5 ms·

I don't think these kind of coding interviews are given to average programmers though, and if they are I'm sure they are taken with a pinch of salt (or with a l

by flor1s 9y ago

I don't think these kind of coding interviews are given to average programmers though, and if they are I'm sure they are taken with a pinch of salt (or with a lot of help from the recruiter, or using simple tasks such as FizzBuzz [1]). In my experience, having been an average programmer (and maybe still being, I hope that by now I'm at least slightly above average) who worked in The Netherlands at a "system integrator", a web dev "sweat shop" (some projects using 10 year old tech, relatively high staff turnover) and even a startup, such companies don't ask for whiteboard coding, however take home projects are quite common. I also interviewed at some more "hot" unicorns in Japan, which do have these kind of questions (using a dehumanizing online test in fact). 1: http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest

mamon 9y ago
FizzBuzz test is actually pretty great interview question, but most interviewers miss one crucial ingredient: time pressure. Original idea was that any competent programmer should be able to solve it in under 1 minute (only limiting factor being your own writing/typing speed). It is a good indicator of familiarity with the basic programming constructs (loops, conditionals, print statements). It's like writing down the alphabet - you should be able to do that without thinking. I have seen many developers who fail to do that.
- qwerty456127 9y ago
  > I have seen many developers who fail to do that. How do they happen to be developers then? Doesn't being unable to implement a FizzBuzz quickly imply they can't code anything that is more complex, by definition? By the way although I do understand programming (OOP, FP, SQL) and can develop a considerably complex app from scratch in an IDE like Visual Studio with ReSharper or IntelliJ Idea that would expand code snippets, offer auto-completion and highlight errors on the fly I doubt I can code anything more complex than a "hello world" using just Notepad and expect it to compile and run without errors immediately - I use to make small typos and miss some syntactical elements all the time thanks to my ADHD (but modern IDEs solve this problem). Also, a person standing behind my shoulder watching me code and counting time would decrease my performance by an order of magnitude at best. Does this count as a failure from your point of view?
- Jare 9y ago
  I will highlight the most glaring problem I find in your take. > FizzBuzz test is actually pretty great interview question [...] you should be able to do that without thinking If you are going to code for me, I'm not interested in what you can do in 1 minute, I'm interested in what you can do in 1 year. I want you to spend more than 1 minute just thinking about any problem that is remotely worth solving. And that's the underlying problem: FizzBuzz is not representative of the problems I hire you to solve, and solving it fast is not representative of the approach I want you to take for solving the problems I hire you to solve. FizzBuzz can be a reasonable point to start a conversation about approaches and style. But that's true of almost any piece of code - I used strcmp() for a number of years.
  - mamon 9y ago
    If you are not able to write FizBizz without thinking that means that you've probably written no more than a handful of for loops and if statements in your whole programming "career". That's a very bad indicator for someone who applies for a programming job.
    - qwerty456127 9y ago
      This obviously is true (a truism) but doesn't answer any of the questions.

by flor1s 9y ago

mamon 9y ago

FizzBuzz test is actually pretty great interview question, but most interviewers miss one crucial ingredient: time pressure. Original idea was that any competent programmer should be able to solve it in under 1 minute (only limiting factor being your own writing/typing speed). It is a good indicator of familiarity with the basic programming constructs (loops, conditionals, print statements). It's like writing down the alphabet - you should be able to do that without thinking. I have seen many developers who fail to do that.

qwerty456127 9y ago
> I have seen many developers who fail to do that. How do they happen to be developers then? Doesn't being unable to implement a FizzBuzz quickly imply they can't code anything that is more complex, by definition? By the way although I do understand programming (OOP, FP, SQL) and can develop a considerably complex app from scratch in an IDE like Visual Studio with ReSharper or IntelliJ Idea that would expand code snippets, offer auto-completion and highlight errors on the fly I doubt I can code anything more complex than a "hello world" using just Notepad and expect it to compile and run without errors immediately - I use to make small typos and miss some syntactical elements all the time thanks to my ADHD (but modern IDEs solve this problem). Also, a person standing behind my shoulder watching me code and counting time would decrease my performance by an order of magnitude at best. Does this count as a failure from your point of view?
Jare 9y ago
I will highlight the most glaring problem I find in your take. > FizzBuzz test is actually pretty great interview question [...] you should be able to do that without thinking If you are going to code for me, I'm not interested in what you can do in 1 minute, I'm interested in what you can do in 1 year. I want you to spend more than 1 minute just thinking about any problem that is remotely worth solving. And that's the underlying problem: FizzBuzz is not representative of the problems I hire you to solve, and solving it fast is not representative of the approach I want you to take for solving the problems I hire you to solve. FizzBuzz can be a reasonable point to start a conversation about approaches and style. But that's true of almost any piece of code - I used strcmp() for a number of years.
- mamon 9y ago
  If you are not able to write FizBizz without thinking that means that you've probably written no more than a handful of for loops and if statements in your whole programming "career". That's a very bad indicator for someone who applies for a programming job.
  - qwerty456127 9y ago
    This obviously is true (a truism) but doesn't answer any of the questions.