vba_php said:
does this mean that you think I have the skills
Adam, I have no idea because that is an open-ended question. Do you have the skills to do the job? I don't know because I don't know which job you were seeking. And there are a LOT of different jobs out there.
We had a lot of people apply to work for us when I was working for the pipeline control systems company. There were a LOT of competent business programmers and a few of them were actually hired by our business staff. But I was doing real-time data monitoring and control systems and also I was doing device drivers for a Digital Equipment Corp. computer running the RSX-11M operating system. That wasn't for everyone.
For the job of designing a system that could run interstate or international pipelines, you had to have the mind-set and you needed a rare skill - alternation of scope. In simple terms, you had to be able to see both the forest AND the trees when necessary. When I worked for them, I had to be able to see hardware-level events as well as software events. I had to see how all those things fit together at high and low levels.
Then, when I was into navigation software I had to be able to program complex formulas for spherical trigonometry. There, the issue was optimizing the formulas so that the computer could do its work quickly and accurately because we had a tape to process with a LOT of "shoot" information. (We were doing underwater echo surveys.) The longer it took to do the navigation computations, the longer it would take us to process the tape and deliver our deliverable product - the "shoot" map.
For the Navy job, I had to understand the implications of certain security rules and had to know how to implement them on the O/S assigned to me. That included cryptography and network protocol analysis. And I had to do some database design and normalization for the action tracking software I built for them.
Each job was different. Do you have the skills? I don't know. Not saying you do, not saying you don't. Saying I have no opinion on the question you asked because its vagueness makes it unanswerable.
My point was that if you have to take a test with a company and the test makes absolutely no sense, that should tell YOU that there is a disconnect somewhere. If you want to flounder around with a company that gives crappy tests, that speaks of either desperation and/or lack of self-esteem, or it points to lack of ability to recognize bullsnot when you see it. That was my point.