I recently applied for a job in Silicon Valley.
The recruiter had me take a battery of tests that measured my verbal, mathematical and visual aptitude. I'd guess it was a mini-IQ test; it wasn't a mini-MMPI. As a result of the tests I was invited to interview onsite.
At the end of the interview the manager declared that he wanted me to take some tests.
His tests were brain teasers he had downloaded from a random website. The brain teasers had nothing to do with the work I was interviewing for. He seemed to ignore the battery of sophisticated tests I had been subjected to, and to believe that he could do better.
What is the REAL purpose of using brain teasers during an employment interview?
Is it just to make the candidate feel stupid? Are any of these people qualified to interpret the results? Are any of them industrial psychologists? Or is this all about power and control?
Please advise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 05 2018, @05:06PM (1 child)
That's why software sucks. You guys are tinkerers, not engineers.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday October 05 2018, @05:17PM
No argument there. I lay no claim to being an engineer. After initially declaring an Engineering major, I soon switched to Business and there I graduated.
If you know of a way to enforce engineering first, code second, especially in the wild, where most free software communities do their bad-engineering-code-tinkering, you would be doing the world a great favor.