In article <4c6298c1$0$11101$c3e8...@news.astraweb.com>, Steven D'Aprano <st...@remove-this-cybersource.com.au> wrote:
> Sounds ridiculous, but apparently there are vast hordes of people who can > barely program "Hello World" applying for programming jobs. One figure > bandied about -- how accurately, I don't know -- is 199 out of every 200 > job applicants for programming jobs are barely capable of writing a line > of code. By the same token, there are lots of people with advanced degrees in computer science who can't code their way out of a paper bag. One advantage of the take-home test is that you can prepare the test once and amortize the preparation cost over many applicants. It's a big investment of time to interview somebody. By the time I get up to investing an hour or so of my time on a phone screen, I'd like to weed out the obvious rejects as cheaply as possible. Even more interesting is to publish some problems on your web site and instruct applicants to submit a solution to one of them along with their resume. This makes the per-applicant cost to administer the exam essentially zero. It also has the nice side-effect of weeding out the resume spammers. To be honest, I've never done this, but I've seen companies that do. I may try it sometime. I still want to see the candidate write some code during the interview. This gives me a chance to feed them a problem incrementally and see where they take it. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
