Bad experience with too much undetected nepotism might be a reason they decided to start looking for slightly more objective procedures. When those then still get gamed, perhaps even harder, that turns into a slippery slope and in the end you get those systems where only those who memorize the entire secret dance routine ever get a position.
Or maybe it's like OP said, the HR guy read a book on hiring and now has a 2hr test because he thinks it will help. While the dev team is struggling to hire good people.
The thing I dislike, but not surprised about, is how so many dev teams will engage in this circus. The dev management guy is definitely okaying the 5th toy test thing. Which can probably be summarized by the stereotype of which devs seek management, if they are devs at all.
Anyway, I doubt FedEx is doing interesting programming work anyway. They'll get the quality and output they deserve.
Having worked at FedEx, I can say that there’s actually a decent amount of interesting work to be done.
First, the website gets a ton of traffic. Granted, it’s not google scale but it’s still significant enough to be interesting.
The more interesting bits are behind the scenes. The operations research challenges are enormous, routing millions of packages across thousands of trucks and airplanes. The sorting hubs are highly automated and frankly terrifying in their scale and speed.
I worked in fraud detection and infosec, and I can’t say much detailed about that. Suffice it to say that stealing packages is a sufficiently good motivation for criminals to develop some interesting strategies.
All that to say that it’s deeply disappointing that fedex is using dumb shit like this to screen talent.
