Programming tests: are they relevant?

Question

Do online programming tests have any value (except for providing an evidence to potential employers) in terms of evaluating your knowledge, or a they too broad or too narrow in general? For examples, brainbench.com and similar websites. From my experience I have never found myself scoring particularly high, although I have many years of commercial experience and is doing great at work. These tests mostly refer to things I have never worked with (WebForms or ADO .Net, who works with ADO .Net directly anyway?), yet these tests claim to be C# tests.

If you were hiring a programmer, would you consider online tests as an evidence of real skill?

Answer 1

Some of the headhunters consider them valuable. I was interviewed for one once and scored very high on their tests. They were very happy. Then they offered me half of the going market rate for my skills. Not a good experience.

Answer 2

Some tests are useful but some tests are just a shit. Specially I've seen the tests which analyzes the algorithmic skills, specially for performance which can be categorized as good. And some questions are based on things that are not in general use; I don't think they are useful. I believe those technologies etc should not need to be in "Known technologies" list. They can be learn when If and only you need it. So asking a question on those will not be useful.

Answer 3

As someone who has frequently interviewed and hired programmers, I can say they (the tests :-) have little value to me. Tests that I have seen tend to rate the depth of knowledge that programmers have in very specific technologies. A large percentage of that knowledge would not even be used by most programmers using that technology, most of the time.

Instead, I focus on questions that expose a candidate's knowledge of computer science / programming concepts abstracted away from the technology. Technologies change quickly, underlying concepts much less so.

Answer 4

I don't value the tests in reviewing resumes.

Years ago when brainbench first started the tests were ridiculously easy. When I saw them on a resume for the first time I went to the site to see what they were all about and had 6 "certifications" within an hour, two of which were in languages I'd never used. More recently I tried them again and found them to be much tougher, but also asked about a variety of topics that many developers would not run into on a regular basis.

IMO there are much better ways to evaluate programmers.

Answer 5

While I'm personally not a big fan of those tests, if I was told I have to use them for my company, I'd use them for two reasons:

1) To weed out the gross underperfomers...basically, the people who struggle creating "Hello World" type applications.

2) To see if someone is really interested in working for my company. Most of us programmers haven't taken a "test" since school, so I could see that this would weed out those who might be less motivated.

That being said (and like every answer above has stated), I prefer to sit people down, ask CS type questions, logic questions and to see what non-work programming/IT/etc interests a person might have.

Answer 6

I cannot imagine how anyone would use them except possibly to separate the wheat from the chaff...