems, riddles, and brain teasers, many of which seem only tangential to the task of software development. Other large companies have similar practices — Facebook and Microsoft being two examples,' McAllister writes. 'You'll need to assess an applicant's skill in one way or another, but it's also possible to take the whole interview-testing concept too far. Here are a few thoughts to keep in mind when crafting your test questions, to avoid slamming the door on candidates unnecessarily.'"

Comments

the way to go

[lecoupdejarnac]

Radical idea: have them write code for a few hours to solve a given problem - then see how their solution looks. This goes a long way towards judging their fit for the job. You can even give them a couple of data structures and algorithms references - on the job we use references all the time, and being able to implement something from a reference and apply it to a problem is a real skill.

Re:the way to go

[CannonballHead]

I interviewed at a company, some sort of advertising thing. Relatively small - I was fresh out of college and talked to some heads of something-or-other. Anyways, there were two of us that happened to interview at the same time; they had two test stations setup. There were a few multiple choice sorts of questions, and then an actual programming test dealing with extracting ads out of an XML page, as I recall, in PHP. Well, I'd never dealt with XML in PHP at all, so it was totally new to me. I found various things online (XML parser, etc). After a couple hours and making some progress, but not completing it - and having the other guy already finish roughly an hour or so earlier and whatever - I said I wasn't going to be able to complete it very quickly and asked if I should leave or not.

The head hiring people asked if they could talk to me, so I said sure. Asked if I thought I could complete it, given time - I said sure, it wasn't that difficult, it's just that I had never worked with XML parsing before and was having to learn it as I went. Then they pretty much startled me. They said, basically, the following: the other guy interviewing had all the skills, he was able to churn out the problem, and his test scores were good (as were mine, incidentally). But they didn't like his attitude (somewhat arrogant, loudly proclaiming "oh yeah, it was easy!" and that sort of thing). They said that even though I couldn't complete it within an hour or two, they liked my attitude, they liked that I stayed at it for about two hours (without being asked really), they liked that I was honest to say I would not be able to complete it by the end of the business day (my interview was at like 2:30 and it was now 4:30). They basically said they'd offer me a Jr. Dev position based on the work ethic, honesty, and generally good attitude/personality (along with knowledge of general programming stuff based on test scores, resume, etc).

I didn't end up accepting as I got a much better offer elsewhere - also, primarily, based on work ethic, personality, general knowledge, etc.... it was a "we'll train you to do what we want you to do, because we can see you're versatile enough and willing to learn" - but the experience was pretty eye-opening.