I'm sitting in on a technical interview tomorrow and as I was skimming through the resume and coming up with questions I had an interesting thought...
Why do design techniques never come into play in technical interviews??
Now I know that some companies might possibly give someone an "oral examination" where they have them design a component on a white board, but in all my interviews I've never been given a test or had to answer real questions on OOAD. Now, I have been given programming tests out the wazoo. But honestly, who cares if you can program the world with C# delegates or perform pointer arithmetic (yuck!!) if you can't take a simple functional specification document and transform it into an end product that meets the end user expectations?
If software engineering is ever going to truly be considered an engineering discipline we need to move past the processes of simply testing knowledge of programming languages. Programming languages are nothing more than tools to a software engineer. We need to be hitting the software engineering concepts as the true gauge in hiring as I have met many a person who could ace a programming test and then turn in an application where all of the code existed in one long file...
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