On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 6:04 AM, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote: > 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 can't recall who it was, but I remember being very impressed by a company that did a variant of this a few years ago: they put programming problems on the sides of pay phones, taxis, etc. with a note that said 'If you can solve this, call us'. I have zero doubt that they got some top talent that way. Geremy Condra -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
