Technical Reviews

As you may know I have recently moved back from London to Perth, due to many reason including a credit crisis that means London is not the best place for us to be living.

I have been job hunting with favourable feedback, but not a lot of cash in my pocket. The state of affairs the world is in means a lot of companies are waiting for the new year to hire people. This, needless to say, is not so good for me as I need to eat before then.

I am in talks with a few companies that I hold I reasonably high regard and would be happy to have any of them on my CV in years to come, however the interview process is really getting dragged out.

I have been involved in more interviews test this years than the all my previous years combined. This includes writing them, completing them as a bench mark for my current employer and of course completing them in hopes of a new job.

My disdain for them however continues, yet I understand they are somewhat of a necessary evil.

The problems I have is:

• Most test technical knowledge, i.e. my knowledge of a library, something that becomes obsolete very quickly. I do not hold this is very high regard. Core concepts are much more important to me, I can get someone productive in ASP.Net in a day or two, I cant teach them OO coding that quick.
• A test that tests coding ability tend to be short and inane. Ironically these to me are more beneficial, because now I get to see the workings of their mind and their coding style. Still I have never done a test that dealt with interaction, which is unrealistic for an enterprise developer, and is a place where most intermediate devs fall over. SoC is still something many struggle with.
• I have never seen a test that tests ability to write enterprise code... which is what I do, the technologies are implementation details. Design, interaction and domain logic to me is much more important

How would I fix these? Well my first approach would be by talking to the candidate. The time it takes to mark the test could be done talking to the candidate, you are going to have to anyway. keep it brief; in 10-20 minutes I would have a very good understanding of what the candidate knows.

Secondly I would sit with them and get them to write some code. again in 20 minutes I will ascertained what I need. The type of person to me is of utmost importance.

If you are taking a interview type test be sure to get something out of it. You are investing your time so there should be some sort of return, ideally a job, but at least feedback.

You should be able to tell straight away what you are not comfortable with, today I realised my knowledge of IIS is not up to scratch. I do not need to see my results to know that, I know I got the answers wrong. I have highlighted a weakness. Now it is up to me to decide if that is a weakness I want to address; time is a limited resource, do I spend it on learning IIS? Well I am going to have to, my ignorance is unacceptable. Will I go for guru status? No chance, I don't value it that much.

It is also important to push the interviewer for feedback, critical feedback, personally I want them to be borderline nasty. If they tell me I was awesome and don't give me a job, well then something is wrong. Find out what. If they say you were crap/"not right for the position" then find out what set you apart from the others and what you would need to work on. Be forceful. HR will be fluffy, ask for concrete reasons. Was it because I suck at IIS? Asking for too much in terms of reimbursement? Do I smell funny?

Note to recruiters/employers:

Please update your tests at lest yearly. Asking questions about

• IIS 5 when IIS 7 is out,
• ADO (not ADO.Net)
• SQL 2000
• Operating systems that are 8 years old

may give insight on the candidate and there knowledge of legacy stuff, but it also reflects a certain something on your company and what the candidate will come to expect. I will certainly be favouring the company asking about TDD, ORM and C# 3.0 features over one grilling me on VB 6.0, Com interop and Access.