That is a very fair test, basic, and not high difficulty. Sometimes I get a bit miffed when I find out an interview for a technical position was held without me or any other technical person there. One "test question" back some years ago with I was working in Heidelberg was to ask the interviewee what would they do if they encountered some network problems.
I didn't get that question because I was interviewing for a mainframe position, and with one manager level "MVS"kinda-sorta and another Unix guy that didn't say much. And knew diddly about mainframes. But the answer they were looking for about the network was the ping utility. To be honest, I would have probably gotten that one wrong because I would have gone deeper too look for a problem. Ping is such a staple utility used so much that I would have dismissed it as being just too obvious. Of course I would have started with something like ping, but I wouldn't have counted it as any sort of answer. Personally I would expect more from a professional. Ok, if someone says they are an assembler programmer, then sure, show us what you can do. Copying a file to a file seems trivial. But what if they aren't an assembler programmer? I'd say come back tomorrow with a working program, and explain briefly how it works in case it was simply copied from another source and (hopefully changed a bit). Copying code is fair game. Now you have me challenged to see if that would be a fair request. My assembler skills are next to nothing. Best I've done is a Rexx assembler function and that was mostly just going through a bunch load of control blocks. And I might as be a RISC programmer - I might know 40 instructions. Starting now, if I don't give up for some good reason, I am going to write an assembler program to copy a file. Something I've never done before, and I have no clue how to do it. Sounds like a nice challenge. Lindy Mayfield -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of Rick Fochtman Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2011 12:09 AM To: IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu Subject: Re: Licence to kill -9 --------------------------------------------<unsnip>------------------------------------ When they talk about their skills in Assembler, I ask them to write a simple program to copy one file to another. (I had a white boarxd in my office.) We then would critique the result. Sometimes the program was very good: short and effective. Other times, the result was a disaster. One couldn't do it at all. And HE was supposed to be the Assembler expert! Bottom line: you MIGHT dazzle us with brilliance; you certainly CANNOT baffle us with BS. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
