[a_square_peg]

No. Senior engineers are expected to have different level of skills - project management, leadership, and ability to identify problems that matter, rather than blinding solving problems that are given to them. You're also not going to be able to test their ability to learn by giving tests.

I'm sure most of us would fail high-school trigonometry (or spelling and grammar for that matter) if given one.

[seanmcdirmid]

> I'm sure most of us would fail high-school trigonometry (or spelling and grammar for that matter) if given one.

Not if we had a few weeks of prep time.

[ryanbrunner]

Doesn't it seem like an absurd scenario to you though, that you need to prep for an interview by relearning skills that aren't relevant to the job you're interviewing for?

I've been in coding interviews that matched the work that the company is doing, and I've found those useful - I get something from taking the interview (an idea of what their codebase is like, working with a partner, maybe some interesting code design questions), but I'm never going to do another "code this CS algorithim that 100% of people use a library for nowadays" type questions.

[seanmcdirmid]

It is absurd, but is so easy to counteract by just prepping. I’d be a lot more negative about it if it wasn’t so easy to game.

[a_square_peg]

I think this is the point - that it's so easy to game (albeit a waste of time) and that this doesn't reflect on the quality of the hire coming through this process. Assuming this is the test for senior engineer, the greatest candidacy pool would be second-year CS students.

[seanmcdirmid]

True, but I guess they are also judging our pliability in jumping through hoops, because even us senior engineers have to jump through many. To be honest, I'm probably not jumping through enough of them, cramming for a coding interview is one thing, but jumping in on every welcome!/goodbye! email is something that I really wasn't ready for.

[a_square_peg]

Then it’s no longer a skills test but an aptitude test. That’s fine if we’re all happy to call it that.

[AnimalMuppet]

But I'm not going to take a few weeks of prep time to prepare for a high-school trig test, either. I have no reason to waste my time in that way.

And I have no reason to waste my time spending a few weeks prepping for a code interview, either. I am who I am. Either you want that, or you don't. I'm not going to try to spend weeks studying so I can pretend to be different than I am.

(Disclaimer: I'm not looking, and I haven't been for a very long time. I've never been desperate while looking. I haven't even been unemployed while looking in over 30 years. If I were unemployed and watching the bills pile up, I might feel a whole lot less smug...)

[seanmcdirmid]

If the trig test was in the way of a $200k/year job I didn’t have yet, I would totally hit the books.

[yodsanklai]

> I have no reason to waste my time in that way.

Preparing for interviews isn't wasted time provided you have some chance of success. The signing bonus alone can be worth the time.

[b20000]

you mean 3 months and then going through 30 cycles of 10 hours each?