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I spent a chunk of the afternoon talking to a recruiter about scounging up a short-term programming gig here while I wait for other things to happen. Talking to folks, it sounds eminently doable, although it certainly gets easier if I'm willing to go cheaper. Anyway, towards the end, the guy offered me a chance to volunteer for a multiple-choice Java test.
I told him up front why it was a bad idea, and why, in a previous life where I got to help hire people, what we did was give people programming exercises and a few days. That way, you look at what someone did, how they thought, how they solved the problem, what boundary cases they considered, how readable the code was, and so on. That's much more indicative of what they're going to be like as a programmer.
And then, to show I wasn't a spoilsport, I went and took it.
It was exactly as I'd feared. The "difficult" questions, the ones requiring the ability to think, program, and perhaps have a deep understanding of the language, I did great on. The ones which the compiler tells you about when you try, or better yet, the fancy editor tells you about before you even finish writing the line, I only did so-so on. This isn't the stone age, people! I'm not batch feeding a stack of punch cards into a machine, and it doesn't take a week to fix any typos. One of the reasons I like Java is that the compiler gives pretty good error messages, and the tools (like Eclipse or NetBeans) are phenomenally helpful. So, as I suspected, half the questions on the "skill evaluation" were just stupid.
Why can't people use interesting puzzles like ITA/Orbitz?
I told him up front why it was a bad idea, and why, in a previous life where I got to help hire people, what we did was give people programming exercises and a few days. That way, you look at what someone did, how they thought, how they solved the problem, what boundary cases they considered, how readable the code was, and so on. That's much more indicative of what they're going to be like as a programmer.
And then, to show I wasn't a spoilsport, I went and took it.
It was exactly as I'd feared. The "difficult" questions, the ones requiring the ability to think, program, and perhaps have a deep understanding of the language, I did great on. The ones which the compiler tells you about when you try, or better yet, the fancy editor tells you about before you even finish writing the line, I only did so-so on. This isn't the stone age, people! I'm not batch feeding a stack of punch cards into a machine, and it doesn't take a week to fix any typos. One of the reasons I like Java is that the compiler gives pretty good error messages, and the tools (like Eclipse or NetBeans) are phenomenally helpful. So, as I suspected, half the questions on the "skill evaluation" were just stupid.
Why can't people use interesting puzzles like ITA/Orbitz?
