I have to disagree: When you're hiring a person, you're hiring someone to join your team. Hopefully, we can agree that the majority of people in our field have the capacity to learn.
In fact, in many FAANGs, your first performance review year is "freebie" because they know that you're not going to come in and know the role and the tools used intnerally.
So, then, what is the technical aptitude test (is it really anything other than that?) for? Well, it could be used to measure a baseline for basic programming skills; however, this isn't how most technical interviews are designed.
Interviews aren't designed around the premise that knowledge on the internet exists or that your colleagues could, oft, be your first line of support (or code reviews, if the company has a good culture). Hell, there are interviews where the candidate has to code in notepad (or other text editor equivalent) because they don't want the candidate availing of things like Intellisense.
If we look at it from a different perspective, though, we live in a time when we can now put our source code online for the world to see. We can publish packages for the world to consume. We can make changes to production software (FOSS) and documentation and that's easily traceable (if you're not obfuscating your identity through sixty different handles).
It seems we don't consider these viable avenues of purview to view the candidate's ability before even asking them questions.
With that being said, are you really hiring the candidate because they would be good for the team or are you just hiring the candidate who can check off some interview-type question boxes?
I have interviewed a number of people in my day and the most excelled candidate that we interviewed and hired, because he checked all of the technical boxes, ended-up being a raging asshole and bringing the team morale down, considerably.
So, at the end of the day, you're not just hiring someone to fill a role. A single role is all but mostly dead, anymore. You're hiring someone to join a team and the human aspect should outweigh the technical aspect.
After all, just because someone checks all of the boxes, it doesn't imply that they would "be a good fit".
In fact, in many FAANGs, your first performance review year is "freebie" because they know that you're not going to come in and know the role and the tools used intnerally.
So, then, what is the technical aptitude test (is it really anything other than that?) for? Well, it could be used to measure a baseline for basic programming skills; however, this isn't how most technical interviews are designed.
Interviews aren't designed around the premise that knowledge on the internet exists or that your colleagues could, oft, be your first line of support (or code reviews, if the company has a good culture). Hell, there are interviews where the candidate has to code in notepad (or other text editor equivalent) because they don't want the candidate availing of things like Intellisense.
If we look at it from a different perspective, though, we live in a time when we can now put our source code online for the world to see. We can publish packages for the world to consume. We can make changes to production software (FOSS) and documentation and that's easily traceable (if you're not obfuscating your identity through sixty different handles).
It seems we don't consider these viable avenues of purview to view the candidate's ability before even asking them questions.
With that being said, are you really hiring the candidate because they would be good for the team or are you just hiring the candidate who can check off some interview-type question boxes?
I have interviewed a number of people in my day and the most excelled candidate that we interviewed and hired, because he checked all of the technical boxes, ended-up being a raging asshole and bringing the team morale down, considerably.
So, at the end of the day, you're not just hiring someone to fill a role. A single role is all but mostly dead, anymore. You're hiring someone to join a team and the human aspect should outweigh the technical aspect.
After all, just because someone checks all of the boxes, it doesn't imply that they would "be a good fit".