I still don't understand why puzzles are considered a suitable way of testing suitability for employment. It's a mile better than some generic aptitude test, but what does it really show beyond interest in contrived puzzles? I assume here that you mean that you want someone to write an algorithm which plays a good game of battleships. This often means, "Has this guy been to the same uni as me or read the same book where this puzzle is studied in detail?" Sometimes the interviewer doesn't even realise that they're doing that - it's even worse in other professions such as accountancy where you have an elite group of firms which have a nice two-way channel with the producers of professional competency exams, so your chances of passing depend very much on training with the right people. To create a solver under interview-exam conditions with no prior knowledge of the game is fairly tough and completely unrepresentative of typical development work. To demonstrate a solution to the puzzle merely because it's been seen before is almost meaningless.
Why don't you filter people technically by asking them to submit in advance work which they have done? I can't fathom the purpose of inviting anyone for interview until you have enough information about their work to be fairly certain that you are interested in their technical ability. This may be easier when hiring people with lots of experience (why hire fresh grads in the current environment?) but any graduate who doesn't either have an exceptional demonstration of theoretical ability or some practical work which they can present to you doesn't seem worth considering. Whether they've seen the same puzzle as you in a book/class and don't become flustered in interview conditions says comparatively little. For a second round, send people a task to complete in their own time. The ones with a competent solution (this means competent, not "as I would do it") can be interviewed about their solution - this confirms it was their own and shows that they are able to communicate about their development work.
OP said that people were tested to have those skills at "high-school level" (what is high hyphen school in England anyway? did the verbal reasoning test include Scots/Americanisms?).
The underlying questions, then: what is a university level of verbal and numerical reasoning? Who says? What has attainment of this higher level on these tests been shown to mean?
Put another way, let's assume that the grading on these tests is sufficiently scientific that performance by a wide range of graduates has been recorded for comparison (*). Who cares? Does this guarantee better job performance? Recent graduates are also likely to score higher in a test on "university culture", but the graduates' knowledge of university culture doesn't suggest that they're going to be better at anything in the workplace.
(*) It won't have been - everyone whines about how badly people do on these tests because what they think is performance suited to a particular cohort doesn't actually reflect any meaningful average/percentile.
But there is no "good" UK university for undergraduate CS, excepting perhaps Cambridge (and expect a mound of the sort of theory the dilettante technicians on Slashdot eschew). Hell, Oxford is mediocre in terms of actually providing CS education but has going for it the good name and the safe bet that a graduate will have been sufficiently challenged.
Engineering, law and medicine have clear professional standards which universities can aim to attain. CS is not a profession.
Inflation puts your £18k at ~£22.5k. East Berkshire is fairly close to London. £25k will put off the best candidates interested in money, and the stupid reasoning tests will put off those interested in the work for its own sake.
Why are people even hiring graduates when there are many skilled people with years of experience now out of work? Your graduate is not some perfect blank slate to be decorated precisely in your image - he's merely someone with less experience and less proven ability.
Have you actually done a verbal reasoning test? Most go absolutely nowhere to testing the kind of skill you indicate may be useful.
If you want to see whether someone can communicate effectively, read their work and get people including yourself to speak to them over time. One interview session is unlikely to be sufficient.
Recall, finally, that not all roles require an excellent communicator. Since computing has become cool, there are more cool people interested in computing: their ability to present themselves well (and unintimidatingly - it's easy for an interviewer to think he has an extrovert all figured out) may not make them the best for the job.
The problem may be that you give people numerical and verbal reasoning tests. You are employing a human for a set of complex tasks, not measuring a robot to see if its arms fit a slot. The tests confirm nothing more than an interest in primitive puzzles and/or having practiced stupid recruitment tests, whittling out the most creative or intelligent who are either unable or unwilling to jump a few meaningless hoops.
Since my 18th year I have given myself a rule to not consider any position which requires a generic cognitive ability and/or personality test. Meaningless metrics are the bane of modern English work culture, from "performance targets" which encourage little more than gaming the system to "aptitude tests" which test little more than the willingness of an employer to pay for another con-man's puzzle book.
(Prior to my 18th year, I did many of these tests. One was part of the scholarship which allowed me entrance to a nice school. They are not hard. They are just pointless at best and harmful at worse.)
50% of jobs in the UK are obtained through networking. The proportion gets higher the higher you go. (I get the impression that this is certainly true at the higher levels in the US but there is much more "competition on merit" in the job market or whatever you like to call it there - or at least competition based on the interviewer liking the interviewee on paper and at interview rather than having known him for a few years prior.)
Computer science types are not very social.
The economy is shit.
"People can design a programming language and operating system but don't know the idiosyncracies of the Java API!!!" has nothing to do with it. An intelligent man can learn any imperative language quickly and program well, being much more cost-effective in the long run. It is a mark of a mediocre firm to have an insecure interviewer who cannot handle that the person he may be taking on might have better cognitive abilities, so he dismisses him because he can't roll off an optimally compact/write-only Perl script from the top of his head. The better firms will challenge you with theory (not "write a quicksort" but "let's explore this paper") and ideas ("how can we improve...?").
The only valid reason you came up with was Comics/Comic Books
Since I'm on Slashdot, I guess I ought to expect that. And the missing of accessibility for dyslexics.
You obviously read different books than the rest of the world - most have almost no illustrations, few in colour - Not because it is expensive (it generally is not anymore) but because it is distracting
You have no idea what you're talking about. There are general interest books full of photographs of artistic or cultural works; there are technical books full of diagrams where colour is used to represent different paths or categories or whatever. You may have a psychological aversion to colour but we've evolved to recognise it and make use of it.
Just because 'kids like it' or 'it looks cool' is not a reason to do it
So if young children are attracted by bright colours and it helps encourage them to read you should nevertheless not do it?
go and look at most web pages (slashdot is a good example) - they are black text on a light background, with few pictures...
Unfortunately not. Web pages continue to be filled with distracting layout, banners, bars, squiggles and crap. Adblock almost makes you forget how bad it is. The web of the mid-'90s was far better. Although you may remember the brightly-coloured imagemaps, these were exceptions. Lack of bandwidth meant it was mostly text and the occasional icon with pictures/diagrams interspersed where needed.
You've created a strawman of inappropriate colouring. Well done. No-one'll disagree with you, but it's not what's being discussed.
Since you're continuing with the pedantry, English is descriptive. "Very unique" means "contains lots of unique characteristics and/or characteristics which are markedly different rather than just slightly different". This image may apply to you.
How many books have you read with coloured text or backgrounds...?
I hear lots of people need or like to look at printed illustrations or diagrams. Or to read comics. And kids like lots of colour. Hey, some people with dyslexia benefit from being able to change the hues of the paper.
And none of my highlighter pens are shades of grey.
Ignore the movement and concentrate on the lack of quality of the image.
Erm, most books are just copies of some original and there are lots more copies floating around the world. What you might be arguing is that it is cheaper to rebuild a whole digital book collection than a physical one - this is true for a particular range of disasters and time frames.
For example, if I drop my book in the water while on some field trip / holiday, it may become a disfigured mess but it's unlikely to become unreadable. I can continue using it and get a new copy in better condition once I've got home. A Kindle in the pond leaves me without my whole reading collection until I return home. With miniaturisation and advanced technology comes a very small volume which needs to be damaged in order to totally destroy an experience. And guess which of the one book or the one e-reader is likely to cost more to replace?
But what I fear most is a massive loss of knowledge/culture accompanying some huge disaster, e.g. war.
There is a geek hoarding habit which I guess would fit in with the need to have compact digital copies of everything. But there is really no requirement to keep your own copy of every book you have ever read or may read at some point in the future.
(1) Works every time after a relaxing read in the bathroom, even if I occasionally splash it;
(2) Works after a drop or a knock in the train;
(3) Doesn't send any information about my reading or highlighting habits anywhere;
(4) Can actually be annotated and highlighted by writing directly on it with a stylus (though the cool kids call them pencils) - and the annotations can be removed using an eraser;
(5) Is of no interest to thieves;
(6) Has never transformed overnight into several hundred blank pages of paper because of some corporate decision somewhere;
(7) Is three-dimensional and can be held so I can look at multiple pages at once;
(8) Has zero power usage;
(9) Seems to have an average lifespan of at least a decade or two in the cheapest cases, centuries for some - they just don't go wrong when I'm in the middle of nowhere;
Not "the entire" - there are certain frequency ranges (HF, VHF...) for which this would be trivially inappropriate. It's also necessary, as you note, to keep certain ranges for emergency and aviation - and satellite, industrial, scientific, medical, amateur research, military, etc. But to allocate certain ranges to certain services where sharing is on a spread spectrum basis may be efficient.
And we always need regulation to prevent abuse by dominant groups: "deregulation" in modern political parlance is a synonym for sale to and monopoly by the highest bidder with the greatest resources at the time. (This becomes especially noticeable when better technology comes along but the private providers have no interest in adopting it, in the worst case sticking with something not even as good as what it was replacing: see eg DAB in the UK.)
When a man announces himself to be a libertarian he is usually just finding an excuse for not being good enough in his own eyes.
Anyone he regards as successful must therefore have got there through immoral means. Because if Buffet got really rich through being a very fine capitalist investor then.. well.. the system worked for him.. and if it worked for him but not for roman_mir it must be that roman_mir simply isn't as good as Buffet.
The other annoying thing for libertarians to have to accept is that once people have got really rich they do curry favour with government. Why is that? Because powerful people enjoy power but don't abide by a sophomoric list of principles. Nearly every newly super-wealthy man is a demonstration of (i) how capitalism can make people very rich through clever investment; (ii) how capitalism inevitably includes a strong dose of cronyism.
The real world: it's simple when you are prepared to accept what you observe.
Licensing to users of particular services, e.g. allowing ships to share maritime frequencies or amateurs to share amateur frequencies, is not the same as selling to the highest bidder.
It's the difference between a privately owned road and a public road. Anyone with a driver's licence and a willingness to obey road traffic law can use the latter.
There's a mile of difference between regulating usage for the benefit of a particular service and selling to private bidders according to who pays the most.
Slashdot Mirror
I still don't understand why puzzles are considered a suitable way of testing suitability for employment. It's a mile better than some generic aptitude test, but what does it really show beyond interest in contrived puzzles? I assume here that you mean that you want someone to write an algorithm which plays a good game of battleships. This often means, "Has this guy been to the same uni as me or read the same book where this puzzle is studied in detail?" Sometimes the interviewer doesn't even realise that they're doing that - it's even worse in other professions such as accountancy where you have an elite group of firms which have a nice two-way channel with the producers of professional competency exams, so your chances of passing depend very much on training with the right people. To create a solver under interview-exam conditions with no prior knowledge of the game is fairly tough and completely unrepresentative of typical development work. To demonstrate a solution to the puzzle merely because it's been seen before is almost meaningless.
Why don't you filter people technically by asking them to submit in advance work which they have done? I can't fathom the purpose of inviting anyone for interview until you have enough information about their work to be fairly certain that you are interested in their technical ability. This may be easier when hiring people with lots of experience (why hire fresh grads in the current environment?) but any graduate who doesn't either have an exceptional demonstration of theoretical ability or some practical work which they can present to you doesn't seem worth considering. Whether they've seen the same puzzle as you in a book/class and don't become flustered in interview conditions says comparatively little. For a second round, send people a task to complete in their own time. The ones with a competent solution (this means competent, not "as I would do it") can be interviewed about their solution - this confirms it was their own and shows that they are able to communicate about their development work.
OP said that people were tested to have those skills at "high-school level" (what is high hyphen school in England anyway? did the verbal reasoning test include Scots/Americanisms?).
The underlying questions, then: what is a university level of verbal and numerical reasoning? Who says? What has attainment of this higher level on these tests been shown to mean?
Put another way, let's assume that the grading on these tests is sufficiently scientific that performance by a wide range of graduates has been recorded for comparison (*). Who cares? Does this guarantee better job performance? Recent graduates are also likely to score higher in a test on "university culture", but the graduates' knowledge of university culture doesn't suggest that they're going to be better at anything in the workplace.
(*) It won't have been - everyone whines about how badly people do on these tests because what they think is performance suited to a particular cohort doesn't actually reflect any meaningful average/percentile.
But there is no "good" UK university for undergraduate CS, excepting perhaps Cambridge (and expect a mound of the sort of theory the dilettante technicians on Slashdot eschew). Hell, Oxford is mediocre in terms of actually providing CS education but has going for it the good name and the safe bet that a graduate will have been sufficiently challenged.
Engineering, law and medicine have clear professional standards which universities can aim to attain. CS is not a profession.
I can speak English but I can't speak for it.
People like to speak in vagaries to hide any error on their part.
Why don't you post the actual problem you give to interviewees so other readers might offer an idea of why so many "can't do it"? :-)
tl;dr Oxford or Cambridge?
Inflation puts your £18k at ~£22.5k. East Berkshire is fairly close to London. £25k will put off the best candidates interested in money, and the stupid reasoning tests will put off those interested in the work for its own sake.
Why are people even hiring graduates when there are many skilled people with years of experience now out of work? Your graduate is not some perfect blank slate to be decorated precisely in your image - he's merely someone with less experience and less proven ability.
Have you actually done a verbal reasoning test? Most go absolutely nowhere to testing the kind of skill you indicate may be useful.
If you want to see whether someone can communicate effectively, read their work and get people including yourself to speak to them over time. One interview session is unlikely to be sufficient.
Recall, finally, that not all roles require an excellent communicator. Since computing has become cool, there are more cool people interested in computing: their ability to present themselves well (and unintimidatingly - it's easy for an interviewer to think he has an extrovert all figured out) may not make them the best for the job.
The problem may be that you give people numerical and verbal reasoning tests. You are employing a human for a set of complex tasks, not measuring a robot to see if its arms fit a slot. The tests confirm nothing more than an interest in primitive puzzles and/or having practiced stupid recruitment tests, whittling out the most creative or intelligent who are either unable or unwilling to jump a few meaningless hoops.
Since my 18th year I have given myself a rule to not consider any position which requires a generic cognitive ability and/or personality test. Meaningless metrics are the bane of modern English work culture, from "performance targets" which encourage little more than gaming the system to "aptitude tests" which test little more than the willingness of an employer to pay for another con-man's puzzle book.
(Prior to my 18th year, I did many of these tests. One was part of the scholarship which allowed me entrance to a nice school. They are not hard. They are just pointless at best and harmful at worse.)
50% of jobs in the UK are obtained through networking. The proportion gets higher the higher you go. (I get the impression that this is certainly true at the higher levels in the US but there is much more "competition on merit" in the job market or whatever you like to call it there - or at least competition based on the interviewer liking the interviewee on paper and at interview rather than having known him for a few years prior.)
Computer science types are not very social.
The economy is shit.
"People can design a programming language and operating system but don't know the idiosyncracies of the Java API!!!" has nothing to do with it. An intelligent man can learn any imperative language quickly and program well, being much more cost-effective in the long run. It is a mark of a mediocre firm to have an insecure interviewer who cannot handle that the person he may be taking on might have better cognitive abilities, so he dismisses him because he can't roll off an optimally compact/write-only Perl script from the top of his head. The better firms will challenge you with theory (not "write a quicksort" but "let's explore this paper") and ideas ("how can we improve...?").
That is all.
A tenner says Sophie Wilson is in some circumferential way involved with this project.
The only valid reason you came up with was Comics/Comic Books
Since I'm on Slashdot, I guess I ought to expect that. And the missing of accessibility for dyslexics.
You obviously read different books than the rest of the world - most have almost no illustrations, few in colour - Not because it is expensive (it generally is not anymore) but because it is distracting
You have no idea what you're talking about. There are general interest books full of photographs of artistic or cultural works; there are technical books full of diagrams where colour is used to represent different paths or categories or whatever. You may have a psychological aversion to colour but we've evolved to recognise it and make use of it.
Just because 'kids like it' or 'it looks cool' is not a reason to do it
So if young children are attracted by bright colours and it helps encourage them to read you should nevertheless not do it?
go and look at most web pages (slashdot is a good example) - they are black text on a light background, with few pictures ...
Unfortunately not. Web pages continue to be filled with distracting layout, banners, bars, squiggles and crap. Adblock almost makes you forget how bad it is. The web of the mid-'90s was far better. Although you may remember the brightly-coloured imagemaps, these were exceptions. Lack of bandwidth meant it was mostly text and the occasional icon with pictures/diagrams interspersed where needed.
You've created a strawman of inappropriate colouring. Well done. No-one'll disagree with you, but it's not what's being discussed.
Since you're continuing with the pedantry, English is descriptive. "Very unique" means "contains lots of unique characteristics and/or characteristics which are markedly different rather than just slightly different". This image may apply to you.
How many books have you read with coloured text or backgrounds ...?
I hear lots of people need or like to look at printed illustrations or diagrams. Or to read comics. And kids like lots of colour. Hey, some people with dyslexia benefit from being able to change the hues of the paper.
And none of my highlighter pens are shades of grey.
Ignore the movement and concentrate on the lack of quality of the image.
Erm, most books are just copies of some original and there are lots more copies floating around the world. What you might be arguing is that it is cheaper to rebuild a whole digital book collection than a physical one - this is true for a particular range of disasters and time frames.
For example, if I drop my book in the water while on some field trip / holiday, it may become a disfigured mess but it's unlikely to become unreadable. I can continue using it and get a new copy in better condition once I've got home. A Kindle in the pond leaves me without my whole reading collection until I return home. With miniaturisation and advanced technology comes a very small volume which needs to be damaged in order to totally destroy an experience. And guess which of the one book or the one e-reader is likely to cost more to replace?
But what I fear most is a massive loss of knowledge/culture accompanying some huge disaster, e.g. war.
You underestimate the resilience of a well-bound book printed on good paper.
There is a geek hoarding habit which I guess would fit in with the need to have compact digital copies of everything. But there is really no requirement to keep your own copy of every book you have ever read or may read at some point in the future.
Just looking at this demo suggests it's neither e-ink nor LCD quality.
Washed out compared to surroudings: check.
Low contrast/dark compared to surroundings: check.
Annoyingly reflects ball of light: check.
Contrast changes significantly when angle to camera changed: check.
My paper book:
(1) Works every time after a relaxing read in the bathroom, even if I occasionally splash it;
(2) Works after a drop or a knock in the train;
(3) Doesn't send any information about my reading or highlighting habits anywhere;
(4) Can actually be annotated and highlighted by writing directly on it with a stylus (though the cool kids call them pencils) - and the annotations can be removed using an eraser;
(5) Is of no interest to thieves;
(6) Has never transformed overnight into several hundred blank pages of paper because of some corporate decision somewhere;
(7) Is three-dimensional and can be held so I can look at multiple pages at once;
(8) Has zero power usage;
(9) Seems to have an average lifespan of at least a decade or two in the cheapest cases, centuries for some - they just don't go wrong when I'm in the middle of nowhere;
(10) Is sized appropriately to the content;
(11) Can be lent and resold and copied;
(12) Smells nice.
Free Market = most efficient allocation
Mormonism = best religion.
Michael Jackson = best King of Pop.
Equals sign = best method of proof on Internet.
Responding to a straw man with "some counter-points" is missing the missing of the point.
Not "the entire" - there are certain frequency ranges (HF, VHF...) for which this would be trivially inappropriate. It's also necessary, as you note, to keep certain ranges for emergency and aviation - and satellite, industrial, scientific, medical, amateur research, military, etc. But to allocate certain ranges to certain services where sharing is on a spread spectrum basis may be efficient.
And we always need regulation to prevent abuse by dominant groups: "deregulation" in modern political parlance is a synonym for sale to and monopoly by the highest bidder with the greatest resources at the time. (This becomes especially noticeable when better technology comes along but the private providers have no interest in adopting it, in the worst case sticking with something not even as good as what it was replacing: see eg DAB in the UK.)
When a man announces himself to be a libertarian he is usually just finding an excuse for not being good enough in his own eyes.
Anyone he regards as successful must therefore have got there through immoral means. Because if Buffet got really rich through being a very fine capitalist investor then.. well.. the system worked for him.. and if it worked for him but not for roman_mir it must be that roman_mir simply isn't as good as Buffet.
The other annoying thing for libertarians to have to accept is that once people have got really rich they do curry favour with government. Why is that? Because powerful people enjoy power but don't abide by a sophomoric list of principles. Nearly every newly super-wealthy man is a demonstration of (i) how capitalism can make people very rich through clever investment; (ii) how capitalism inevitably includes a strong dose of cronyism.
The real world: it's simple when you are prepared to accept what you observe.
Licensing to users of particular services, e.g. allowing ships to share maritime frequencies or amateurs to share amateur frequencies, is not the same as selling to the highest bidder.
It's the difference between a privately owned road and a public road. Anyone with a driver's licence and a willingness to obey road traffic law can use the latter.
There's a mile of difference between regulating usage for the benefit of a particular service and selling to private bidders according to who pays the most.
Posting history suggests roman_mir is an Internet Libertarian troll. Don't expect a chain of logic.