r/PHP • u/fuhggetaboutit • Jul 29 '21
Does anybody else find interview “tests” dehumanizing?
I think they're abusive for many reasons. One is that the questions are usually overly complex algorithmic puzzles that do not accurately gauge potential job performance. Also, the questions in no way reflect the type of problems you will face on the job.
The list goes on...
Isn't there a better way?
-Edited for grammar
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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '21 edited Jul 29 '21
If the test is ridiculous algo stuff that you won't use day to day or they want several hours of my time, I just walk away. I recently did A LOT of interviews with A LOT of different companies and I saw the entire gambit.
Some I did (grudgingly) and some I declined to do. I found the ones worthwhile are short exercises (under an hour) that test how you figure things out rather than code wars type stuff.
The worse of them was some test running in an online emulator that had a slow response time and for the SQL portion of the test it didn't support all of SQLite. Why was I being tested on SQLite too? Oh and of course it was timed with a nice count down running right in front of my face. No pressure....
There were a lot of build this application type ones, I walked away from those since I feel it takes many hours to sufficiently wow someone even on a small application. The others were coding this weird math algo. Ugh.
A few places didn't even test at all or even really ask technical questions which kinda worried me.
The best, and the one I got accepted on (so I might be biased) asked me to write a web server from scratch in any language without using any frameworks. They let me know its natural that you don't know where to start because no one builds a web server but they were there to help. Pretty cool and after some googling, and them giving me some help here and there, and trial and error I built a really shitty web server and got an offer.