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The only justification is that its a filtering mechanism. You likely won't use any of this, but its a proxy to certain characteristics you might find desirable

The only justification is that its a filtering mechanism. You likely won't use any of this, but its a proxy to certain characteristics you might find desirable in a candidate - some baseline intelligence and motivation. That you have the capacity to sit down and rote memorise a bunch of different techniques and practice completing a these kinds of tests indicates the likeliness of success in absence of other hard evidence of likely future performance. In a way it is the same function as university entrance exams. That these companies continue to do this for experienced candidates and not just recent graduates without a track record in employment is more perplexing.

shagie 3y ago
> That these companies continue to do this for experienced candidates and not just recent graduates without a track record in employment is more perplexing. This assumes that they don't get similar number of people applying to the experienced positions who are lacking skills. For example, I know some Java devs who could put down 5+ years of professional experience but are still very junior when it comes to problem solving skills. They are capable of following precise instructions and there's enough work of that nature to do - but an open ended "there's a bug that has a null pointer exception when running in test but not dev or production" is something that they're not capable of doing. If they were to apply to a position that said senior java developer based on their years of experience and there was no code test as part if it, they might be able to talk their way through parts of it and there is a risk that they could get hired. For a senior java developer position at Google, would it be surprising if they got 500 applicants with 5+ years of experience? How would you meaningfully filter that down to a set of candidates who are likely to be able to fill the role?

shagie 3y ago

> That these companies continue to do this for experienced candidates and not just recent graduates without a track record in employment is more perplexing. This assumes that they don't get similar number of people applying to the experienced positions who are lacking skills. For example, I know some Java devs who could put down 5+ years of professional experience but are still very junior when it comes to problem solving skills. They are capable of following precise instructions and there's enough work of that nature to do - but an open ended "there's a bug that has a null pointer exception when running in test but not dev or production" is something that they're not capable of doing. If they were to apply to a position that said senior java developer based on their years of experience and there was no code test as part if it, they might be able to talk their way through parts of it and there is a risk that they could get hired. For a senior java developer position at Google, would it be surprising if they got 500 applicants with 5+ years of experience? How would you meaningfully filter that down to a set of candidates who are likely to be able to fill the role?