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> Number 6: Outsourced Hiring Assessment Services Are Very Much in Vogue

I ran into this a few years ago. I bombed hard when they asked me some specific terminology question about the stages of the ASP.NET request lifecycle. I believe I just said "I have no idea" and the call was over shortly after that.

It was frustrating--why are they hiring based on esoteric trivia instead of general programming skill? This assessment would've filtered out an enthusiastic, genius-level Java programmer!

And is that sort of question actually effective at measuring ASP.NET expertise? I work with ASP.NET every day, and memorizing that information would offer me zero benefit since A) I rarely need it, and B) I can look it up whenever I do need it. It's doubly frustrating to think there's someone out there who believes I'm a weak engineer based on this misguided quiz.



I've done 99.999% of my development on a Mac. I took a coding quiz a few years ago that asked me where I could find the "ruby" executable on Windows.


"In the PATH."




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