Re: COBOL interview tests

This test was a little different. It had four or five questions. The
first was writing the merge program. The second one contained some
code that needed to be desk checked to find an error. I don't recall
the other questions.

The interviewer sat me at an empty cubicle with the test, paper and a
pencil. No computer or manuals were involved.

JJ wrote:
I've interviewed Cobol programmers back when I was in a Cobol shop.

We used to give tests like this ("write a program that <insert simple task
here> ...."). What the programs had to do was really irrelevent. It didn't
even matter to us whether or not the program actually worked - it just had
to come close. We only gave a few hours to get it done. (On the other
hand, we weren't hiring people with 20+ years experience either at what we
were paying.)

We gave a *** with instructions on where to put the source and how to
compile and run it. The tests were done under Windows, so we assumed
everyone was familiar with Notepad and the basics of navigating Windows.
(Our actual development environment was on Unix, but Windows was the common
denominator.)

In our case, the tests were really just to see if the person knew more than
just how to do well in an interview (or maybe didn't do so well in
interviews, but were proficient programmers). Could they actually write a
Cobol program? You'd be suprised at how many people we interviewed for a
Cobol programming position who didn't know Cobol other than from a few
classes, couldn't write a program, and gave up without anything. Could they
follow instructions to compile and run the program? Could they identify
compile errors and correct them? What would they do to test their program?

No one could really tell you what we were looking for - the programming task
we had people do was just thought up at the time we were hiring and there
was no set "answer" that we were looking for.

As for your situation, where you said you never wrote a program from
scratch - I know what you mean. We usually started with a template, rarely
a blank slate. But when we had people do a test like this, we always
allowed them to use the help file that contained the Cobol manual. I
figured, heck, I had been programming in Cobol for 20+ years and I still
occasionally used the manual, so there's no reason this person shouldn't be
able to also. It was a programming skills test, not a memory test.


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