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So, I've never been involved in hiring, so I have no perspective on the state of the job market. However, I have trouble believing that anyone who would be wil

So, I've never been involved in hiring, so I have no perspective on the state of the job market. However, I have trouble believing that anyone who would be willing to rep themselves as a "C Developer" couldn't write this particular piece of code in a manner similar to the author's solution in a matter of minutes. Do these FizzBuzz articles keep getting promoted to the front page to boost everyone's collective egos, or is the job market really this pitiful? Can someone who has been involved in hiring recently comment with some anecdotal evidence as to what they've seen?

wheaties 16y ago
It isn't that pitiful, per se, but there are a lot of people who want to be programmers trying to pass themselves off as actual programmers. Then again, there are a small handful of people who can't code that apply all over the place because no one will hire them. There's more of the unhireables than you'd think.
smackfu 16y ago
To be honest, the people we hire tend to fall down in ways other than coding skills. Sloppiness in following procedures or pure laziness are much bigger impacts. Does anyone have a test for that?
RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
I've been involved in hiring, I've seen it, it's true. There are people who have excellent CVs who cannot write this code.
tptacek 16y ago
The problem isn't the job market --- although it is pitiful, and it is dreadfully hard to hire talented developers, particularly in C. The problem is that the hiring process is necessarily ineffective. You have a very short period of time to come to a sweeping conclusion about the entirety of someone's capabilities. Dev interviewers do a notoriously crappy job at this. The specific problem "FizzBuzz" tests solve is this: candidates who can talk about development (including people who know that the difference between otherwise equivalent for() and while() statements is whether the increment runs when you hit a "continue"), but who, when asked to sit down and code something, fumble horribly. These people, all of whom are smart and extremely knowledgeable about software development, have not developed the real world programming survival skill of being able to sit down and just code when they need to. Most development shops want to avoid these people. Hence: a test that isolates specifically your ability to just start coding, apart from any domain knowledge or computer science.
- baddox 16y ago
  This seems a little silly, or perhaps just overly optimistic. If I have a lot of real computer science knowledge and understanding, I should be able to get an entry-level software development job (assuming there are enough or close to enough to go around). I don't think this particular problem is too unrealistic to expect a CS graduate with zero experience to get right, but I think it's unrealistic for an employer to expect entry-level applicants to know a whole lot about how enterprise development works. That's why they have training (fairly well-structured and comprehensive training, from what I've read) for new hirees.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    The exercise has very little to do with experience or knowledge. Think of it as a sort of personality test. It isn't, but it helps to think of it that way.
cabalamat 16y ago
> I have trouble believing that anyone who would be willing to rep themselves as a "C Developer" couldn't write this particular piece of code in a manner similar to the author's solution in a matter of minutes Believe it. A friend of mine once got a job as a Cobol programmer (he didn't know Cobol but said he did). He managed to bluff his way through the job until the company went bankrupt 6 months later!
akeefer 16y ago
I've personally interviewed way, way too many people with impressive-looking CVs that couldn't code worth anything. Some people probably exaggerate their experience and some people I've seen end up in manager/"architect" roles that don't require actual coding and seem to forget how. Also, when you're hiring, you're getting a skewed picture of the overall programming population. Suppose (to make the math easy) that there are 100,000 programmers in the world, 90% of which are employed. So that leaves 10,000 programmers in the candidate pool. Most of the top 20% of those will be able to get a job from a referral and not go through a "normal" hiring process, so if you're screening resumes you're now down to the next 80%. But that's the bottom 80% of the 10% that's looking for a job. Of those, some are competent people between jobs or looking for a change, but a lot of them are just in the bottom 10% of the overall skill level, are basically unhirable, and are semi-permanently on the job market because of that. To make another simplification, if you and I both screen 100 resumes in the same area, there's a reasonable chance that the 10 best candidates we see are different since they go off the market so quickly, but that the 10 worst candidates we see are the same, since they stay on the market. And unfortunately, some of those totally unhirable people have good-looking resumes.
- sokoloff 16y ago
  And unfortunately, some of those totally unhirable people have good-looking resumes. Often because they've had PLENTY of time to work on their resume and plenty of feedback on what works and doesn't (for small values of "works")

wheaties 16y ago

It isn't that pitiful, per se, but there are a lot of people who want to be programmers trying to pass themselves off as actual programmers. Then again, there are a small handful of people who can't code that apply all over the place because no one will hire them. There's more of the unhireables than you'd think.

smackfu 16y ago

To be honest, the people we hire tend to fall down in ways other than coding skills. Sloppiness in following procedures or pure laziness are much bigger impacts. Does anyone have a test for that?

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago

I've been involved in hiring, I've seen it, it's true. There are people who have excellent CVs who cannot write this code.

tptacek 16y ago

The problem isn't the job market --- although it is pitiful, and it is dreadfully hard to hire talented developers, particularly in C. The problem is that the hiring process is necessarily ineffective. You have a very short period of time to come to a sweeping conclusion about the entirety of someone's capabilities. Dev interviewers do a notoriously crappy job at this. The specific problem "FizzBuzz" tests solve is this: candidates who can talk about development (including people who know that the difference between otherwise equivalent for() and while() statements is whether the increment runs when you hit a "continue"), but who, when asked to sit down and code something, fumble horribly. These people, all of whom are smart and extremely knowledgeable about software development, have not developed the real world programming survival skill of being able to sit down and just code when they need to. Most development shops want to avoid these people. Hence: a test that isolates specifically your ability to just start coding, apart from any domain knowledge or computer science.

baddox 16y ago
This seems a little silly, or perhaps just overly optimistic. If I have a lot of real computer science knowledge and understanding, I should be able to get an entry-level software development job (assuming there are enough or close to enough to go around). I don't think this particular problem is too unrealistic to expect a CS graduate with zero experience to get right, but I think it's unrealistic for an employer to expect entry-level applicants to know a whole lot about how enterprise development works. That's why they have training (fairly well-structured and comprehensive training, from what I've read) for new hirees.
- tptacek 16y ago
  The exercise has very little to do with experience or knowledge. Think of it as a sort of personality test. It isn't, but it helps to think of it that way.

cabalamat 16y ago

> I have trouble believing that anyone who would be willing to rep themselves as a "C Developer" couldn't write this particular piece of code in a manner similar to the author's solution in a matter of minutes Believe it. A friend of mine once got a job as a Cobol programmer (he didn't know Cobol but said he did). He managed to bluff his way through the job until the company went bankrupt 6 months later!

akeefer 16y ago

I've personally interviewed way, way too many people with impressive-looking CVs that couldn't code worth anything. Some people probably exaggerate their experience and some people I've seen end up in manager/"architect" roles that don't require actual coding and seem to forget how. Also, when you're hiring, you're getting a skewed picture of the overall programming population. Suppose (to make the math easy) that there are 100,000 programmers in the world, 90% of which are employed. So that leaves 10,000 programmers in the candidate pool. Most of the top 20% of those will be able to get a job from a referral and not go through a "normal" hiring process, so if you're screening resumes you're now down to the next 80%. But that's the bottom 80% of the 10% that's looking for a job. Of those, some are competent people between jobs or looking for a change, but a lot of them are just in the bottom 10% of the overall skill level, are basically unhirable, and are semi-permanently on the job market because of that. To make another simplification, if you and I both screen 100 resumes in the same area, there's a reasonable chance that the 10 best candidates we see are different since they go off the market so quickly, but that the 10 worst candidates we see are the same, since they stay on the market. And unfortunately, some of those totally unhirable people have good-looking resumes.

sokoloff 16y ago
And unfortunately, some of those totally unhirable people have good-looking resumes. Often because they've had PLENTY of time to work on their resume and plenty of feedback on what works and doesn't (for small values of "works")