How to Measure an Engineer’s Get-Job-Done Capability

Nowadays engineers use both internal brain and external brain, internal hands and external hands to get their job done. What I mean by internal/external brain/hands? With advancement of technology, our brains, as a storage and library of know-hows, have been extended externally to search engines such as Google, knowledge-bases such as StackOverflow or Confluence Spaces; our hands, as used by engineers to write and test code, have been extended externally to infinite number of libraries, packages as well as open-source or proprietary tools that we can leverage to build more powerful application without creating from scratch. Yet, most of coding tests during technical interviews nowadays focus on evaluating interviewee’s capability of using his/her internal brain as well as tools that interviewee can remember using his/her internal brain. This practice, to me, is significantly disconnected from the real process of how engineers plan their work and get their job done. Current coding test practices measure how many answers to coding test questions that interviewee can memorize in his internal brain before the interview and how fast the interviewee’s hands are able to write code that he can memorize using his internal brain. In short, size of internal brain’s memorized material is the metric that is being measured by most common practice of coding tests currently.

Although I don’t have a better proposed practice at this point but I write this because I think this is an issue that need to improved.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *