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points by intrasight 4 days ago | 0 comments

I remember in the mid-90s going to an interview in Manhattan - pre-Internet. Someone met me and led me to a table and said, "Here's where you're going to take your test." I said, "I don't take tests." She said "Everyone that comes in takes the test". I said, "Well, that's no longer true because I came in and I'm leaving without taking the test"

[–] progforlyfe 4 days ago

While I love the "edgy-ness" of this, I remember doing something like this around 2013 in Manhattan and kind of enjoyed it. They had me go into a room, and gave me a paper with an open ended question: it was something along the lines of, write as much detail as I could about what happens when a user visits a URL in a web browser. E.g. explain as much as I know about TCP, HTTP requests, web servers, etc. I think I touched on how Cookies worked as well.

No AI, no leet code, just old fashioned gauging someone's experience and communication skills.

[–] intrasight 3 days ago

My first job interview in 1989 after college:

Them: "Do you know TCP/IP?". Me: "Yes". Them: "you're hired"

Job at the Westinghouse instrumenting nuclear power plants. Simpler times then.

[–] jandrese 3 days ago

Back in 1989 that was a rare skill. Many of the engineers who had experience were working on government projects. I mean TCP barely had congestion control at that point, it was very early days.

[–] sigttou 3 days ago

"Usually we don't hire people from high school, but you had Common Lisp in your CV, so the engineers said to take you anyway." 2010, still simpler times.

[–] vconnor 3 days ago

Same for me in 2006 as a junior Linux sysadmin:

“What does ifconfig do? What does it mean to mount a disk? What editor do you use? You’re hired.”

None of that culture fit nonsense.

[–] Tyr42 3 days ago

Did you say vim or emacs? Might have been culture for afterall.

[–] vconnor 3 days ago

I forget. I used to use emacs but very superficially; when I started the job a literal greybeard UNIX admin shook his head and took me under his wing to teach me vim, which I used for a long time before switching back to emacs (and learning the elisp underpinnings of it)

[–] selicos 3 days ago

Do you know DNS? How does an HTTPs/SSL handshake work? Man this kid is good hire him. - 2015 era job interview

[–] mrheosuper 3 days ago

Have you finished 3 months Javascript bootcamp ? you're hired - 2019 era.

[–] intrasight 4 days ago

I'm fine with technical interviews that are "test-like", with questions and answers and discussion and with an engineer who is my technical equal. But this was not that.

[–] steveBK123 3 days ago

The more inhumane the screener the worse the job in my experience.

Had one recently that waived me thru and then sent me straight to talking to senior management/stakeholders/etc but literally no one on the team itself.

Couldn’t get a straight answer as to what team does, what role is for, real day to day I’d be walking.

Only clear thing was scale of architectural mess stemming from a political mess… and not a lot of interest in changing it.

They wanted a seasoned tech body to throw into the grinder 12-15hr days to replace the last one. No thanks.

[–] nzjrs 4 days ago

I did this as a test in 2018! Compares to the leetcode screens now, it was a dream

[–] _whiteCaps_ 3 days ago

I love this test and will dive deep into switch debouncing on keyboards when they press the enter key.

[–] camtarn 3 days ago

I have never had the opportunity to ask this as an interview question. I'm secretly hoping that the first time I do so, somebody will lead off with "So, let's skip past the discussion of free will that might occur when considering how the user decides to visit the website, and instead start at the motor cortex..."

I'd also love a deep dive into the keyboard microcontroller that ends with the key press leaving over USB , and never even considers the main CPU.

Honestly, even the facetious answers to this have the potential to be incredibly interesting. Reality just has a ton of depth.

[–] bmacho 4 days ago

I'm confused, I'm probably missing here something.

By 'test' you mean a school-type paper exam, questions and answers? (On unspecified topics.)

Why would you refuse that, when applying to a job?

[–] paganel 3 days ago

> Why would you refuse that, when applying to a job?

Not the OP, but from a certain point on (I'd say 3-5 years into one's career, I'd say maybe even earlier) school-type tests become quite ridiculous, as in real-life programming/development has nothing to do with how people are graded in school.

[–] howunfortunate 3 days ago

> nothing to do with how people are graded

If by "nothing to do with" you mean "uncorrelated", then this is very trivial and empirically untrue. There are a lot of tests that correlate with peer and manager-rated performance in software development (and many other roles).

Even the dumbest most ad hoc unrelated tests will have nonzero correlations, and the well-studied principled ones much more so.

The better argument is that tests are high effort and can feel demeaning. But it's not productive to pretend they don't work.

[–] paganel 3 days ago

This has not been my experience. Granted, I’ve never worked for a FAANG-like company, but in my 20 years of writing code for a living I’ve seen a lot more unknown unknowns in my day-to-day work compared to what school had prepared me to handle.

[–] gosub100 4 days ago

It's also for liability. If someone comes in with the intention of suing them, they can point to the test and have objective evidence that the rejection was not based on race or gender. It also allows them to gather data after the employee gets established and succeeds or fails.

Also in the mid 90s, you actually had to be smart to work in this field. There was no stack overflow or reddit to search. And CS programs were nascent.

Companies certainly have taken it too far, but I don't blame them for some usage of standard tests.

[–] hnlmorg 3 days ago

As a hiring manager, I can assure you that’s not true.

If you cannot explain why a successful candidate was chosen without bias, then you shouldn’t be interviewing candidates to begin with.

But it is always worth keeping a copy of your interview notes just in case the candidate asks for feedback.

[–] gilrain 4 days ago

Excellent choice! No amount of money feels as good as claiming the respect you deserve.

[–] autoexec 3 days ago

That's how I react to companies wanting personality tests.

[–] hnlmorg 4 days ago

And I bet you both came away from that interview feeling like you’d dodged a bullet. The interviewer just as much as yourself.

[–] Horffupolde 4 days ago

Wow how tough.

[–] nutjob2 3 days ago

How is mid 90's pre-internet?

[–] raincole 4 days ago

I honestly don't know what's so wrong about taking a test for a job, unless the job already requires some kind of certifications/licenses. I, personally, wish that my doctors and lawyers have passed some tests.

[–] steveBK123 3 days ago

More often than not the test is at best tangentially related to the role.

At worst it’s the biggest hardos on the team writing a bunch of brain teasers and gotchas as a hazing ritual.

[–] sgerenser 3 days ago

Hey, one day the fate of the company is going to hinge on getting an accurate estimate of how many ping pong balls can fit into a 747, and they'll be glad that they asked the right brainteasers.

[–] steveBK123 3 days ago

I had one recently that was like.. I'd be better at this test if I knew less / was less experienced.

An hour to implement a toy version of a component which, the last time I did it "in real life" blew everyone away that I had a prototype ready in 1 day. That real life prototype went through weeks and weeks of iteration before it was even useful, and everyone was happy with that. But yeah that's something to time box to 1 hour in an interview environment.

So turns into an exercise of - which of the 100 pitfalls/nuances do they want me to pretend don't exist in order to complete it in 1 hour. Opinions vary!

There were multiple questions of this form.

One could pass this test blindly as a new grad not knowing the 100 pitfalls of actually building one in real life.

[–] aleph_minus_one 4 days ago

> I honestly don't know what's so wrong about taking a test for a job, unless the job already requires some kind of certifications/licenses.

You already have a degree from some university, and you already worked in software development for quite some time. So it's very annoying to do some test over and over again for every job application.

[–] toast0 3 days ago

> You already have a degree from some university, and you already worked in software development for quite some time. So it's very annoying to do some test over and over again for every job application.

Ok, but there's no uniform grading in school or employment. We all know people who managed to get through university without learning anything and manage to hold a job in software development without knowing or doing anything. It'd be nice if a degree and a job history guaranteed competence, but it doesn't.

Lots of professions can bring a portfolio and/or a sample of their work, but most software developers can't because the work is often propriatary and a trade secret, and anyway would need a lot of specific setup to operate.

I've only taken test tests for government jobs, and they were laughably outdated; approximately nobody knew how much space was on a 5 1/4" floppy in 1998 when I took the test, but they were asking about 8" floppies, and I assume they still are, because the test had to go through some process and doing a new test would be expensive. But yeah, I expect a company to validate that I can both describe solutions to problems and turn that description into code.

[–] raincole 3 days ago

> You already have a degree from some university, and you already worked in software development for quite some time

Yep. Now substitute doctors/lawyers/accountants/civil engineers into the equation and see how you feel about it.

Surely they don't take a test for every client, but I'd consider the interview process more like a "workaround" for the lack of standardized tests for software engineers instead of the lack of respect.

[–] hnlmorg 3 days ago

They don’t take a test for every client. But they do get regularly monitored for their competency and instead of being fired when they fail, they have their professional license revoked.

Maybe IT professionals should be held to the same rigour. There’s a lot of deadweight in the profession that get paid too much and moan too loudly despite having a cushty job in a field they’re barely competent in.

[–] xyzsparetimexyz 4 days ago

Haha owned