8 ms·

While I agree that 20h working assignment is ridiculous I saw some serious primadonnas while interviewing who declined to do a simple 15-30 minutes on-site codi

While I agree that 20h working assignment is ridiculous I saw some serious primadonnas while interviewing who declined to do a simple 15-30 minutes on-site coding challenge because they have extensive github or whatever they told me. Needless to say those candidates didn't got hired.

jpatokal 9y ago
While I rather like "Pri madonna", it's originally simple Italian for "first lady": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prima_donna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prima_donna
- Arkaad 9y ago
  So what?
hardwaresofton 9y ago
Why even ask for resumes if you're going to ignore them? I also get very annoyed when people ask about your experience, then in the very next breath pretend none of it matters and you should do fizzbuzz. If we as an industry don't trust/value the stated experience of others, why do we continue to ask for it? Maybe tech companies should just stop accepting resumes then?
- hvidgaard 9y ago
  FizzBuzz is a great way to see if the dev experience listed is total bullshit.
  - pawelkomarnicki 9y ago
    yeah like that one company asking me to do Slack to work at their inventory management startup ;-) Totally related, in so many ways.
  - bphogan 9y ago
    Not sure about that. FizzBuzz is an interview question you just expect. RosettaCode has every FizzBuzz solution out there. Tons of people know how to FizzBuzz. This is just "learning enough to pass the test" - a canned answer like the one you know you have for "How do you deal with multiple simultaneous high priority projects?" or "What's your biggest weakness?" You may be filtering out lazy lazy candidates with FizzBuzz. But just because they can do it doesn't mean they can ship code.
    - lmm 9y ago
      The idea isn't that you hire everyone who can FizzBuzz, it's that you don't hire (or waste any more time interviewing) those who can't.
    - dropit_sphere 9y ago
      What is the answer to those questions? I can Fizzbuzz in any number of languages, but the first response that springs to mind for the others is "Fuck off."
      - bphogan 9y ago
        Really? As a potential member of my team, I really do want those questions answered because how you answer them tells me about your character, personality, and thought process. I don't care what your biggest weakness is. You could have severe OCD or addiction. You could battle depression. You could be a chronic procrastinator. None of those matter. What does matter is if you give a solid straight honest answer, rather than some canned crap you read on a web site somewhere. Same goes for how you manage multiple high-priority things. Every job I've worked on, every team, it always happens that there are multiple high priority things. Do you try to do them all and then crash and burn? Do you do them half-assed? Do you fight to get priorities aligned? Do you call the sponsors together and share information about the deadlines? Do you under promise and over-deliver? Do you ask for help from your team? The way you answer is often more important than what you answer. Unless it's "Fuck off." :)
  - pklausler 9y ago
    FizzBuzz itself is too well known, but the world is full of other trivial questions that can filter out the no-hires.
    - hvidgaard 9y ago
      I usually cook my own questions that involve a loop and an if statement. I kid you not, plenty of candidates cannot do simple stuff, and they're interviewing for a developer position. If you don't know how to reverse a string, or split an array of ints into two with even and odd ints, or write a while loop that terminates on a specific word - I have zero belief that you can fill the position I have available.
  - am8 9y ago
    Not sure how knowing modular arithmetic and writing code are dependent.
    - hvidgaard 9y ago
      I'll gladly tell them how the modular arithmetic works, I just want them to fill out the rest. Many are unable to, which tells me that they don't know even the simplest constructs in programming.
- aninhumer 9y ago
  Because despite the apparent skills on people's resumes, a lot of people still seem to fail to write fizzbuzz in an interview. I have no problem with short sanity checking exercises during interviews. The problem is when they expect a lot more unrealistic whiteboard code.
  - pklausler 9y ago
    Yes. Always have an easy problem in analysis & coding, like constructing a simple Boolean predicate from some comparisons. You will thank yourself later when you don't hire the fantastic-looking candidate who had absolutely no idea how to work the problem.
  - abawany 9y ago
    Agreed, I have come to believe strongly in the value of Fizz Buzz and other simple tests. Many candidates have strong resumes but large companies destroy their souls and skills by sticking them for 8+ hours a day in rubbish meetings. Go without coding for a few months of this and your ability to Fizz Buzz will be compromised. Most smaller companies are looking for active, hands-on developers and Fizz Buzz is a quick check to ensure that the candidate spends a substantial part of the day writing code and designing software.
  - am8 9y ago
    I don't know why knowing modular arithmetic is a requirement for knowing the syntax and how to code in a specific language/on a specific platform?
- Sorreah 9y ago
  There's various levels of bullshit, of incremental bullshitness a) I won't believe you got your PHD legitimately, do fizzbuzz for me. b) You're faking both your diploma and your 4 year experience at Megacorp, prove me wrong via fizzbuzz. c) Alright your credentials check out, do this entirely unrelated to the job assignment to prove that you have what it takes to do the job. d) Alright you aced your assignment which despite being entirely unrelated to the actual job, domain and language, convinces us you got what it takes. Now, tell me an example of when you resolved a conflict with a colleague and how you did it...
  - qw 9y ago
    We had a surprise at my company. The candidate had a masters degree and 2 years experience in a known software company. We relied too much on the resume and mostly talked during the one hour interview. After hiring the person turned out that our new employee would have had serious issues with FizzBuzz. Maybe even looping through arrays... When we interview people know we test for basics, regardless of their resume.
    - Sorreah 9y ago
      I'd consider the interviewer as much of a problem as the hire in this case. Talking to someone for an hour and not being able to figure out if they could write basic code? Hiring someone based on their background and not doing a background check (after getting their approval ofcourse)?
      - ballenf 9y ago
        At smaller companies who have trouble attracting better talent, avoiding technical questions is a (flawed) way of showing deference to the prime candidate. It's a way for the company to say, you are special to us and we respect you so much you don't have to do tricks for us. Again, it's flawed, but trying to find and attract talent at a small company who maybe can't pay top dollar makes people take risks like this. At least that's my experience!
      - mcguire 9y ago
- corobo 9y ago
  Resumes get you the interview. Interviews get you the job. You can't just hire someone because they say they know something, you'd end up spending a fortune on employee turnover when everyone you've hired turns out to have exaggerated their resume.
  - hardwaresofton 9y ago
    Two things: 1) Who cares if they've exaggerated their resume? The question is supposed to be whether they can contribute well to your code base/business right? I see this as a point towards getting rid of resumes -- maybe companies can stop bullshitting on what they "require" from candidates, and test more literally for what they want. Don't take my resume, but if it's a backend position where the focus is erlang and postgres, test as specifically as you can for that, with fizzbuzz-like business requirements mixed in, for the best of both worlds. 2) I often wonder if there's anyway to lessen the costs of employee turnover. Obviously there's less you can do about time spent interviewing, but there's gotta be some cheaper way to figure out if someone is going to be a good employee while on the job? I mean that's the best test you could possibly have. Is it just the legal/logistical framework that's missing? Also, I often wonder if running a company where it's hard for newcomers to ramp up and easy for newcomers to break things is a failing of the CTO and executives/managers all the way down to the newcomer (of course the newcomer is to blame as well if it's flagrant but I also think top-of-the-line tech orgs have (mostly) bulletproof process that evolved with them and got them to where they are (i.e. newcomer can't break your build if commits to shared branches/environments are gated by automated testing to begin with).
  - mcguire 9y ago
    Then there was that time a subcontractor sent someone for a US Federal government job who wasn't a US citizen.
- romanovcode 9y ago
  I've had PhD candidates who were unable to do a proper link tag in HTML. CV doesn't matter.
  - pawelkomarnicki 9y ago
    That's why you have on-site for, I can ask my super-duper-master friend to make the homework for me ;-) It's not a proof of anything.
    - verinus 9y ago
      At unis I know nobody could outsource PhD in computer science as it takes serious commitment and scientific publications to get one...
  - bluedino 9y ago
    If you're a Ph D that's interviewing for a job that requires you to write HTML, or a company interviewing Ph D holders to write HTML, something is wrong.
- james_a_craig 9y ago
  The failure rate on fizzbuzz is spectacular. That's why; far too many resume/CVs are full of nonsense. It's not always the candidate's fault, either. When doing technical interviews for contractors, I've gotten into the habit of giving the candidates the version of their CV passed to me by their agencies to check; a good percentage of candidates horrified to see what had been claimed by the employment agency on their behalf.
- watwut 9y ago
  It is more fair to do fizzbuzz. Seeing someone being taken over you because he is good at bullshitting is super infuriating. Might be fine if the position was "sales", not fine for engineers. Fizzbuzz is cool. I am quite confident I can do it.
sk0g 9y ago
I'm still a student, but I have a feeling, if a job interview asks me to do a big 'assignment' of sorts, I'll ask them how long it would take an average dev to do. I'd do the assignment, provided I get paid those hours * a dev wage. Surely if they were serious about me, they'd pay me to do a stupid task, right? Or am I way off base?
- corobo 9y ago
  That's how I interviewed for my current job. I was given a task to do and was asked my contracting rate and told to keep a log of how long I worked on it and what I did, got the cash a day or so after completing the task. Got the job a couple days after that.
- wedowhatwedo 9y ago
  This is a good way to guarantee unemployment for yourself.
- charsifood 9y ago
  A student? You'd get laughed out the door. Experienced dev? Someone pay the man. Sorry, we've all gotta pay our dues.
- th4dv 9y ago
  It's all about negotiation really. Being a junior doesn't give you enough leverage to make this kind of demands IMHO. Juniors have this weird tendency towards overestimating their value. Don't make this mistake in the beginning of your carrier (been there, done that).
- bphogan 9y ago
  Don't negotiate like that. Instead, just keep score. If they offer you a homework assignment that you think is going to take some time, and they give you a week to do it, and you can do it on your own time, just do it. Stay positive and upbeat. But learn from the homework. is it trivial? Or is it related to the work you'll be doing? If, however, they make you come to their office or be available for specific times, and they don't offer to compensate you for skipping your other job or obligations, take that as a sign that they aren't considerate. You could put that as a negative in the "core values" bucket. But yea - don't demand anything during an interview. You may certainly ask politely, but don't demand. It's a two-way street. Even when you negotiate your salary, don't demand. Be firm, but be nice.
spacelizard 9y ago
It's difficult when you don't have a lot of free time to spend doing random mundane interview questions. It's doubly frustrating when this is because you're spending a lot of time doing work on free (libre) software and technical recruiters can easily see tons of your code and communication style openly on Github and whatnot, but for various reasons this isn't adequate for them.
mcguire 9y ago
I've seen some who should have declined, because I then spent half an hour tutoring them in the syntax of their chosen programming language.
valuearb 9y ago
Sounds like you passed on some good candidates.
- romanovcode 9y ago
  More likely I've passed some skilled assholes which my team is not interested in working with at all.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Early in my career I interviewed at a small game company. It was located in a crappy town, and when I arrived the CEO walked me around their work environment, which was mostly cubicles in hallways and multiple devs crammed in offices. Then we sat down in his office and he handed me a programming quiz. While young, I was an accomplished dev with my name on a multiple published products. The first question was unclear, it didn't specify if I was to optimize for speed or memory or maintenance cost. So I got up, walked out, handed him the unstarted exam and left to take a job at Apple. Where I was highly rated in every performance review and extolled for my ability to work well with others. People who don't want to take coding exams fall into two rough categories. 1) They are fakers, their resume claims are BS and they are afraid of being unmasked. 2) They are very good developers, and don't like tests. Maybe because of test anxiety, maybe they find them insulting given their career accomplishments, or mostly because they know they have little to no bearing on how good a developer they are. The reasons I refused the test that day was a combination of all three. One example, even today I can't whiteboard anything to do with binary trees, because in 30 years of professional development I've never had to do anything with them, and can no longer remember any of the binary tree algorithms from my comp-sci classes. My recommendation to you (as someone who has hired over 40 devs in my career) is to do paired programming tests with candidates. You can get a much clearer idea of their thought process and abilities, and it's a far friendlier and respectful process. Too many managers measure the process cost only in their own time. They think, oh, I'll give 10 candidates a test to filter out the worst ones and then I only have to spend my time interviewing the top two or three. First you are ignoring how easy it is to cheat those tests and how little they apply to actual dev work, which means your top two or two are not likely to be your best two out of the ten. But you are also ignoring the possibility that four others refused to test and two of them were likely as good or better than anyone in your test group. I will never take a coding test again. When someone requests one, they tend to be a crap company with poor software dev practices and a huge noisy open floor plan.

jpatokal 9y ago

While I rather like "Pri madonna", it's originally simple Italian for "first lady": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prima_donna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prima_donna

Arkaad 9y ago
So what?

hardwaresofton 9y ago

Why even ask for resumes if you're going to ignore them? I also get very annoyed when people ask about your experience, then in the very next breath pretend none of it matters and you should do fizzbuzz. If we as an industry don't trust/value the stated experience of others, why do we continue to ask for it? Maybe tech companies should just stop accepting resumes then?

hvidgaard 9y ago
FizzBuzz is a great way to see if the dev experience listed is total bullshit.
- pawelkomarnicki 9y ago
  yeah like that one company asking me to do Slack to work at their inventory management startup ;-) Totally related, in so many ways.
- bphogan 9y ago
  Not sure about that. FizzBuzz is an interview question you just expect. RosettaCode has every FizzBuzz solution out there. Tons of people know how to FizzBuzz. This is just "learning enough to pass the test" - a canned answer like the one you know you have for "How do you deal with multiple simultaneous high priority projects?" or "What's your biggest weakness?" You may be filtering out lazy lazy candidates with FizzBuzz. But just because they can do it doesn't mean they can ship code.
  - lmm 9y ago
    The idea isn't that you hire everyone who can FizzBuzz, it's that you don't hire (or waste any more time interviewing) those who can't.
  - dropit_sphere 9y ago
    What is the answer to those questions? I can Fizzbuzz in any number of languages, but the first response that springs to mind for the others is "Fuck off."
    - bphogan 9y ago
      Really? As a potential member of my team, I really do want those questions answered because how you answer them tells me about your character, personality, and thought process. I don't care what your biggest weakness is. You could have severe OCD or addiction. You could battle depression. You could be a chronic procrastinator. None of those matter. What does matter is if you give a solid straight honest answer, rather than some canned crap you read on a web site somewhere. Same goes for how you manage multiple high-priority things. Every job I've worked on, every team, it always happens that there are multiple high priority things. Do you try to do them all and then crash and burn? Do you do them half-assed? Do you fight to get priorities aligned? Do you call the sponsors together and share information about the deadlines? Do you under promise and over-deliver? Do you ask for help from your team? The way you answer is often more important than what you answer. Unless it's "Fuck off." :)
- pklausler 9y ago
  FizzBuzz itself is too well known, but the world is full of other trivial questions that can filter out the no-hires.
  - hvidgaard 9y ago
    I usually cook my own questions that involve a loop and an if statement. I kid you not, plenty of candidates cannot do simple stuff, and they're interviewing for a developer position. If you don't know how to reverse a string, or split an array of ints into two with even and odd ints, or write a while loop that terminates on a specific word - I have zero belief that you can fill the position I have available.
- am8 9y ago
  Not sure how knowing modular arithmetic and writing code are dependent.
  - hvidgaard 9y ago
    I'll gladly tell them how the modular arithmetic works, I just want them to fill out the rest. Many are unable to, which tells me that they don't know even the simplest constructs in programming.
aninhumer 9y ago
Because despite the apparent skills on people's resumes, a lot of people still seem to fail to write fizzbuzz in an interview. I have no problem with short sanity checking exercises during interviews. The problem is when they expect a lot more unrealistic whiteboard code.
- pklausler 9y ago
  Yes. Always have an easy problem in analysis & coding, like constructing a simple Boolean predicate from some comparisons. You will thank yourself later when you don't hire the fantastic-looking candidate who had absolutely no idea how to work the problem.
- abawany 9y ago
  Agreed, I have come to believe strongly in the value of Fizz Buzz and other simple tests. Many candidates have strong resumes but large companies destroy their souls and skills by sticking them for 8+ hours a day in rubbish meetings. Go without coding for a few months of this and your ability to Fizz Buzz will be compromised. Most smaller companies are looking for active, hands-on developers and Fizz Buzz is a quick check to ensure that the candidate spends a substantial part of the day writing code and designing software.
- am8 9y ago
  I don't know why knowing modular arithmetic is a requirement for knowing the syntax and how to code in a specific language/on a specific platform?
Sorreah 9y ago
There's various levels of bullshit, of incremental bullshitness a) I won't believe you got your PHD legitimately, do fizzbuzz for me. b) You're faking both your diploma and your 4 year experience at Megacorp, prove me wrong via fizzbuzz. c) Alright your credentials check out, do this entirely unrelated to the job assignment to prove that you have what it takes to do the job. d) Alright you aced your assignment which despite being entirely unrelated to the actual job, domain and language, convinces us you got what it takes. Now, tell me an example of when you resolved a conflict with a colleague and how you did it...
- qw 9y ago
  We had a surprise at my company. The candidate had a masters degree and 2 years experience in a known software company. We relied too much on the resume and mostly talked during the one hour interview. After hiring the person turned out that our new employee would have had serious issues with FizzBuzz. Maybe even looping through arrays... When we interview people know we test for basics, regardless of their resume.
  - Sorreah 9y ago
    I'd consider the interviewer as much of a problem as the hire in this case. Talking to someone for an hour and not being able to figure out if they could write basic code? Hiring someone based on their background and not doing a background check (after getting their approval ofcourse)?
    - ballenf 9y ago
      At smaller companies who have trouble attracting better talent, avoiding technical questions is a (flawed) way of showing deference to the prime candidate. It's a way for the company to say, you are special to us and we respect you so much you don't have to do tricks for us. Again, it's flawed, but trying to find and attract talent at a small company who maybe can't pay top dollar makes people take risks like this. At least that's my experience!
    - mcguire 9y ago
corobo 9y ago
Resumes get you the interview. Interviews get you the job. You can't just hire someone because they say they know something, you'd end up spending a fortune on employee turnover when everyone you've hired turns out to have exaggerated their resume.
- hardwaresofton 9y ago
  Two things: 1) Who cares if they've exaggerated their resume? The question is supposed to be whether they can contribute well to your code base/business right? I see this as a point towards getting rid of resumes -- maybe companies can stop bullshitting on what they "require" from candidates, and test more literally for what they want. Don't take my resume, but if it's a backend position where the focus is erlang and postgres, test as specifically as you can for that, with fizzbuzz-like business requirements mixed in, for the best of both worlds. 2) I often wonder if there's anyway to lessen the costs of employee turnover. Obviously there's less you can do about time spent interviewing, but there's gotta be some cheaper way to figure out if someone is going to be a good employee while on the job? I mean that's the best test you could possibly have. Is it just the legal/logistical framework that's missing? Also, I often wonder if running a company where it's hard for newcomers to ramp up and easy for newcomers to break things is a failing of the CTO and executives/managers all the way down to the newcomer (of course the newcomer is to blame as well if it's flagrant but I also think top-of-the-line tech orgs have (mostly) bulletproof process that evolved with them and got them to where they are (i.e. newcomer can't break your build if commits to shared branches/environments are gated by automated testing to begin with).
- mcguire 9y ago
  Then there was that time a subcontractor sent someone for a US Federal government job who wasn't a US citizen.
romanovcode 9y ago
I've had PhD candidates who were unable to do a proper link tag in HTML. CV doesn't matter.
- pawelkomarnicki 9y ago
  That's why you have on-site for, I can ask my super-duper-master friend to make the homework for me ;-) It's not a proof of anything.
  - verinus 9y ago
    At unis I know nobody could outsource PhD in computer science as it takes serious commitment and scientific publications to get one...
- bluedino 9y ago
  If you're a Ph D that's interviewing for a job that requires you to write HTML, or a company interviewing Ph D holders to write HTML, something is wrong.
james_a_craig 9y ago
The failure rate on fizzbuzz is spectacular. That's why; far too many resume/CVs are full of nonsense. It's not always the candidate's fault, either. When doing technical interviews for contractors, I've gotten into the habit of giving the candidates the version of their CV passed to me by their agencies to check; a good percentage of candidates horrified to see what had been claimed by the employment agency on their behalf.
watwut 9y ago
It is more fair to do fizzbuzz. Seeing someone being taken over you because he is good at bullshitting is super infuriating. Might be fine if the position was "sales", not fine for engineers. Fizzbuzz is cool. I am quite confident I can do it.

sk0g 9y ago

I'm still a student, but I have a feeling, if a job interview asks me to do a big 'assignment' of sorts, I'll ask them how long it would take an average dev to do. I'd do the assignment, provided I get paid those hours * a dev wage. Surely if they were serious about me, they'd pay me to do a stupid task, right? Or am I way off base?

corobo 9y ago
That's how I interviewed for my current job. I was given a task to do and was asked my contracting rate and told to keep a log of how long I worked on it and what I did, got the cash a day or so after completing the task. Got the job a couple days after that.
wedowhatwedo 9y ago
This is a good way to guarantee unemployment for yourself.
charsifood 9y ago
A student? You'd get laughed out the door. Experienced dev? Someone pay the man. Sorry, we've all gotta pay our dues.
th4dv 9y ago
It's all about negotiation really. Being a junior doesn't give you enough leverage to make this kind of demands IMHO. Juniors have this weird tendency towards overestimating their value. Don't make this mistake in the beginning of your carrier (been there, done that).
bphogan 9y ago
Don't negotiate like that. Instead, just keep score. If they offer you a homework assignment that you think is going to take some time, and they give you a week to do it, and you can do it on your own time, just do it. Stay positive and upbeat. But learn from the homework. is it trivial? Or is it related to the work you'll be doing? If, however, they make you come to their office or be available for specific times, and they don't offer to compensate you for skipping your other job or obligations, take that as a sign that they aren't considerate. You could put that as a negative in the "core values" bucket. But yea - don't demand anything during an interview. You may certainly ask politely, but don't demand. It's a two-way street. Even when you negotiate your salary, don't demand. Be firm, but be nice.

spacelizard 9y ago

It's difficult when you don't have a lot of free time to spend doing random mundane interview questions. It's doubly frustrating when this is because you're spending a lot of time doing work on free (libre) software and technical recruiters can easily see tons of your code and communication style openly on Github and whatnot, but for various reasons this isn't adequate for them.

mcguire 9y ago

I've seen some who should have declined, because I then spent half an hour tutoring them in the syntax of their chosen programming language.

valuearb 9y ago

Sounds like you passed on some good candidates.

romanovcode 9y ago
More likely I've passed some skilled assholes which my team is not interested in working with at all.
- valuearb 9y ago
  Early in my career I interviewed at a small game company. It was located in a crappy town, and when I arrived the CEO walked me around their work environment, which was mostly cubicles in hallways and multiple devs crammed in offices. Then we sat down in his office and he handed me a programming quiz. While young, I was an accomplished dev with my name on a multiple published products. The first question was unclear, it didn't specify if I was to optimize for speed or memory or maintenance cost. So I got up, walked out, handed him the unstarted exam and left to take a job at Apple. Where I was highly rated in every performance review and extolled for my ability to work well with others. People who don't want to take coding exams fall into two rough categories. 1) They are fakers, their resume claims are BS and they are afraid of being unmasked. 2) They are very good developers, and don't like tests. Maybe because of test anxiety, maybe they find them insulting given their career accomplishments, or mostly because they know they have little to no bearing on how good a developer they are. The reasons I refused the test that day was a combination of all three. One example, even today I can't whiteboard anything to do with binary trees, because in 30 years of professional development I've never had to do anything with them, and can no longer remember any of the binary tree algorithms from my comp-sci classes. My recommendation to you (as someone who has hired over 40 devs in my career) is to do paired programming tests with candidates. You can get a much clearer idea of their thought process and abilities, and it's a far friendlier and respectful process. Too many managers measure the process cost only in their own time. They think, oh, I'll give 10 candidates a test to filter out the worst ones and then I only have to spend my time interviewing the top two or three. First you are ignoring how easy it is to cheat those tests and how little they apply to actual dev work, which means your top two or two are not likely to be your best two out of the ten. But you are also ignoring the possibility that four others refused to test and two of them were likely as good or better than anyone in your test group. I will never take a coding test again. When someone requests one, they tend to be a crap company with poor software dev practices and a huge noisy open floor plan.