So I’m thinking of switching jobs because I hate the commute. Of course the best time to think about switching jobs is when you don’t need to nor really have to–in my case I’d be perfectly happy staying put for another 5 years, but honestly the drive is killing me. So I’m “exploring my options.”

One “exploration” involved talking to a head-hunter who then sent me to a site to take a stupid on-line test.

I get it: it’s a great screening mechanism to filter out the bozos who claim years of Java or SQL or C++ but who wouldn’t know the difference between a class and a struct or a select verses an update–and lord knows I’ve interviewed enough people where I work who claimed expert knowledge but who couldn’t write a function call to save his life.

But ohmygod that was the worst test-taking experience I’ve ever had. Perhaps I’m just old: it’s the first test I’ve ever taken on-line. But I like being able to go back and check my answers, and I like being able to run through the test out of order so I can spend extra time on the hard questions. The whole “you have three minutes and if you don’t hit the OK button we’re taking you to the next question” combined with the “hit the back button at your own dooooooom!!!” thing drove me bats. And that says nothing about staring at tables full of tiny tiny little text and a SQL statement and the question “how many values will this return? 8? 9? 11? 13?”

I have a headache.