The Low Bar

What happens to all the people that apply for tech jobs that clearly aren’t ready for them?

Many companies (such as RockThePost) use a simple test to remove those for whom the role is inappropriate from the pool. This is a great approach, for a number of reasons. It proves that the applicant has a minimum level of either knowledge or experience, even if the level is (quite) low. In the case of the RockThePost test, those who fail can’t even apply (a pleasant way to do rejection). This frees up more time to be spent between those in the right realm of skill.

So many companies don’t do this however. Most online job postings have no such limitation, allowing people to spam applications to every job in the marketplace. So there’s a huge chunk of people that get thousands of rejections to tech jobs, the subjects of The Daily WTF who can’t FizzBuzz, but are programmers. Where do they go? What jobs do they get?

On another note, I’m tired of base64 questions. IDEA: A database of coding interview questions ranked and graded by difficulty, for employers to use for the low bar problem. This could also be a sneaky way to teach people more programming fundamentals. +1 for that.