> caveat: I wasn’t hired using that test; I had been hired as a junior long before, based on my portfolio and a short interview
That's always the catch. The founders and initial employees of a company never had to go through the crappy hiring process that the company adds later as it gets bigger. And then we claim that the tests make tech a "meritocracy" and "objective", but those at the top are exempt from the tests.
On a related note, evaluating the quality of tests is even more challenging than writing them.
I recently tried interviewing for a growing small company, who nullified the initial good impression with a multiple choice test about certain technologies they were using, administered over the web by some test company.
The best questions were "which of these four functions or classes do you use to do $common task with $framework", testing documentation speed reading skills rather than actual coding skills; other questions were ambiguous, debatable or completely wrong.
>The best questions were "which of these four functions or classes do you use to do $common task with $framework", testing documentation speed reading skills rather than actual coding skills; other questions were ambiguous, debatable or completely wrong.
Sounds like testgorrilla. I swear they have a poor markov-chain based AI generating the questions.
Modern not-quite-AI might be able to figure out reasonable questions from high quality source material (e.g. StackOverflow questions) and synthesize wrong answers, but competent human reviewers are still needed and this is probably the weak point of the process.
This is all true, although note that I was not a founder or initial employee; I definitely arrived during the second half of the company's decades-long lifespan. The test was just developed years after I was hired, and I was not involved in its development in any way (except for once taking it to act as a baseline for what a senior programmer's answers might look like).
I just thought it was a really neat and kind idea to let the applicant choose what question or questions they wanted to discuss and in what order, instead of forcing them to answer a single pre-defined high-pressure coding question and hang the whole interview on that.
That's always the catch. The founders and initial employees of a company never had to go through the crappy hiring process that the company adds later as it gets bigger. And then we claim that the tests make tech a "meritocracy" and "objective", but those at the top are exempt from the tests.