8 ms·

I worked at Palantir in the covered period and did a ton of interviews, 5-10 a week. I experienced exactly this dynamic - very large numbers of applicants who h

I worked at Palantir in the covered period and did a ton of interviews, 5-10 a week. I experienced exactly this dynamic - very large numbers of applicants who had a bachelor's degree from a South or East Asian university, a year or two of work experience, and a Masters from a mid-tier US University. The large majority washed out on the FizzBuzz-level technical questions on phone screens (or asked in person at job fairs).

api 10y ago
I've seen American university CS grads wash out on FizzBuzz level questions at alarming levels as well so this is not exclusively a phenomenon with these backgrounds. How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all?
- sib 10y ago
  "How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all?" I'm sure that there are many more people who could complete FizzBuzz on a homework assignment, with the help of the Googles, than could do so in an interview. And there are many mid-tier MS programs that are happy to take money from international candidates and give them every opportunity to keep paying.
- throwaway8976 10y ago
  > I've seen American university CS grads wash out on FizzBuzz level questions at alarming levels as well so this is not exclusively a phenomenon with these backgrounds. Absolutely. They may even have washed out at higher numbers. The applicant pool described in the complaint definitely isn't representative of US CS majors nationwide, so you can't use it to draw inferences about the quality of students overall.
- 67726e 10y ago
  I'm rather shocked by this as well. I understand not knowing the latest frameworks and such, but I have close personal friends that say my name should be in parenthesis next to theirs on their diplomas. A lot of CS courses can be passed by getting help on take home assignments and rote memorization on tests. At least for your typical state schools.
- dabockster 10y ago
  > How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all? Recent undergraduate grad here. A lot of the algorithms I've seen on technical interviews were only covered once or twice in the curriculum. Basically, one such algorithm would come up in either the data structures or algorithms class, we would then work on it for the given assignment/exam, and finally we would move on from it. Subsequent course work would barely reference it. These things are best learned through repetition. Unfortunately, with all of the other CS coursework topics that I was being educated on, it seemed like there was little room for the repetition to take place. (At least, not in the stereotypical four year timespan assuming that the given student enters a CS program with no prior programming knowledge.)
  - chii 10y ago
    I would expect that the project they work on to utilize the knowledge in the courses. With 4 projects a year at 4 years, there's got to be something learned!
    - pavel_lishin 10y ago
      I got a BS in CS, graduated in 2006. What 4 projects? We had one project that lasted an entire semester, in one class; the rest was mostly one-off homework assignments that were very much topic-of-the-week. And most of them didn't really require coding.
      - chii 10y ago
        If this is really as common as you imply, then no wonder many grads are lacking in exp. I thought 4 projects was on the low end...
  - NoPiece 10y ago
    If you know even some basic programming and logic, you should be able to come up with a reasonable fizz buzz solution. You don't need to have studies the fizz buzz algorithm in college, or have practiced a solution.
- douche 10y ago
  Computer science programs, even at very prestigious schools, don't really require you to know anything about programming or practicality using computers. The amount of real hands-on work I did for classes in my entire undergrad career is less than I do in a good week at work.
- vidarh 10y ago
  The question is if the questions asked are really "FizzBuzz level" questions, or algorithm questions that are easy to consider of similar complexity when you know the expected algorithms. When I studied CS, data structures and algorithms was the second CS course we were expected to take, right after "introduction to programming". It would usually be taken in the second semester. That's the last time we were tested on a long range of algorithms, except indirectly if we happened to need a given algorithm to complete our work later. In the 22 years since, I've probably needed e.g. a depth first search once, and many of the algorithms I learned I've never touched on since. So for many, it boils down to whether or not you cared about and liked that course. I happened to love it - I read the set texts the first weekend of the course, and spent a lot of time reading up on algorithms in the years before and after. But for a lot of my class mates it was a course they had to endure to get to more interesting stuff. Many of them would go on to do very well in other subjects. If they can't figure out a problem like FizzBuzz given a complete description, then that's a deeper problem. But a lot of algorithm questions can sound like they are on that level because we expect people to know a catalogue of algorithms that most developers don't actually need through most of their careers.
  - sheeshkebab 10y ago
    ^^ - this. same here - almost 20 years of dev, last time I needed to implement basic cs algorithms were in college and grad school classes (and some idiotic corporate interviews where preferred way of coding is apparently using a white board). basic knowledge of fizbuzz, dfs, bfs, quicksort, and similar things of course is needed - however asking developers actually implement them in front of you is pointless, at least as far as job performance goes.
    - nazgob 10y ago
      Why do you bundle fizbuzz with some legit algorithms that require some knowledge? Fizzbuzz is a gimmick, deliberately picked as something very simple to filter out clowns. I can't imagine a more simple programming task. Any suggestions? ;)
      - 10y ago
- morgante 10y ago
  A lot of people are pushing back on you, but I've seen the exact same thing. I think everyone who hasn't interviewed developers would be surprised by the general incompetence, but everyone who runs an interview process realizes that 80+% of "developers" are terrible. For the record, I'm absolutely not talking about algorithms questions. I'm talking about literal FizzBuzz. A majority of candidates cannot solve it in 15 minutes. > How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all? It's through a combination of: 1. Tests being based on memorization, not actual knowledge or programming. If you manage to stuff enough keywords into answers, it's possible to pass. 2. Lots of group work. The 20% of students who actually know how to program finish the project while everyone else slacks off and asks for help "with this one thing." 3. Outright cheating. There's a thriving market in recycled homework and exam answers.
  - TulliusCicero 10y ago
    > everyone who runs an interview process realizes that 80+% of "developers" are terrible. No, 80% of people in the 'currently looking for a job developer pool' are terrible. But you have to consider that the worse a candidate is, the longer they stay in that pool. So judging developers as a whole based just on interviews makes them look much worse than they are.
    - morgante 10y ago
      Good point, that's always an important thing to remember. The average job applicant is much lower quality than the average developer.
      - Balgair 10y ago
        Maybe. With a large enough population for either the job-hunters or the employed, you should regress to the mean for the total population and the deviation should also be similar. This assumes a normal distribution for the metrics that you are hired for, something that may not be in fact true, ie. Poisson or exponential distributions are reasonable. What you can take away from this: Your own developers may not be as good as you think they are OR they may be much better, same for the candidates. That particular day you interviewed them they may have been exceptional or they may have been ill and they failed, or a million other reasons. I think Google came out a while ago and said that their initial hires had no correlation to the really successful people in the company after...5(?)... years. I can't find the citation, sorry. The interviewing process is known to be broken, so trying to extrapolate to say that the job-seekers are less good at these metrics than the employed is erroneous. I'm not saying you are wrong, just that using a binary decision like this to determine these things is wrong.
porpoisemonkey 10y ago
Does Palantir make US citizenship a requirement for most of its job positions? My understanding is that this is common place for most US military contractors but I was wondering if this applies to government contractors at large.
- throwaway8976 10y ago
  Not for the positions I was interviewing for.
- ardacinar 10y ago
  US citizenship is a requirement if you are going to do something related to the US government. I've worked for them in a position not related to the US government(not a US citizen myself) and the number of technical people who also happened to be US citizens were quite low.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
If that is the case, and the records show that, then the company is probably ok. But you have to show that all of the people you hired could pass FizzBuzz right? Google gave one of the best hiring training lectures I've ever attended on eliminating personal bias from interviewing questions. A lot of it was thinking about the question and the response and putting it in the context of someone you knew, what would you think then? Would you still consider it so highly? Or as such a deficit? They said, although I didn't experience it directly, that they did data analytics on interviewer write ups to identify bias. That could have been to sort of encourage due diligence but given how data driven that company was when I was there I would not put it past them to do exactly that.
- ng12 10y ago
  How does personal bias factor in to FizzBuzz? It's literally what I'm hiring you for -- I should be able to describe some process to you, and you should be able to write it out in code. Communication is a huge part of software engineering, and I don't understand why anyone would be expected to hire employees they cannot communicate with.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    Personal bias potentially factors in the moment your evaluation of the solution goes beyond "works" or "doesn't work" and into subjective evaluation of the code quality. Personal bias also potentially factors into how you describe it (so consider presenting it written, in the same format for everyone). E.g. let's say the interviewer goes into extra detail or ask for confirmation of understanding from candidates they favour.
  - ChuckMcM 10y ago
    In addition to vidarh's excellent response, FizzBuzz is a great example that personal bias should not interfere. So if you did data analysis of your candidates and everyone you hired could do FizzBuzz and everyone you didn't hire could not do FizzBuzz then you could objectively state that failure to do FizzBuzz disqualified the candidates and it was blind to personal bias or discrimination factors. However if you hire whites who couldn't do FizzBuzz in the interview and you didn't hire asians who could, then you can't really say that "not being able to do fizzbuzz is a disqualifier" because it only disqualified some candidates. Generally if you are hiring on work product skills (coding for software folks) and can show that your test is unbiased and you hire to the test, then you can avoid being found guilty of discrimination even if you hire a disproportionate number of a certain group. To be rock solid you also need to show that your applicant pool is highly diversified and has representation from all groups. Sometimes that means going out and seeking out candidates (like women or hispanics) who are self selecting to not apply. And why you really do better if you blind the resumes your HR staff sees before they sort them into phone screen and skip piles.
Zigurd 10y ago
Both sides of this issue are wrong. On the one hand, If I knew, based on online articles about the interview process, that there is a set of 100 questions out of which I might get asked 20, I'd prep on those 100 questions. It seems like the interviewees are underpreped for interviewing. That's sloppy. Maybe that's a reason not to hire them, but it probably isn't the best way to select hires. On the other hand this process makes about as much sense as requiring that I know how to shift a non-synchronized manual transmission in order to pass a driving test. Nobody is implementing most of these algorithms from scratch, and if they did it would be a bad practice without having a good reason to do it.
- daveFNbuck 10y ago
  You'd have a good point in your second paragraph if we were talking about implementing a Fibonacci Heap or an AVL tree. But the comment you're responding to is about people failing FizzBuzz.
  - Zigurd 10y ago
    Good point, FizzBuzz should take a couple minutes. AND it's the sort of thing a prepared interviewee should nail. I'd hope the rest of the interview would focus more on real-world considerations.
- ryuker16 10y ago
  Im guessing they assumed the CS degree was a magic job getter and were too cocky to study
StreamBright 10y ago
We introduced homework to filter out candidates who could not complete FizzBuzz level tasks. 70% of applications can be filtered by simple home work.

api 10y ago

I've seen American university CS grads wash out on FizzBuzz level questions at alarming levels as well so this is not exclusively a phenomenon with these backgrounds. How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all?

sib 10y ago
"How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all?" I'm sure that there are many more people who could complete FizzBuzz on a homework assignment, with the help of the Googles, than could do so in an interview. And there are many mid-tier MS programs that are happy to take money from international candidates and give them every opportunity to keep paying.
throwaway8976 10y ago
> I've seen American university CS grads wash out on FizzBuzz level questions at alarming levels as well so this is not exclusively a phenomenon with these backgrounds. Absolutely. They may even have washed out at higher numbers. The applicant pool described in the complaint definitely isn't representative of US CS majors nationwide, so you can't use it to draw inferences about the quality of students overall.
67726e 10y ago
I'm rather shocked by this as well. I understand not knowing the latest frameworks and such, but I have close personal friends that say my name should be in parenthesis next to theirs on their diplomas. A lot of CS courses can be passed by getting help on take home assignments and rote memorization on tests. At least for your typical state schools.
dabockster 10y ago
> How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all? Recent undergraduate grad here. A lot of the algorithms I've seen on technical interviews were only covered once or twice in the curriculum. Basically, one such algorithm would come up in either the data structures or algorithms class, we would then work on it for the given assignment/exam, and finally we would move on from it. Subsequent course work would barely reference it. These things are best learned through repetition. Unfortunately, with all of the other CS coursework topics that I was being educated on, it seemed like there was little room for the repetition to take place. (At least, not in the stereotypical four year timespan assuming that the given student enters a CS program with no prior programming knowledge.)
- chii 10y ago
  I would expect that the project they work on to utilize the knowledge in the courses. With 4 projects a year at 4 years, there's got to be something learned!
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    I got a BS in CS, graduated in 2006. What 4 projects? We had one project that lasted an entire semester, in one class; the rest was mostly one-off homework assignments that were very much topic-of-the-week. And most of them didn't really require coding.
    - chii 10y ago
      If this is really as common as you imply, then no wonder many grads are lacking in exp. I thought 4 projects was on the low end...
- NoPiece 10y ago
  If you know even some basic programming and logic, you should be able to come up with a reasonable fizz buzz solution. You don't need to have studies the fizz buzz algorithm in college, or have practiced a solution.
douche 10y ago
Computer science programs, even at very prestigious schools, don't really require you to know anything about programming or practicality using computers. The amount of real hands-on work I did for classes in my entire undergrad career is less than I do in a good week at work.
vidarh 10y ago
The question is if the questions asked are really "FizzBuzz level" questions, or algorithm questions that are easy to consider of similar complexity when you know the expected algorithms. When I studied CS, data structures and algorithms was the second CS course we were expected to take, right after "introduction to programming". It would usually be taken in the second semester. That's the last time we were tested on a long range of algorithms, except indirectly if we happened to need a given algorithm to complete our work later. In the 22 years since, I've probably needed e.g. a depth first search once, and many of the algorithms I learned I've never touched on since. So for many, it boils down to whether or not you cared about and liked that course. I happened to love it - I read the set texts the first weekend of the course, and spent a lot of time reading up on algorithms in the years before and after. But for a lot of my class mates it was a course they had to endure to get to more interesting stuff. Many of them would go on to do very well in other subjects. If they can't figure out a problem like FizzBuzz given a complete description, then that's a deeper problem. But a lot of algorithm questions can sound like they are on that level because we expect people to know a catalogue of algorithms that most developers don't actually need through most of their careers.
- sheeshkebab 10y ago
  ^^ - this. same here - almost 20 years of dev, last time I needed to implement basic cs algorithms were in college and grad school classes (and some idiotic corporate interviews where preferred way of coding is apparently using a white board). basic knowledge of fizbuzz, dfs, bfs, quicksort, and similar things of course is needed - however asking developers actually implement them in front of you is pointless, at least as far as job performance goes.
  - nazgob 10y ago
    Why do you bundle fizbuzz with some legit algorithms that require some knowledge? Fizzbuzz is a gimmick, deliberately picked as something very simple to filter out clowns. I can't imagine a more simple programming task. Any suggestions? ;)
    - 10y ago
morgante 10y ago
A lot of people are pushing back on you, but I've seen the exact same thing. I think everyone who hasn't interviewed developers would be surprised by the general incompetence, but everyone who runs an interview process realizes that 80+% of "developers" are terrible. For the record, I'm absolutely not talking about algorithms questions. I'm talking about literal FizzBuzz. A majority of candidates cannot solve it in 15 minutes. > How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all? It's through a combination of: 1. Tests being based on memorization, not actual knowledge or programming. If you manage to stuff enough keywords into answers, it's possible to pass. 2. Lots of group work. The 20% of students who actually know how to program finish the project while everyone else slacks off and asks for help "with this one thing." 3. Outright cheating. There's a thriving market in recycled homework and exam answers.
- TulliusCicero 10y ago
  > everyone who runs an interview process realizes that 80+% of "developers" are terrible. No, 80% of people in the 'currently looking for a job developer pool' are terrible. But you have to consider that the worse a candidate is, the longer they stay in that pool. So judging developers as a whole based just on interviews makes them look much worse than they are.
  - morgante 10y ago
    Good point, that's always an important thing to remember. The average job applicant is much lower quality than the average developer.
    - Balgair 10y ago
      Maybe. With a large enough population for either the job-hunters or the employed, you should regress to the mean for the total population and the deviation should also be similar. This assumes a normal distribution for the metrics that you are hired for, something that may not be in fact true, ie. Poisson or exponential distributions are reasonable. What you can take away from this: Your own developers may not be as good as you think they are OR they may be much better, same for the candidates. That particular day you interviewed them they may have been exceptional or they may have been ill and they failed, or a million other reasons. I think Google came out a while ago and said that their initial hires had no correlation to the really successful people in the company after...5(?)... years. I can't find the citation, sorry. The interviewing process is known to be broken, so trying to extrapolate to say that the job-seekers are less good at these metrics than the employed is erroneous. I'm not saying you are wrong, just that using a binary decision like this to determine these things is wrong.

porpoisemonkey 10y ago

Does Palantir make US citizenship a requirement for most of its job positions? My understanding is that this is common place for most US military contractors but I was wondering if this applies to government contractors at large.

throwaway8976 10y ago
Not for the positions I was interviewing for.
ardacinar 10y ago
US citizenship is a requirement if you are going to do something related to the US government. I've worked for them in a position not related to the US government(not a US citizen myself) and the number of technical people who also happened to be US citizens were quite low.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

If that is the case, and the records show that, then the company is probably ok. But you have to show that all of the people you hired could pass FizzBuzz right? Google gave one of the best hiring training lectures I've ever attended on eliminating personal bias from interviewing questions. A lot of it was thinking about the question and the response and putting it in the context of someone you knew, what would you think then? Would you still consider it so highly? Or as such a deficit? They said, although I didn't experience it directly, that they did data analytics on interviewer write ups to identify bias. That could have been to sort of encourage due diligence but given how data driven that company was when I was there I would not put it past them to do exactly that.

ng12 10y ago
How does personal bias factor in to FizzBuzz? It's literally what I'm hiring you for -- I should be able to describe some process to you, and you should be able to write it out in code. Communication is a huge part of software engineering, and I don't understand why anyone would be expected to hire employees they cannot communicate with.
- vidarh 10y ago
  Personal bias potentially factors in the moment your evaluation of the solution goes beyond "works" or "doesn't work" and into subjective evaluation of the code quality. Personal bias also potentially factors into how you describe it (so consider presenting it written, in the same format for everyone). E.g. let's say the interviewer goes into extra detail or ask for confirmation of understanding from candidates they favour.
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  In addition to vidarh's excellent response, FizzBuzz is a great example that personal bias should not interfere. So if you did data analysis of your candidates and everyone you hired could do FizzBuzz and everyone you didn't hire could not do FizzBuzz then you could objectively state that failure to do FizzBuzz disqualified the candidates and it was blind to personal bias or discrimination factors. However if you hire whites who couldn't do FizzBuzz in the interview and you didn't hire asians who could, then you can't really say that "not being able to do fizzbuzz is a disqualifier" because it only disqualified some candidates. Generally if you are hiring on work product skills (coding for software folks) and can show that your test is unbiased and you hire to the test, then you can avoid being found guilty of discrimination even if you hire a disproportionate number of a certain group. To be rock solid you also need to show that your applicant pool is highly diversified and has representation from all groups. Sometimes that means going out and seeking out candidates (like women or hispanics) who are self selecting to not apply. And why you really do better if you blind the resumes your HR staff sees before they sort them into phone screen and skip piles.

Zigurd 10y ago

Both sides of this issue are wrong. On the one hand, If I knew, based on online articles about the interview process, that there is a set of 100 questions out of which I might get asked 20, I'd prep on those 100 questions. It seems like the interviewees are underpreped for interviewing. That's sloppy. Maybe that's a reason not to hire them, but it probably isn't the best way to select hires. On the other hand this process makes about as much sense as requiring that I know how to shift a non-synchronized manual transmission in order to pass a driving test. Nobody is implementing most of these algorithms from scratch, and if they did it would be a bad practice without having a good reason to do it.

daveFNbuck 10y ago
You'd have a good point in your second paragraph if we were talking about implementing a Fibonacci Heap or an AVL tree. But the comment you're responding to is about people failing FizzBuzz.
- Zigurd 10y ago
  Good point, FizzBuzz should take a couple minutes. AND it's the sort of thing a prepared interviewee should nail. I'd hope the rest of the interview would focus more on real-world considerations.
ryuker16 10y ago
Im guessing they assumed the CS degree was a magic job getter and were too cocky to study

StreamBright 10y ago

We introduced homework to filter out candidates who could not complete FizzBuzz level tasks. 70% of applications can be filtered by simple home work.