test.

Needless to say, I was more then a little ticked off that we were not
allowed to retake the test!
This is the same as programming tests during job interviews, over
the phone or in an e-mail form, and especially during an on-site interview gauntlet
where any slight goof-up gets one filed in the round file
for years! I do not do well unless I have my research library within
arm’s reach and plenty of time to respond with a well-thought-out
answer. Once a company has drawn a conclusion about you, it seems to
be their opinion for years. Besides, these tests are useless, as the person
doing the testing judges the answers based upon his or her experiences
(or lack thereof) and skill level. During a gauntlet or marathon session,
quite often the alpha male of the pack wants to make sure that everyone
in the room, especially the interviewee, knows just how superior he
thinks he is, so he will ask the most complicated or obscure questions he
can that will make the interviewee look bad. In fact, a good number of
those questions have nothing to do with game programming (not that I
am bitter or anything!). There was also a rumor that a fellow employee
at a company I worked for actually had other people do his preinterview programming
test for him. Nobody attempted to verify his
knowledge, and it took about six months for management to acknowledge his lack of
skill level. Of course, not all the interviewers are of this
sort, but I have personally encountered quite a few that are, at least from
my perspective.
The point is that if one was interviewing test pilots, one would want
to test them for their quick responses to any environmental concern that
might arise in the cockpit. If you were hiring someone to design and
build the plane, you would not want someone who would slap the plane
together from memory (without looking at the instructions, like a couple of my
children) but, rather, would take their time, do research,
design it, and build it properly.
To make a long story short (too late), I have thrown in some interview questions
and their answers into this book that have come up time
to time during my interviews over the years. Hopefully, they will help
you when you have to handle a programming test, as it seems that some
of those same questions seem to be continuously passed around from
company to company. It is sort of my personal crusade to abolish interview testing!
(Keep an eye out for one of my next books, Programming
Interview Questions from HELL! or Introduction to Vertex and Pixel
Shaders.)