Hi everyone,

I recently took a Java technical test (for a company who wanted are looking for senior java developers) and, funny enough, I only realised the technical terms of what I've been doing all along after I've written the test. I'm not too IT jargon when it comes to development but I can pretty much code and create solutions unaware that I'm using design pattern (or the specifics of that design pattern) or technology.

I learned things such as JMS, Frameworks, etc. while programming at home and having to google stuff online to problems I have.

Others e.g. IoC, Surrogates in Databases, etc., I have used extensively without knowing that it had a name for it.

• Do you think that these technical test are effective and why?
• What interesting questions did you find that boggled your brains out while the clock kept ticking?
• Seeing that IT is vastly evolving at a rapid rate, do we have to constantly be updated with new terms that comes out?

Some questions I was asked :

• What object oriented principle is violated by this architectural mechanism for dot notation?
• Is indexing tables effective for range query or point query search?
• What is ThreadLocal and what is it used for?
• Method overloading vs Method overriding. What is the difference between the 2?
• What is dynamic binding?

Now, imagine my poor head trying to understand these jargons (considering I use it almost everyday)

PS The question was not a programming question, where you have a problem and write code to solve it. Rather, a thinking type question and you write answers (against the clock).

Update I clearly didn't come out clearly as I should have. There are those that are technically "book smart" but with very little hands-on experience and vice versa. So, the question (in connection to what I've asked) is that are these technical test seeking "book smart" people or people with lots of hands-on experience (some who are not that well clued up with too much book-smart jargons). How effective is it then, for companies to look for developers if most of the questions are too terminology-centric? (if that's the correct term, :))