[Phpwm] Interviews & technical competency

[Dave Holmes]

Not worried about you mike more a case of some of the other muppets I have
been subjected to in particular the guy who liked to eat raw mushy peas from
a can at dinner time!!!

-----Original Message-----
From: phpwm-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk
[mailto:phpwm-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Mike Tipping
Sent: 23 March 2007 16:38
To: 'West Midlands PHP User Group'
Subject: RE: [Phpwm] Interviews & technical competency

By psychometric programming test I didn't quite mean psychometric.

Basically the test is online and you have half an hour to answer as many
questions as possible. You can use reference material but this slows you
down so you answer fewer questions. The more questions you get correct the
harder the test gets (and vise versa) so you never actually get a feel on
how well you are doing until you get the results. And you can choose what
you want to test so if you want mainly PHP but a little SQL and Perl you can
weight the test to measure that.

>Last time i was made to do a technical test at an interview I over scored
>and was told I was too good for the job!

Yes that was obviously why I didn't get the Job, they were just too polite
to tell me.

Last Job I got it was Dave who did the interviewing, so I don't know why
he's worried - his interview technique is obviously perfect ;o)



-----Original Message-----
From: phpwm-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk
[mailto:phpwm-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Phil Beynon
Sent: 23 March 2007 16:20
To: West Midlands PHP User Group
Subject: RE: [Phpwm] Interviews & technical competency

> I had a Zend test at an interview once. The only criticism I would make is
> that the answers are based on doing it the Zend way. I could have argued
> that for several of the choices but as the guy who was
> interviewing wasn't a
> programmer there didn't seem much point.

Last time i was made to do a technical test at an interview I overscored and
was told I was too good for the job!

largely its going to depend on what you want from a person and what level of
knowledge you expect them to bring to a job, if you want someone who just is
given a task and does it then the next one you need someone different from
someone who can think "out of the box" and bring ideas and input to a
project.
Think up a simple project idea and get them to rough out a design spec, that
will weed out most of the duffers!

> I suppose if you are doing the interview you can constructively judge the
> quality of the answer.

Within the persons area of expertise yes - if I went to an interview and
they wanted to know about say using PHP for formatting / creating .pdf
documents on the fly the answer would be I know you can do it, I know where
to find out how to do it, but if they exepected me to quote syntax I woulod
fail since I haven't done it recently.

> Second option is to use an online psychometric programming test. Can't
> remember the URL but I had one of those at an interview and it was more
> accurate than the zend test.

Oh please...... those were largely discredited years ago! You can tell by
instinct if a person is likely to fit into a team without worrying what
their favorite colour is!

Phil


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