XML, XPath, and XSLT technology quiz
About
In 2006, on the intranet of the consulting company that had just hired me, I saw a list of technical questions they had prepared for interviewees. They didn't have many questions to assess a candidate's fluency in XML, XPath, and XSLT, so I wrote up my own list that I might grill potential new hires with. I wanted the questions to be part pre-hire competency/weedout exam, and part post-hire placement test.
Technical interview quizzes suck
After I wrote up these questions, I had second thoughts about the whole project.
In an interview, you can really put people off by asking too many "puzzlers" that require really deep knowledge and that require being able to quickly solve what could be really hard and pointless problems. I know I would be irritated if I had come in for an interview somewhere and was handed a list like this, and I'd feel pretty disillusioned if I didn't have an answer for everything off the top of my head.
Also, I feel like too many of the questions are things that really shouldn't be asked in an interview. Even if the ideal, super-knowledgeable candidate answers them all correctly, once I get to know this person who is probably more intelligent than me, I'd feel like a total jerk for having put them through that. There were surely other indicators that they're well-versed in this stuff. I could've just asked whether they've worked with or encountered certain topics and problems in their work. Then the focus would've been more on "what do they bring above & beyond technical competency"—not "can we stump him?"
Likewise, with a candidate who couldn't answer hardly any of the questions, I feel like it may not matter, because I've seen firsthand that the right person for the job can do very well without knowing every last esoteric detail. You could train a good programmer on half of this stuff in a day, and once you point them in the right direction, they can pick up a lot of it on their own, as I've discovered when training people on these and other technologies.
I'd want someone who, even if they're not an expert in a certain technology, it's pretty evident they're not going to b.s. me about what they don't know. I want someone who "gets it" when I explain something new to them. I want someone who I can tell to go "read up on this" and they'd come back a few hours later with at least a rudimentary understanding and they're asking me some smart questions. These are not traits that are easily tested for, but they're far more valuable, to me, than getting even half the answers right.
