Why are interviewers checking only the technology knowledge and don't go any further (technical part of interview)?

Question

I was on a job interview few days ago and for the n-th time in the technical part I was given a detailed test with a set of .NET questions, some simple, some harder. After I had finished I thought about the reasons of doing this, because I don't really see the point. If I had to do something in my project that I already did't know, I would simply go to google and find an answer in about 10 minutes. Does it really matter if i know all these details if I know where to look and I can easily and quickly learn them? You may know all the tricks of the language but it doesn't mean that if you write your code it's clear, it's well-documented, easy to read, easily scaled, well designed. And almost noone checks it - I was asked to provide a sample code only ONCE and I've been to several interviews. It's not hard to learn the language, but it's hard to use it well and to solve problems effectively. And what about a will to learn, how easily you learn and all that stuff? Doesn't it matter more that the detailed knowledge of the technology?

So if there are people who interview, and I know there are, could anyone explain me why are the interviews designed this way? Is it the lack of time, lack of people who are willing to review the sample code or are there other reasons? Or (if your interview is more complex) what do you do to find out a bit more of candidate's programming skills than just the knowledge of the basics?

Answer 1

Asking questions for which you have precise and nicely packaged answers make the life of the interviewers a lot easier. It is rather rare to get an interview where you're asked about your problem solving abilities which is a lot harder to measure.

Answer 2

I have seen quite a few reasons for technical interviews that don't concentrate on the "important stuff."

1. The initial interview is done by HR, and they don't know the technical stuff, so they need something a less technical or non-technical person can evaluate.

2. The initial interview is done by a relatively less technical manager, so the same thing as above.

3. It's done as a simple filter; many alleged programmers can't actually program at all. (There are some blog entries on this somewhere that I was reading the other day, but I can no longer dig them up. Perhaps someone can edit this point to point to one or two.)

4. The development group wants to do more technical interviews, but HR process won't let them.

5. The development group doesn't have their people with vast technical knowledge working on the interview process.

6. The development group doesn't have any people with vast technical knowledge.

If you want an example of an interview process that I hope is technically informed, you can check out my company's interview process.

Answer 3

If I had to do something in my project that I already did't know, I would simply go to google and find an answer in about 10 minutes.

That's a nice illusion, but the reality is that if everything in software development could be learned in 10 minutes by googling, nobody would pay us our salaries, they would just outsource it to bright Thirld World students with access to google.com. There are certain facts and ideas which take time to digest and separate the men from the boys. It makes sense to check if the person interviewed knows them.

I am all for writing code during the inverview, but I am also for asking questions which test candidate's knowledge.