I am an IT person, started out as a Solaris engineer, moved to a LAMP admin, and now a VisualStudio VB.NET programmer in addition to my management duties and responsibilities, including hiring.

We had a new company handed down as an approved HR firm, so I started interviewing. Now, I've had a long held practice of asking two very basic "programmers quiz" questions; one that relates to SQL and one that relates to general coding practices. I was starting to doubt that they were an effective part of my interview style until recently when someone failed both.

He came from a recruiting firm, listed himself as a C# person, had verified references and promised 8 years of experience.

He did not know that you needed an update statement to change data that was in a table, nor did he know that in certain cases a select/case/switch (I would have accepted either) structure would be more elegant than an if/elseif/elseif structure for a certain task.

Everyone else I've ever interviewed has gotten those two right.

I don't believe in a big 10 page questionnaire; I think that's pretty stupid. I consider myself an above average PHP programmer for instance, but it's been a year and a half. In one week on the job I'd be right back to polished, and in one month I'd be fully 5.0 ready I'm sure - but give me some tricky test on the differences between 5.0 and 4.1 syntax right now or tomorrow and I'm pretty sure I'd fail it, and you'd screw yourself out of a good programmer.

I'm not arguing that testing is great; it should be done in small doses, and its limitations should be understood.

But I see way too many tech people responding "QQ oh noes the bad man wants to ask me if I know what I am doing /wrists" ... and I have a different perspective on the matter.

Grow up. I'm going to keep asking my two quiz questions thank you very much. I almost hired that guy.