Instead of paying a nominal price for people relearning some primitives for a specialized area of IT/software dev, nowadays most companies want the new kids to go to $80,000 worth of college for the same. That way, the employer gets to skip training, and the student is less likely to leave because he or she has too much damned debt to be mobile.

Maybe I'm projecting.

But I'm not a fan of people stating that see these kinds of tests as an attack, or see it as something which is unnecessary. There are a lot of people out there are unable to answer these questions, even with "google". And most of them are either unwilling or unable to improve themselves.

I'd rather have a very eager "junior" who loves what he does, and works hard to understand and develop him/herself than someone "senior" who knows a couple of tricks and is too arrogant to do these kinds of tests.

You keep people if: * they can improve / if they learn * if the colleagues are nice * and the product is interesting, aka they have meaning * management is done reasonably * there's a future for them

this is why startups are popular (learn lots of things, meaningful, good upside) as well as corporates (carreer path is flexible, good management, etc).

This person did not qualify to be _knowledgeable_, as he refused to do this test ;)