Coincidences and Consternation.

[swestrup]

So, I (like I predicted) did end up sleeping in due to my Somnolus Interuptus and didn't wake up until 1:30 pm.

Still no phone call from the folks that phoned on Monday. However there WAS an email message waiting for me from them, only they aren't the folks working with the CSA. DOH!
It turns out it was just a strange coincidence of timing. I have a vague recollection from several months back of some stranger I had passed a resume to asking if I would like him to hand it to some folks with a medical center down town, since he thought I might fit the profile they were looking for. Of course I said "Yes", although I was unsure what a Mom-and-Pop medical center would want with me. Well, that's who phoned on monday and just sent me an email with a contained employment quiz. I had to Google them to discover that they are in fact a medical software house specializing in (among other things) advanced image analysis software.

On the one hand, I'm somewhat happy that they sent me the quiz by e-mail, since that means I can fill it in at my leisure once I've had some coffee, and as there's no interview pressure I won't make any stupid mistakes. On the other hand, I haven't actually applied for any position with them, and the information in the above paragraph is pretty much the sum total of all I know about them. So, I don't know that I want to work with them, nor what that work would entail. Seeing as I have a real problem with any depiction of gore or damaged people, I'm not so sure that a medical imaging company is the place for me to work.

This also means that I actually have THREE job prospects at the moment (I got an email yesterday saying that I'd been referred to someone who may want to hire me), but that means the folks doing the satellite work may not be as hot to hire me as I had assumed.

One final thing. The quiz that I got has me scratching my head. On the one hand, I can see that you wouldn't want to hire someone for even the most junior position who couldn't fill it in correctly, but I'm not sure being able to traverse a linked list in C++ is much of a recommendation either. Since I would want a senior position, I take a certain amount of umbrage at the implied doubt that I actually have 20 years experience in the industry, or that the quiz is in any way an adequate measure of my abilities. So, are there suddenly so many bozos applying for computer jobs these days that they need to weed them out with this kind of test? I ask because, while I have on occasion devised such a test for unexperienced applicants for the most junior programming positions in a company, I have never been asked to fill one in before being laid-off last year. Usually I've just had a chat with someone with a technical background in software and talked about projects we've worked on, and what we did. By the end of that they either think they want to hire me, or they don't.

Oh well, I'm gonna install GPP so I can test my answers and know that I don't have any stupid syntax errors in my C++, and then I'll go fill in the dang quiz.

Comments

[denizsarikaya.livejournal.com]

So, are there suddenly so many bozos applying for computer jobs these days that they need to weed them out with this kind of test?

In a nutshell: yes.

Don't ask me to describe some of the incompetence I've seen get hired. Please, just don't.