I haven’t, but my partner has. It’s good to have a practical test, IMO. The position they needed to fill involves having the manual dexterity and patience to cut pieces of fabric in straight lines at precise lengths, so the practical test at the end of the interview was drawing the thing they would be making with a provided ruler and pencil on a provided piece of paper. Now, you would think this is a low bar and pointless, but you would be surprised how bad science and engineering students are at manual dexterity and following simple directions.
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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I'm not surprised at all by that last part. The reason I'm even asking is because I feel like I have to be missing something about interviewing. We have a lot of people with 4 year degrees in engineering and computer science come in that are just dumbfounded by basic tasks and questions.
Like legitimately the best interviewees (and in the long term so far, employees) that we get are all service industry folks. Cooks, Bartenders, restaurant managers, etc. We have a couple people who did low level drafting right out of college that are good too, but even those were still paying the bills in the industry.
Is the state of STEM programs really this dire? Why is it that none of them can even handle basic questions or monkey see monkey do tasks?
Your stem applicants, if they aren't fresh out of college with no real job experience because their parents paid for their tuition, just sit on their asses all day. All that bullshit about being critical thinkers is them hyping themselves. They're complete drones who await their marching orders from Outlook and Teams. The highly paid people are all little Eichmanns who are trained to sleep at night after designing orphanage-busting bombs.
Service industry folks have to actually think on their feet. They almost always get inadequate tools for the job with only a "Man, I'm glad I'm not in your shoes right now. Good luck buddy, you're gonna need it lmao." They're forced to be resourceful. Dealing with shithead customers means their social skills are at bare minimum adequate. Most service industry workers know basic conflict deescalation after dealing with belligerent boomers.
It's a good illustration of the labor aristocrat vs actual prole divide.