My wife is in this position now, and it's not for a programming job. She works in pharmaceuticals, in pharmacovigilance & risk management. She does a lot of data analysis & writing (the latest report she wrote for Health Canada & the FDA was 461 pages).
A company she's interviewing with asked her to do a sample writing task as part of her application/interview. She hasn't decided whether it's worth it or not. For someone who has 15 years experience in the field, excellent recommendations and credentials, spending (her estimate) 12-15 hours doing pro bono work just to apply somewhere is ridiculous.
I work in data analysis and I decline any "test" requests for a job or project.
If you don't value my time before hiring, you definitely are not going to value my time after hiring. Also, if you are incapable of judging a fit based on resume, interviews, and just talking with me, you are not mature enough, experienced enough, smart enough and intelligent enough and have failed the test for being my potential coworker and boss.
Edit: The tests make perfect sense for entry level positions and entry level candidates but once someone requesting tests for experienced positions and candidates, it shows the immaturity of the company, group, team and people who are unable to assess suitability of candidate and place too much emphasis on technical skills and tests as a crutch. The best jobs in my career were those where coworkers and boss had good relationship dynamics. Technical excellence had nothing to do with how well we worked and delivered results.
How about a car? Then it is obviously worth the applicant's time and since a professional can deliver or destroy a Bimmer's worth of corporate value on any given decision it easily pays for itself in identifying good candidates and weeding out bad ones.
I had a similar experience last year applying for a major technology company. Although I still lightly code in the devops sense (process automation) and to do typical management data analysis my day job is managing people, processes and crises.
If you have billion dollar trading systems and need a cool-headed guy who can talk to VPs or directors in one breath and SAs, DBAs, SAN, Network, etc guys in the next I'm your man.
I applied to head a global support organization, with teams in (from memory) North America, India and Asia Pacific. I'm pretty sure day-to-day would be a mix of employee career management, forward planning with my application development partners to make sure we were prepared capacity and training-wise to take on whatever's next, and crisis management of production issues and the like. Business as usual as they say.
Yet I found myself answering computational complexity questions about hash map insertions. To be fair, before I became quite so management-centric I've found plenty of badly performing code via the usual tools (dtrace, strace, thread dumps), and sql queries using analogous database tools, but at some point you have to rely on technical people to do their jobs.
Am I wrong to think if I'm going to manage a 60-100 person organization across three timezones I don't really need to be under the hood in the code any longer? Or am I clueless?
> Am I wrong to think if I'm going to manage a 60-100 person organization across three timezones I don't really need to be under the hood in the code any longer?
An organization that does this is hiring stupidly. They have clearly demonstrated via interview that they don't understand the job to be done and/or how to determine that a candidate can do that job. Asking low-level technical questions is a terrible way to answer what I'll guess was the intended "question", something like:
Does this candidate understand the technology and work well enough to make executive decisions grounded in our organization's reality?
> at some point you have to rely on technical people to do their jobs.
On one hand, I totally agree that technical tasks should be left to the technical people, preferably those who are actually working on the system. There's almost nothing worse than a manager trying to take technical decisions out of people's hands.
> Am I wrong to think if I'm going to manage a 60-100 person organization across three timezones I don't really need to be under the hood in the code any longer? Or am I clueless?
On the other, I think people want to work for people they respect and to the extent that people respect technical chops that might be what they are screening for. Though the hash map question sounds like a soft ball, so it might be screening for a baseline of software competence.
I hear you about having enough technical ability to understand what's going on and make sensible decisions. Certainly in a role like that and the one I have now a mix of technical and positional authority are required.
But at what point does it become ludicrous? When your CIO is yelling "No, No! You have to enable the EPEL repo or you'll patch to the wrong version!"?
Does she have existing samples of writing that she can point to, not locked up under copyright?
If so, then I would point to those samples and suggest those should be relevant data for assessment and I'd like to get further in the process before putting in extra work for this.
If they're prepared to discuss the matter, great.
If they just give a blank 'sorry, this is our policy,' then walk away. Why? Because if they're not willing to have a discussion with you, that means they don't care about you. It means they think they have a hefty surplus of candidates. Which means you are very unlikely to be the chosen one, and you would probably just waste a lot of your time.
Ah, but the willing aren't able and the able aren't willing. In any case, I'd avoid companies that recklessly fleece applicants just because they can. Once you've proven your worth professionally, begging for scraps is pathetic in any job market. For every greedy business with ten desperate applicants, there's an honest organization or untapped market ready to pay fairly for what value you offer.
The question I consider when asked to perform for free: why should anyone simply donate their knowledge to a profitable business after spending a lifetime to attain it?
A company she's interviewing with asked her to do a sample writing task as part of her application/interview. She hasn't decided whether it's worth it or not. For someone who has 15 years experience in the field, excellent recommendations and credentials, spending (her estimate) 12-15 hours doing pro bono work just to apply somewhere is ridiculous.