Alone, from memory

For four years starting in the late 90s I wrote the technical screening tests companies used to decide who got programming jobs. Years before that, a GPA filter had kept me out of a job I could already do.

My number was under the line, so my résumé never reached a human. I’d spent college shipping software to paying customers, and a transcript has no column for that. Then I grew up and built the filter that would have screened out the younger me. Five hundred dollars a month.

The gate existed for a real reason. Software has no working credential: no bar exam, no board, just a degree that says you can reason about algorithms, which isn’t the same as shipping. A hiring manager with four hundred résumés had nothing to lean on, so we sold them fifty questions.

The questions measured recall: syntax and API trivia that good developers look up in twenty seconds, and a machine now answers instantly. So even a perfectly proctored test measures someone in the one condition they’ll never work in. Alone, from memory.

Eventually I learned that what we need to know about a person is whether we can trust them. There’s no great way to test that: