Your Marks Out Of 10 Please
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Picture by CraigOppy   Some rights reserved. |
Something I’ve been meaning to comment on for quite a while now has been some of what I experienced a few months ago while hunting for a new job1.
One of the thing that really got to me was the number of times I was asked to rate my various skills out of 10. At first I didn’t really have a problem with it but more and more I came to realise that rating yourself out of 10 just doesn’t make sense. It’s a completely subjective analysis of skills and does nothing to give a correct idea of your ability. What’s worse is that you’re are being asked to rate yourself on a scale that has been decided by someone else in advance without your knowledge. Here’s a quick case study.
Asked to rate my Java development skills out of 10, I gave myself an 8. This was based on what I felt was my ability related to people and code I had worked with and, more importantly, what I felt were my general OOD design skills. Relatively speaking I felt I was quite strong and rated myself in the top 10 to 20%. What I didn’t realise was that my interviewer took it to mean that I had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Java API and could, quite literally, write any code asked of me on a piece of paper without reference to Javadocs which is what he proceeded to do. Unfortunately this isn’t the case. Worst. Interview. Ever.2
I think the reality is that it’s impossible to rate yourself on any scale unless you are given some idea of what you’re rating yourself against. I also believe that a good developer can learn pretty much any language they need to use; it’s basic software design skills that are far more important and are much harder to rate out of 10. Being asked to rate yourself out of 10 is at best the sign of someone who just doesn’t understand the domain and at worst the sign of someone who is too lazy to read through a CV and talk to you to get an informed opinion of your ability. Quite apart from anything few people if any will rate themselves down3 so it becomes a fairly meaningless metric anyway.
The only way to be sure that someone knows their Visitors from their Acceptors is to ask them. If you want to know how much someone knows about Java ask them what the Object contract for hashCode() and equals() is. If it’s C++ ask them about virtual destructors and the risks of using auto_ptr. Ask them what books they’ve read and what blogs they read regularly. Get an idea of how they work not what they think of themselves. I’ve been on both sides of the interviewing table and so far I think I’ve done pretty well. Not wanting to bang my drum but *bang* *bang* so far I don’t think I’ve been responsible for recommending a hire who didn’t work out. And I never once asked them to rate their skills out of 10.
– Fintan
1 – c.f Job went to india etc.
2 – I nearly walked out at one point after “failing” this test and basically being asked had I bluffed on my CV.
3 – Unfortunately I suffer from chronic honesty and have done so in the past. I’m not sure that it hasn’t cost me an interview or two.
Filed under: Business, Software Development | 5 Comments
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Fintan Palmer v1.0 (c) 1970
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I don’t have a problem with asking people to mark themselves out of 10 for particular skill sets. Actually, I don’t think that you do either, really. What rankles is being asked to write code on-the-spot. This might be acceptable for graduates who have yet to make their own mark, but for a senior techie it’s as if your experience and references count for nothing.
Also, it’s not that meaningless being asked to rank your technical skills either. You’d be surprised at the range of answers you’d get back (especially from the chronically honest), and you’d be surprised at how accurate the answers tend to be (when given)…
So you’re an 8 ….. hmmmm ….
Hi Brian and thanks for the comment. Actually I disagree with you. I think the coding test issue is a seperate one which does sometimes have merit although as a screening process rather than as a “I’ve read your CV and spoken to you but now I’m going to ask you to take a test because I can’t judge whether or not you’re bluffing” response. That’s why we have probationary periods, certainly in Ireland. My problem with the marks out of 10 is that they are subjective but in two ways – one is in the person grading themselves and the other is in the person asking for the marks out of 10 – and the expecation behind each of these freqeuntly don’t co-incide, leading to false impressions and just hinders rather than helps the recruiting process.
Thanks again for the comment.
Fintan
My favourite book on getting a job, interviewing etc. is Ask The Headhunter. The author turns the entire job-hunting process on its head, arguing convincingly that the way we do everything from finding a position we wish to apply for, to writing a c.v., to interviewing, is ineffective for both the employer and employee. asktheheadhunter.com has a lot of the book’s content online.
The book is really about sales, since that’s what applying for a job is fundamentally about, and the techniques in the book are equally helpful when seeking a promotion/raise at your current employer, or for the self-employed.
I used the techniques in this book when applying for a summer job in college, and they worked so well that I haven’t had to look for a job on the open market since then. :-)
Hi Ana. Great seeing you at BarCamp on Saturday… enjoy RailsConf in Oregon next month (boo!). Thanks for the tip about asktheheadhunter.com. I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet but it sounds interesting. I think one of the key problems, at least with most small tech companies, is that the people who are responsible for interviewing aren’t professional interviewers: they’re techies who have risen through the ranks. Everyone knows that being an interviewee requires a certain skill-set but very few interviewers seem to understand, at least in my experience, that there is a skill to giving an interview as well.
– Fintan
I tend to agree on the ‘marks out of 10′ thing – it really doesn’t prove anything, other than what you think the answer they are looking for is. And a coding on the spot test is really only valid, if the victim is asked for pseudo code – as you say, any decent programmer can quickly pick up just about any language – but pseudo code will give an indication of the way they approach a programming problem, and the kind of logic they use – way more useful information than do they know a particular language ‘off-by-heart’
I work for a guy who uses a basic logic riddle in his interviews – the toss-of-a-coin one, and also asks for pseudo code for the factorial problem.
Must look up that asktheheadhunter thing.