6 ms·

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 backgr

by 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.
  - jnordwick 10y ago
    I spent weeks on that algorithm. It is only through daily katas that I still remember its rigors.
- tominous 10y ago
  > ..assuming that the given student enters a CS program with no prior programming knowledge This is bizarre to me. It's like someone signing up for a music degree having never played an instrument. Maybe you'll cram enough to pass a test on the theory, but it's useless knowledge. It's unanchored and will float away.
  - 10y ago
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.

by api 10y ago

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.
- jnordwick 10y ago
  I spent weeks on that algorithm. It is only through daily katas that I still remember its rigors.
tominous 10y ago
> ..assuming that the given student enters a CS program with no prior programming knowledge This is bizarre to me. It's like someone signing up for a music degree having never played an instrument. Maybe you'll cram enough to pass a test on the theory, but it's useless knowledge. It's unanchored and will float away.
- 10y ago

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.