superEb

> If you had different genes, you would have been a cat instead of human, and would not have the brain to be a software engineer.

While I don't discount the whole of your argument, this is possibly the dumbest thing you could have said.

I would venture to guess that you have not done much hiring and, thus, have not been burned by taking on developers, spending time and money to get them up to speed on application architecture, domain knowledge, and team processes, only to find out that they don't know how to write code.

A developer that cannot take basic requirements and codify them into working software is not a developer. A logician, scientist, or mathematician, maybe, but not a developer. And our hiring process is designed to help distinguish the developers from the non-developers.

Are you saying that exception handling is trivial and so old that it's irrelevant to know how to do it?

Good point. I failed to mention that the coding exercise is done sitting at a computer with an IDE.

So it's a simple concept that takes no time to learn, and they haven't yet learned it before showing up for an interview. Doesn't that tell me something right there?

Should I expect them to be knowledgeable of complicated concepts if they are not knowledgeable of simple concepts?

I'm sorry, I know I'm being obtuse here. I just didn't think that being able to code `throw new Exception();` in an interview for a Java developer position was too much to ask. I guess I'm wrong.

Thanks for your input, Dan. Based on your college experience, it sounds like you would not have been applying for a Java developer position right out of school, correct? But these candidates are. The position they are applying for is officially titled "Jr Java Developer".