OK, so last week I had a call about a possible job in Oxford. That's a 
bit of a long way, but it's shorter than my current commute.

On Friday, I got a call to say that first I have to pass a test. On 
VB.Net, of all things. So, uh, yeah... That's totally going to work out 
then! :-P

What actually happened was that the agency sent me an email containing a 
Word document with several dozen VB questions. I then have 30 minutes to 
email back the document with the answers filled in. Now, obviously, I've 
never written anything in VB.Net. The closest I've come is that VBA 
script that took me 2 hours to write - the one that puts today's date in 
a certain cell when you click a button.

In summary, this test boils down to "how much stuff can you Google about 
VB.Net in just 30 minutes?"

After I sent that back, I got another test - this time, SQL Server. Now 
the job spec says you must have experience of "SQL", but I'm guessing 
they actually meant "SQL Server", which is something quite different. 
Suffice it to say, I know quite a lot about Oracle, but absolutely 
nothing about SQL Server. So, again, how much can you look up on Google 
in 30 minutes?

On both tests, the questions range from "what is the name of the 
function for X?" to "please describe how you would solve this moderately 
complex problem". In both cases, I left the latter sort of question 
completely blank. I couldn't actually find all the answers to the former 
sort either - not in the time allocated.

At this point, of course, I had just come back from that brilliant 
interview, and I thought that job was probably in the bag. I wasn't even 
all that interested in this job - especially if it somehow involves VB. 
So I didn't try especially hard.

Well, you can see where all this is going; apparently, in spite of my 
obviously abysmal performance on the test, the company wants to 
interview me. (??!) I can't imagine why. I mean, of all the tens of 
thousands of other people who applied, there must surely be a vast 
number of them who are way, /way/ better at VB than I am. (It is, after 
all, a language specifically aimed at lusers.) And yet they're still 
bothering to talk to me? Hmm...

 From what I can tell, the company in question sells gas and 
electricity, mainly to commercial customers, and they make a big deal 
about how green they are. She shall see. I'm not expecting great things 
from this interview... then again, I said that about the last one.

Man, I've had 2 interviews in the past 30 years, and now it looks like 
I've got 2 interviews within the same year of each other!

Post a reply to this message