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From: gwyn@brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn <gwyn>)
Newsgroups: net.math
Subject: Re: Interview question
Message-ID: <8498@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 22-Feb-85 20:02:45 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.8498
Posted: Fri Feb 22 20:02:45 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 27-Feb-85 03:49:45 EST
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Organization: Ballistic Research Lab
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> Ah yes, HP's infamous interviewee interrogation.  When will they wise
> up and figure out that there are much more productive, and certainly
> less insulting, ways to discover qualified applicants?  Such
> non-standard and uncontrolled quizzing flirts with antidiscrimination
> laws, and I wouldn't be surprised if one of these days they got sued.

It wouldn't surprise me if it really WERE against the law to
discriminate on the basis of knowledge and intelligence.

So long as the same quiz is given to all interviewees for the position,
how could one consider it unfair?  At my two previous places of
employment, we had programmer qualification quizzes that did a very
good job of finding out what a person's strong and weak points were
before hiring him.  In the few cases where we hired in spite of the
person's poor showing on the tests, we later regretted it.

Please note that designing a GOOD qualifying test is not easy and is
best left to experts at test design.