by Nick
Monday, October 02, 2006 12:55 PM
I wonder how many companies exist out there where this has happened to them:
Of course the reality is that the guy wasn't all that smart... he just thought out of the box so much, that he was unable to write intelligible or logical code, and didn't know enough English to write proper comments. And when I say he didn't know enough English, I'm not saying he was an H1B from another country... there are plenty of locally grown computer geeks that have a problem mastering their own language as well.
Prior to interviewing at a company a long time ago I was given a test by a staffing firm in order to test my knowledge of C++, which at the time was my language of choice. It was a timed test, and by the end of it I had a massive headache. Each question was filled with code written so poorly, with so many uses of pointer indirection, and non-standard pointer dereferencing, that I almost screamed. At the end of the test they gave me an opportunity to provide feedback, and I said something along the lines of:
To be honest, I hope I failed this test. I would never want to work with anyone who passed this test, because that means that they write code like this often enough to be able to answer your questions correctly. People who write code like this are not good programmers.
It goes without saying that the staffing company didn't offer me a position, though I barely passed the test.