Pointless job interview test/task

[Piemaster]

Seems the Cafe has come over all topical!

 

[ColinJ]

I'll remember to have a word next time it happens.
I've been in the situation before when such a blagger joined a team I was part of. I spent 6 months dragging them along & fixing their flip ups (not to help them but make sure my team met it's targets). That was until my manager asked my honest opinion & they were subsequently moved to elsewhere.
It's not worth the stress though. If someone's new & trying I'll happily help but if their out of their depth & slacking next time I was going to hang them out to dry and ensure I've met my own goals. I'll try having a word first.

He was actually pretty bright and did learn quickly, but they were not looking for somebody to learn on the job!

 

[hedder2212]

my last job interview was quite a weird and pointless one but I got the job.
I applied through the college I was at, at the time, they had the vacancy pinned up on the wall so I sent off the application. Got a phone call 30 mins after sending the email.. "can you be here in a hour" jumped on moped, went home and put shirt etc etc on and rode as fast as I could to the warehouse. got there 5 minutes early, from the get go I knew the boss was quite a weird/funny character, "I said in a hour not in 55 minutes" he says. gave me a tour around the warehouse, introduced me to a few of the weirdos that worked there, then asked me if I was willing to do anything that I was asked or told to do within reason, I ofcourse said yes, "go down to the burger van and get me a quarter pounder and a bottle of pepsi then" I didn't quite know how to react to that one but did it anyway, then when I got back I got asked to stack a load of cardboard boxes in a certain way, I did so, he knocked it over, I simply stacked them back up. "when can you start" he says. I worked there for 2 years until end of last week. loved it there too.

 

[Oldbloke]

I went for an interview, for a part time job in the NHS, last August. My interview was for 10am, it said so, clearly, in the letter they sent to me. I arrived at 9.15 and at 10am was invited into a room to do a test (multiple choice nonsense), the test papers advised taking 40 minutes to complete it, it took me 10, it would only have taken my cat a little longer. After 45 minutes a lady returned, collected my papers and vanished. A while later she returned, congratulated me on passing my test and said, "Your interview will be at 4.15pm, is that ok"? Of course it was, after all, I always happily waste every day between 10am and 4.15pm.

Anyway, I got the job and "work" (such as it is) in the NHS is as chaotic and unproductive as the interview process.

That's just as iI remember it when I did a 15 months' assignment in their Purchasing Division. I really felt for all the hard working staff at the sharp end when i saw the shambles of big bosses and pencil squeezers

 

[Dan B]

Years back, we got a new programmer straight from university. I spotted him looking very furtive, and discovered that he was balancing a copy of K&R on his lap, under his desk.

I think that's quite impressive actually - doubly so if he made it past chapter 5. If it had been the Dummy's Guide, on the other hand, I'd have shown him the door straight off

 

[KneesUp]

It isn't difficult to check if somebody knows C. There are some incredibly easy traps to fall into which any experienced C programmer would know about. You could show them some suitable sample C code and ask them what it was supposed to do, and what was wrong with it. Nope, didn't bother. They probably asked him where he saw himself being in 5 years time. In reality, that was as a software team leader - somewhere else!

I don't know what language it was but a friend applied for a job programming it (he was already a programmer) knowing nothing about it. He was given an interview date a few days after his holiday, so he went away with a book about the language - and no computer. He read the book and came back able to program in the new language. I can't comprehend how you can do that. (He got the job)

 

[vernon]

Years back, we got a new programmer straight from university. I spotted him looking very furtive, and discovered that he was balancing a copy of K&R on his lap, under his desk. I had a quiet word with him while management were looking the other way ...

We needed an experienced C programmer, so the company had advertised for one. New Guy had gone to his interview and just blagged it. They asked if he was experienced, so he simply said 'Yes' and they took his word for it!

It isn't difficult to check if somebody knows C. There are some incredibly easy traps to fall into which any experienced C programmer would know about. You could show them some suitable sample C code and ask them what it was supposed to do, and what was wrong with it. Nope, didn't bother. They probably asked him where he saw himself being in 5 years time. In reality, that was as a software team leader - somewhere else!

That's not out of the ordinary. It was fairly standard for contractors to blag work and turn up with manuals hidden about they person/baggage.

A friend of mine was thought to have dysentery by his new IT colleagues as he was spending a lot of time in the toilet. He was mugging up on the finer points of Pick programming from manuals. He'd told the recruitment agency that he was an accomplished programmer in the language. He subsequently learned enough to be recruited by NASA but was unable to take up the post as the whole set up was thrown into disarray by the Challenger disaster.

 

[snorri]

Or maybe I am talking b0ll0cks?

I have never said this to anyone on CC before, but yes, you are talking bollocks.

 

[ColinJ]

That's not out of the ordinary. It was fairly standard for contractors to blag work and turn up with manuals hidden about they person/baggage.

I don't blame a blagger for trying it on if they have the confidence to, but if a company genuinely only wanted to hire an experienced programmer, I think it would make sense to get somebody who knew their stuff to ask her/him a few probing questions at the interview. A bit more probing than "So, you have 3 years experience in C, yeah?" ... which is a summary of what he was asked!

 

[HLaB]

I was interviewed for a council job and their numeracy test was primary school maths (a basic average calc); afterwards they apologised for making me do it; it was of a bit stupid thing to ask somebody who had a degree and a post grad, given the former was a must and the latter preffered :-/

 

[Profpointy]

I don't know what language it was but a friend applied for a job programming it (he was already a programmer) knowing nothing about it. He was given an interview date a few days after his holiday, so he went away with a book about the language - and no computer. He read the book and came back able to program in the new language. I can't comprehend how you can do that. (He got the job)

Up to a point, if you can actually programme, and more to the point, design and structure a programme properly, you should be able to pick up another language to be able to programme in a few days. It may take longer to learn the clever tricks, and longer still to learn that you shouldn't actually use most of the clever tricks at all. Banging in the code isn't actually the hard bit.

I was a solid programmer in that my stuff worked and was tidy, but I wasn't a whizz kid by any means, but I still recall debugging a pals Pascal programme despite never having seen Pascal before in my life. He was studying comp-sci, whilst I'd done 2 lectures in Fortran (it was a while back). .Fair enough SQL is different from awk, but Algol, Coral 66, Pascal, C etc are all much the same frankly - as are Java or C++ to be a bit more up to date

 

[Profpointy]

.... snipped...

Years back, we got a new programmer straight from university. I spotted him looking very furtive, and discovered that he was balancing a copy of K&R on his lap, under his desk. I had a quiet word with him while management were looking the other way ...
...snipped....

I hope your "quiet word" included explaining where to put the curly brackets. He'd get totally the wrong idea from K&R !

(sorry, bit of geek talk, nothing to see here for the rest of you)

 

[ColinJ]

I hope your "quiet word" included explaining where to put the curly brackets. He'd get totally the wrong idea from K&R !

(sorry, bit of geek talk, nothing to see here for the rest of you)

I was just curious to know what was going on.

I was never too keen on C - it always seemed like an accident waiting to happen!

 

[AndyRM]

I was asked to build a bridge out of Lego at my last interview. There weren't enough bricks so I drew a diagram explaining why the task was impossible. After four years I'm still not entirely sure if the lack of bricks was due to the interviewer not knowing what they were doing or budget cuts.

 

[KneesUp]

At the science club at my school they set one of those 'build something from these materials' tasks but obviously hadn't thought it through.

The task was to build a bridge between two work benches which would then be tested to see which one could support the most load.Whilst most teams built contraptions from folded paper and bamboo and so on - some using the odd stool for support, one team basically sellotaped over the gap, using several rolls of tape. There weren't enough weights to break it.