While I understand your perspective Tilly, my own experience in hiring programmers leads to me to believe that tests are *required*.

Too often, education and experience show a very small part of the picture. When giving simple tests, I've seen people with impressive resumes fall *way* short. To the point that I am truely frightened.

This is not true of just finding developers who know perl, but also Java (perhaps more so), C++, and even sysadmins.

The sad fact is that the majority of people currently employed doing technical work simply walk through work in a deep dark haze. They try this, that and the other thing, until it sort of works, not knowing why. They copy and crib (not that that's always bad) without understanding what they're copying (that's bad, IMO). I don't believe this is isolated to technical professions, it is true of here too.

You have to realize that most management types simply do not have the skills and knowledge base to make reasonable assessements of a programmers skill level. For those people, tests are the only way they can assess how well a person knows a given skill.

Should a perl interview test be hard? Of course not. It should stupid simple. The kind of test where if someone misses a few questions you have to seriouslly consider that they either a) lied or b) have brain damage. The kind of test you could pass by skimming an intro book to perl the day before the exam.

Sad fact is that I'll bet more than half of the people you interview won't pass such a stupid simple test. Such is life.

In reply to Re: Re: Perl Exam? by rsmah
in thread Perl Exam? by lnl

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