7 ms·

I'd be interested to hear what you would expect as bare minimums for a "basic entry level technical role." I've heard of recruiters being dumbfounded at CS grad

I'd be interested to hear what you would expect as bare minimums for a "basic entry level technical role." I've heard of recruiters being dumbfounded at CS grads not being able to code FizzBuzz and to be honest I can't believe it.

dmd 10y ago
I've personally interviewed applicants for a "senior developer" position who claimed on their resume 5+ years of jobs where their primary job was supposedly programming, and who could not come up with code to sum the odd integers from 1 to n.
- bko 10y ago
  I've heard stories like that before. Serious question, what do those people actually do? Are they just so far removed from these general type of questions that they can not answer them or do they have no programming ability at all? It just strikes me as bizarre
  - meowface 10y ago
    For some, it could be anxiety. I sometimes choke on really simple questions in interviews that I know I could easily answer if I were home alone. I have anxiety issues in general, though.
    - rtpg 10y ago
      I think it's also important that sometimes it can be misunderstanding the question. I know it sounds silly because it's written clearly here, but in a spoken interview it's possible an interviewee can miss a detail and suddenly think they're faced with travelling salesmen. Or are worried about I/O Of course in those situations, the "right" thing to do is ask for clarification, or think out loud. And an interviewer should make sure the interviewee is solving the right question (in the real world, people help each other).
      - wallacoloo 10y ago
        This is pretty significant. I recently had the opportunity to sit in on some meetings & IM conversations with a recruiting team at my workplace, and was pleasantly surprised with how detailed they were in honing their interview approach. One proposed open-ended interview question in particular (these recruiters utilize both coding exercises & open-ended questions, plus some other stuff), "What's the difference between the stack and the heap?" was shot down for a number of reasons - colloquially, these refer to two different pools of memory wherein variables can be allocated. But stacks and heaps are also specific data structures, so there's some ambiguity. Most importantly, it's surprisingly difficult to answer that with anything that's 100% correct (e.g. "the stack is for variables with known lifetimes, whereas the heap is for those with unknown lifetimes" is really just a convention, and there are plenty of exceptions w.r.t. data structures of size that isn't compile-time constant, or dealing with polymorphism in certain languages). And since the question is rooted in fact, vs something that's intended to be debatable, lots of people won't throw forward the thoughts they have that are only 80% correct - they effectively freeze.
        gaius 10y ago
        At one company we were reviewing the interview questions we used for graduates, and we had to take one out about a hypothetical factory manufacturing widgets. It was actually a simple maths problem about widgets per hour given various inputs. But the grads would freak out at the word "widget" and derail the interview demanding an explanation of what exactly a widget was, what it was used for, etc etc. I personally thought that that was an excellent filter actually, but I was overruled...
        Animats 10y ago
        In manufacturing, you use the term "part" for one instance of a unique thing, and "part number" for a class of identical parts. But people who have never been in a factory may not know that.
        gaius 10y ago
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    Never-ending projects that never deliver, and management that never looks at the code. Also, cheating your way through college - which is basically a requirement for a lot of programs that offer a vertical learning curve, programs spoiled by the fact that many of the people who take a CS program have been hobbyist programmers for years. After the second semester, CS students divide into three groups: 1) stressed out hobbyist programmers having their mind blown by the complexity of what they're learning, 2) people with no programming experience failing to learn to program (because the intro courses don't actually have any lectures about the basics of programming) and switching majors to business or engineering (because they've already taken calculus), and 3) other previous non-programmers who are copying other students' work or googled answers from the internet. Type 3) eventually graduate, get jobs based on having the degree, and never finish a project in a programming role by utilizing a combination of charm, excuses, and transferring between jobs before they have to show their work. If they can paula = "Brilliant"[1] long enough, they can get into management before they are exposed. So many of the people I did CS with never even learned basic programming skills before they got their diploma. This is at a major state university with a very well-regarded program. [1] http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean
    - ryandrake 10y ago
      Haha, the longer I stay in the software biz, the more I believe paula = "Brillant" to be a true story. The sad thing is, that there are tons of talented programmers out there who actually know what they are doing, getting rejected interview after interview because of "culture fit", while charlatans like paula BS and charm their way into job after job, trashing their projects and moving on to the next one as soon as their ruse is about to be uncovered. Chalk it up to yet more evidence of how tech interviewing/hiring is utterly broken.
      - ryuker16 10y ago
        ive been paula in 2 jobs recently....unintentially. i specificaly asked if they wanted to give me a hard technical interview....both greatly objected including one who said they trusted me despite only having 1 year or programming experience....for a six figure senior lead roll. Both seemed to really liked hiring odd canidates but were no slouches on coding.
- Animats 10y ago
  You don't need a program for that, as Gauss figured out in elementary school.
iamdave 10y ago
Let me flip that around and offer that I've had "technical" recruiters fail their end of this transaction as well. One experience involved a recruiter who wanted a compete rewrite of a CV portion outlining a SQL project from planning to continuous implementation models I built. This on top of 8 years of other experience in data design and management. The recruiter wanted to pass on my resume because I had failed to indicate my experience with flat CSV files and thought I needed more experience with them as a "highly specialized software stack". I decided not to pursue that company further, maybe it was ego getting in the way but insisting I rewrite a technical resume covering 10 years of database experience over the omission of operating with flat files seemed like refusing to hire a qualified electrical engineer because he didn't list AA Batteries on his resume.
- splicer 10y ago
  > refusing to hire a qualified electrical engineer because he didn't list AA Batteries on his resume LOL! It won't be long before the majority of EEs under 25 won't even know what an AA battery is. In fact, I bet it would be pretty hard today to find someone in their 20s who knows what a 9-volt is.
  - arundelo 10y ago
    I have six young relatives (nephews and a niece) that are all 19 or younger. I'd bet that all of them but maybe the 2-year-old know what a battery (of this type) is and all but the 2-year-old and maybe the 6-year-old can name different types. Remember, their phones and tablets charge from a cable but their toys and remote controls use 9-volt, AAA, AA, and D batteries. Edit: I guess you were emphasizing the obscurity of the 9-volt in particular, but I think they probably have several things that use 9-volts.
  - douche 10y ago
    It's that thing they take out of the smoke detectors in their college apartments...
  - JackFr 10y ago
    Let alone experience licking one.
jorts 10y ago
The role we were hiring for was for tier 1 desktop support. It involved basic Windows and network troubleshooting. Most of the people we hired for this role were self taught and picked up their skills troubleshooting issues on their home machines. I also would be shocked if a CS grad could not complete FizzBuzz, but apparently that happens.
vacri 10y ago
My tech lead was bemoaning a round of applicants for a senior position, where some of the candidates couldn't even conceptually 'get' FizzBuzz, let alone code it.
- MiddleEndian 10y ago
  Someone I know (not me, I swear!) was excited to interview an experienced candidate with a fantastic résumé for a test lead position. Said candidate did not know what a unit test was and could not figure out how to write one, even after the concept was explained. I have no idea how this could ever happen.
  - flukus 10y ago
    Were they a manual tester? HR/Recruiters don't seem to know the difference. Should they know about unit tests though? That's a developers job.
    - MiddleEndian 10y ago
      I didn't interview said candidate but I am under the impression that web-based integration tests were their specialty. Still no excuse to not at least be familiar with the concept of unit tests.

dmd 10y ago

I've personally interviewed applicants for a "senior developer" position who claimed on their resume 5+ years of jobs where their primary job was supposedly programming, and who could not come up with code to sum the odd integers from 1 to n.

bko 10y ago
I've heard stories like that before. Serious question, what do those people actually do? Are they just so far removed from these general type of questions that they can not answer them or do they have no programming ability at all? It just strikes me as bizarre
- meowface 10y ago
  For some, it could be anxiety. I sometimes choke on really simple questions in interviews that I know I could easily answer if I were home alone. I have anxiety issues in general, though.
  - rtpg 10y ago
    I think it's also important that sometimes it can be misunderstanding the question. I know it sounds silly because it's written clearly here, but in a spoken interview it's possible an interviewee can miss a detail and suddenly think they're faced with travelling salesmen. Or are worried about I/O Of course in those situations, the "right" thing to do is ask for clarification, or think out loud. And an interviewer should make sure the interviewee is solving the right question (in the real world, people help each other).
    - wallacoloo 10y ago
      This is pretty significant. I recently had the opportunity to sit in on some meetings & IM conversations with a recruiting team at my workplace, and was pleasantly surprised with how detailed they were in honing their interview approach. One proposed open-ended interview question in particular (these recruiters utilize both coding exercises & open-ended questions, plus some other stuff), "What's the difference between the stack and the heap?" was shot down for a number of reasons - colloquially, these refer to two different pools of memory wherein variables can be allocated. But stacks and heaps are also specific data structures, so there's some ambiguity. Most importantly, it's surprisingly difficult to answer that with anything that's 100% correct (e.g. "the stack is for variables with known lifetimes, whereas the heap is for those with unknown lifetimes" is really just a convention, and there are plenty of exceptions w.r.t. data structures of size that isn't compile-time constant, or dealing with polymorphism in certain languages). And since the question is rooted in fact, vs something that's intended to be debatable, lots of people won't throw forward the thoughts they have that are only 80% correct - they effectively freeze.
      - gaius 10y ago
        At one company we were reviewing the interview questions we used for graduates, and we had to take one out about a hypothetical factory manufacturing widgets. It was actually a simple maths problem about widgets per hour given various inputs. But the grads would freak out at the word "widget" and derail the interview demanding an explanation of what exactly a widget was, what it was used for, etc etc. I personally thought that that was an excellent filter actually, but I was overruled...
        Animats 10y ago
        In manufacturing, you use the term "part" for one instance of a unique thing, and "part number" for a class of identical parts. But people who have never been in a factory may not know that.
        gaius 10y ago
- pessimizer 10y ago
  Never-ending projects that never deliver, and management that never looks at the code. Also, cheating your way through college - which is basically a requirement for a lot of programs that offer a vertical learning curve, programs spoiled by the fact that many of the people who take a CS program have been hobbyist programmers for years. After the second semester, CS students divide into three groups: 1) stressed out hobbyist programmers having their mind blown by the complexity of what they're learning, 2) people with no programming experience failing to learn to program (because the intro courses don't actually have any lectures about the basics of programming) and switching majors to business or engineering (because they've already taken calculus), and 3) other previous non-programmers who are copying other students' work or googled answers from the internet. Type 3) eventually graduate, get jobs based on having the degree, and never finish a project in a programming role by utilizing a combination of charm, excuses, and transferring between jobs before they have to show their work. If they can paula = "Brilliant"[1] long enough, they can get into management before they are exposed. So many of the people I did CS with never even learned basic programming skills before they got their diploma. This is at a major state university with a very well-regarded program. [1] http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    Haha, the longer I stay in the software biz, the more I believe paula = "Brillant" to be a true story. The sad thing is, that there are tons of talented programmers out there who actually know what they are doing, getting rejected interview after interview because of "culture fit", while charlatans like paula BS and charm their way into job after job, trashing their projects and moving on to the next one as soon as their ruse is about to be uncovered. Chalk it up to yet more evidence of how tech interviewing/hiring is utterly broken.
    - ryuker16 10y ago
      ive been paula in 2 jobs recently....unintentially. i specificaly asked if they wanted to give me a hard technical interview....both greatly objected including one who said they trusted me despite only having 1 year or programming experience....for a six figure senior lead roll. Both seemed to really liked hiring odd canidates but were no slouches on coding.
Animats 10y ago
You don't need a program for that, as Gauss figured out in elementary school.

iamdave 10y ago

Let me flip that around and offer that I've had "technical" recruiters fail their end of this transaction as well. One experience involved a recruiter who wanted a compete rewrite of a CV portion outlining a SQL project from planning to continuous implementation models I built. This on top of 8 years of other experience in data design and management. The recruiter wanted to pass on my resume because I had failed to indicate my experience with flat CSV files and thought I needed more experience with them as a "highly specialized software stack". I decided not to pursue that company further, maybe it was ego getting in the way but insisting I rewrite a technical resume covering 10 years of database experience over the omission of operating with flat files seemed like refusing to hire a qualified electrical engineer because he didn't list AA Batteries on his resume.

splicer 10y ago
> refusing to hire a qualified electrical engineer because he didn't list AA Batteries on his resume LOL! It won't be long before the majority of EEs under 25 won't even know what an AA battery is. In fact, I bet it would be pretty hard today to find someone in their 20s who knows what a 9-volt is.
- arundelo 10y ago
  I have six young relatives (nephews and a niece) that are all 19 or younger. I'd bet that all of them but maybe the 2-year-old know what a battery (of this type) is and all but the 2-year-old and maybe the 6-year-old can name different types. Remember, their phones and tablets charge from a cable but their toys and remote controls use 9-volt, AAA, AA, and D batteries. Edit: I guess you were emphasizing the obscurity of the 9-volt in particular, but I think they probably have several things that use 9-volts.
- douche 10y ago
  It's that thing they take out of the smoke detectors in their college apartments...
- JackFr 10y ago
  Let alone experience licking one.

jorts 10y ago

The role we were hiring for was for tier 1 desktop support. It involved basic Windows and network troubleshooting. Most of the people we hired for this role were self taught and picked up their skills troubleshooting issues on their home machines. I also would be shocked if a CS grad could not complete FizzBuzz, but apparently that happens.

vacri 10y ago

My tech lead was bemoaning a round of applicants for a senior position, where some of the candidates couldn't even conceptually 'get' FizzBuzz, let alone code it.

MiddleEndian 10y ago
Someone I know (not me, I swear!) was excited to interview an experienced candidate with a fantastic résumé for a test lead position. Said candidate did not know what a unit test was and could not figure out how to write one, even after the concept was explained. I have no idea how this could ever happen.
- flukus 10y ago
  Were they a manual tester? HR/Recruiters don't seem to know the difference. Should they know about unit tests though? That's a developers job.
  - MiddleEndian 10y ago
    I didn't interview said candidate but I am under the impression that web-based integration tests were their specialty. Still no excuse to not at least be familiar with the concept of unit tests.