The PCA Group interview questions

The interview was pretty solid, I sat down with the Lead Senior Developer and the IT Director and the process seemed smooth. Nothing was out of the ordinary with the basic questions. They asked questions about where I came from, my background, what was expected. They dabbled in all kinds of technologies and provide a wealth of information to their own employees. They concern themselves with learning about the latest technologies and business idealogy as a top priority. Once the initial 1-2 hour interview is over, they will ask you to take a 3 hour exam. This is a horrible exam to base current knowledge on. They ask questions that a beginner developer would know straight out of college but would later forget along the years at an IT company OR a developer that developed right out of the 1970s would know. The problem with this 3 hour exam is that none of the questions deal with the realm that current developers even think about anymore. For example: "Please convert a string to UPPER without using the built in function of UPPER." Please insert a char array"HELLO" after the third character of this sentence "This is a sentence" without using the built-in function "Instr" or string buffers. I even seen current experience senior developers screw these up! How does that have any basis on design and implementation. which are basically topics that are more important to the scalability of their company? A friend of mine also had a recent interview with them and found the 3 hour exam to be rather insulting as did I. Programmers nowadays have a VAST amount of things to focus on: IDE tools, systems to work in, different OSs, knowledge on networking, learn on the fly coding, server-client loading, team discussions, groups, debugging tools, design principles, coding ethics. The 3 hour exam was not fair; and to add insult to injury: the last question they asked was: "Do you feel this exam is fair?" ..HOLY... You fail this exam, you will not get in.