An attempt to measure talent failed ...

Introduction

Probably, you, like me, during the last years, have had to think about, or carry out a job change. Most likely, like me, you sometimes had to deal with the so-called “talent measurement” services. Whether it is Codility or CEB , in general, the essence of which boils down to one and the same already - test your skills in a particular field of activity. But do they perform this task and how well? .. Let's look at a few arguments and examples.

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The lion's share of such tests is done on time. I do not know about you, but I can not stand stressful situations, the more stress, the more I fall into a stupor. I have never done sports programming seriously, so I participated in a couple of hackathons with a rather relaxed atmosphere, it was cool. I wonder - why do we need time-limited tests? Check if I can pour out a certain amount of code on some abstract topic in the allotted time? Time, time, it is important, I do not argue, it is money, in the end. As has already been proven by various studies, time, as an additional factor, can by no means have a great influence on developers. So why do we need such tests for a while?

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How many times have I come across tests containing typos or compressed images of terrible quality. Recently, most of the measurement services display questions not in the form of text, but in the form of an image, apparently protected from copy-paste. In order to correctly answer the question you need to understand it. How can you understand it if you spend a lot of time deciphering the captcha that appeared to your gaze?

Hello Christmas, New Year

Here I would like to give examples of blatant disorder on the part of CEB , which I recently witnessed. It is worth noting that the below presented blunders are not typical for any particular meter, they come across to me quite often. For example, take a javascript knowledge test, approximately in the middle of the test, a question on the knowledge of conditional blocks in a try / catch surfaced, here's a screen of the question:
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This is what MDN says about this:



The next ridiculous question was about Expression closures , how do you not know what it is? I ask attention to the question screen:



The voice of MDN glogolit that:



Oil, oil pro classes. On this question, I lost a lot of time, I read it 5 times and did not understand it, or my skis do not ride on asphalt or I am idiot. After all, the ES2015 standard has not yet been released officially and completely, and what is it that this is the prototype type of classes in javascript . In addition, due to the two previous questions, I was, to put it mildly, lost. Here it is krasava:



Explained MDN:



For the last question, my screen was not preserved, but in general it sounded like “Why the escape function is used,” with further answer choices. According to MDN, this function is also outdated :

Total

Personally, I think that all the so-called talent measurement systems are counterproductive for employers, and for applicants they result in a trivial loss of time. Also, I would like to say, as a person who has been on both sides of the barricades, I believe that a small dialogue, a technical task and then a discussion of this task can easily outperform and replace the approaches described above.