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When I was a recent graduate, I was thrown into becoming the lead developer for a product at a startup after my boss left to become a Java dev. The workload wa

by EnderMB 10y ago

When I was a recent graduate, I was thrown into becoming the lead developer for a product at a startup after my boss left to become a Java dev. The workload was enough that we needed to hire another developer, so we lined up a couple of people for interviews. As the most senior technical person on the team (with two whole years experience) it fell to me to try and hire someone. I had barely had any technical interviews, let alone interviewed someone, so I did what anyone who read Jeff Atwood's blog would do. I used FizzBuzz. Then and now, I still feel it's a poor way to judge someone's programming ability. It judges your ability to know the modulus operator above anything else. However, it did seem to weed out most of the people who came for the job. We had people with eight years experience and significant experience in what we did that couldn't get as far as the for-loop. I asked a couple of super basic questions to judge their knowledge (how do you guys deploy code at your current job? difference between a class and an object? etc), and nearly everyone answered these, but FizzBuzz was solved by only one person, even when they were allowed to use any language they want. We ended up hiring this guy, and he's still there (well, at the company they acquired them shortly after I left). We're still friends, and I consider him to be a rock solid developer whom I would hire again. I've not used it since, but I've worked with a number of developers in the past few years that have walked into a job with nothing more than a CV of impressive words and a memorised list of answers to the kind of questions you see on the first page of a "developer interview questions" Google search. My favoured approach has been a relaxed conversation in a cafe and a task to build something, done either at home or in the office, but I often wonder whether I'd be better off just going back to FizzBuzz.

Normal_gaussian 10y ago
I have a "simple" problem where a piece of code somebody "wrote this morning" doesn't work. Its about thirty lines, has a pretty print harness and well defined inputs and outputs - it normally takes a competent programmer about 15 minutes to solve in an interview setting (less than five outside). What absolutely shocked me when I first started using it is that it normally takes them 10 minutes for them to decide to insert any form of debugging code, and many try and not talk to me - despite introducing the problem as "a quick debugging task which we hope will show your willingness to talk problems over". Of course the man that took the biscuit was the one who, after I introduced the problem boldly stated "This is obviously a complex problem. If I had more time I would be able to solve it for you". No.

by EnderMB 10y ago

Normal_gaussian 10y ago

I have a "simple" problem where a piece of code somebody "wrote this morning" doesn't work. Its about thirty lines, has a pretty print harness and well defined inputs and outputs - it normally takes a competent programmer about 15 minutes to solve in an interview setting (less than five outside). What absolutely shocked me when I first started using it is that it normally takes them 10 minutes for them to decide to insert any form of debugging code, and many try and not talk to me - despite introducing the problem as "a quick debugging task which we hope will show your willingness to talk problems over". Of course the man that took the biscuit was the one who, after I introduced the problem boldly stated "This is obviously a complex problem. If I had more time I would be able to solve it for you". No.