Testing, 1, 2, 3, Testing

Tomorrow morning, I take a test. I haven’t taken a test in years. A promising, prospective employer, having now spoken twice with me on the phone, wants to assess my software engineering skills, so tomorrow morning I face a timed, 2-hour coding test. I don’t know what to expect. I’m both nervous and yet not.

I certainly want to do well. I spend the weekend figuring out how to set up a virtual environment on my laptop. All of my infrastructure used to be on the cloud through work, but now that I’m not working, I no longer have that infrastructure and need to figure it out myself. I’m relearning DataFrames, notebook programs, and graphing.

Historically, I test well. I study beforehand and think methodically about solutions to exam questions. Former boss Gene did say I was a fast coder. Although I haven’t been manipulating data for the past five months, I have been coding a lot in Python, C++, and Java for my art projects. I sound like my resume.

Still, I’m not sure what kind of test the employer will throw at me. Such testing isn’t uncommon in the software engineering profession in which exaggeration is rife of one’s abilities, but as I head towards fifty years old, it feels odd to face a formal evaluation. If I were hiring, I would want to assess candidates in a similar way.  If they ask me to deploy some code or quickly put together a flask application, I may be doomed.

Nonetheless, I’m ready and I accept your evaluation. Bring it on.