How effective are technical test(s) and is it necessary?
- by The Elite Gentleman
Hi everyone,
I recently took a Java technical test (for a company who wanted are looking for senior java developers) and, funny enough, I only realised the technical terms of what I've been doing all along after I've written the test. I'm not too IT jargon when it comes to development but I can pretty much code and create solutions unaware that I'm using design pattern (or the specifics of that design pattern) or technology.
I learned things such as JMS, Frameworks, etc. while programming at home and having to google stuff online to problems I have.
Others e.g. IoC, Surrogates in Databases, etc., I have used extensively without knowing that it had a name for it.
Do you think that these technical test are effective and why?
What interesting questions did you find that boggled your brains out while the clock kept ticking?
Seeing that IT is vastly evolving at a rapid rate, do we have to constantly be updated with new terms that comes out?
Some questions I was asked :
What object oriented principle is violated by this architectural mechanism for dot notation?
Is indexing tables effective for range query or point query search?
What is ThreadLocal and what is it used for?
Method overloading vs Method overriding. What is the difference between the 2?
What is dynamic binding?
Now, imagine my poor head trying to understand these jargons (considering I use it almost everyday)
PS The question was not a programming question, where you have a problem and write code to solve it. Rather, a thinking type question and you write answers (against the clock).
Update I clearly didn't come out clearly as I should have. There are those that are technically "book smart" but with very little hands-on experience and vice versa. So, the question (in connection to what I've asked) is that are these technical test seeking "book smart" people or people with lots of hands-on experience (some who are not that well clued up with too much book-smart jargons). How effective is it then, for companies to look for developers if most of the questions are too terminology-centric? (if that's the correct term, :))
