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The puzzle question is an interesting one. I like solving puzzles, that's why I am an engineer. Based on this I used to think that puzzles are a good thing for

by bugsy 16y ago

The puzzle question is an interesting one. I like solving puzzles, that's why I am an engineer. Based on this I used to think that puzzles are a good thing for posts and interviews. In practice, it almost never works out very well. Puzzles are incompletely specified, impossible to answer unless you guess at assumptions that are sure to be wrong, or they take so much time to solve it's just not worth it. Usually companies don't need complex puzzles for screening anyway. Something rather trivial and quick to answer like the fizz buzz problem eliminates 90% of the dud applicants anyway.

cageface 16y ago
I'd never heard of the FizzBuzz problem before. Just looked it up. Do people claiming to programmers really struggle with it? That's disturbing if so. Designing a good problem is hard. Something that's difficult enough to present a challenge but easy enough to be solvable by a good programmer in ~15 minutes or so takes some thought. But this is another reason why I appreciate a good programming problem in a posting.
- bugsy 16y ago
  No, they don't struggle with it. More of a blank stare. They have absolutely no idea what to do or how to get started, unless they happened to have seen it on a "famous programming questions" board and memorized a plausible answer character by character. If you do a decent job of publicizing an opening you'll can easily get 1000 resumes. If you narrow this down to what seem to be the top 20, 18 of those won't be able to write a simple loop in the language of their choice. Part of the reason for this phenomenon is that the best developers who applied were in the 980 resumes discarded (this is in part due to unreasonable expectations on the hiring side and outright fabrication on the applying side). But the general idea is that the same duds apply to every job. If you post a job ad for a terrible job with unreasonable parameters, then 100% of the applicants will be the duds as everyone with any sense reasonably ignores the ad. The more reasonable and realistic the ad, the more potentially qualified candidates will apply, but this number is not going to be the majority of applicants. The majority will be the non-english speakers and DeVry Institute grads who are mass spamming every job ad they can find with bogus resumes. There's no point to starting with a challenging programming test because the interviewer's idea of obvious common sense insights is typically some highly domain specific thing that only is known at the particular company. Or even worse, the "challenge project" which will take a week to finish and is obviously a real work project for the company that they want done for free. Furthermore, interviewers seldom have any realistic idea of what could really be solved in 10 minutes by someone who hasn't seen the problem before like the person who selected it. FizzBuzz like problems are again the answer. Ask to reverse a string without calling a library function. This is a reasonable 10 minute question. If 95% of applicants fail, then this is a very useful screen is it not.

by bugsy 16y ago

cageface 16y ago

I'd never heard of the FizzBuzz problem before. Just looked it up. Do people claiming to programmers really struggle with it? That's disturbing if so. Designing a good problem is hard. Something that's difficult enough to present a challenge but easy enough to be solvable by a good programmer in ~15 minutes or so takes some thought. But this is another reason why I appreciate a good programming problem in a posting.

bugsy 16y ago
No, they don't struggle with it. More of a blank stare. They have absolutely no idea what to do or how to get started, unless they happened to have seen it on a "famous programming questions" board and memorized a plausible answer character by character. If you do a decent job of publicizing an opening you'll can easily get 1000 resumes. If you narrow this down to what seem to be the top 20, 18 of those won't be able to write a simple loop in the language of their choice. Part of the reason for this phenomenon is that the best developers who applied were in the 980 resumes discarded (this is in part due to unreasonable expectations on the hiring side and outright fabrication on the applying side). But the general idea is that the same duds apply to every job. If you post a job ad for a terrible job with unreasonable parameters, then 100% of the applicants will be the duds as everyone with any sense reasonably ignores the ad. The more reasonable and realistic the ad, the more potentially qualified candidates will apply, but this number is not going to be the majority of applicants. The majority will be the non-english speakers and DeVry Institute grads who are mass spamming every job ad they can find with bogus resumes. There's no point to starting with a challenging programming test because the interviewer's idea of obvious common sense insights is typically some highly domain specific thing that only is known at the particular company. Or even worse, the "challenge project" which will take a week to finish and is obviously a real work project for the company that they want done for free. Furthermore, interviewers seldom have any realistic idea of what could really be solved in 10 minutes by someone who hasn't seen the problem before like the person who selected it. FizzBuzz like problems are again the answer. Ask to reverse a string without calling a library function. This is a reasonable 10 minute question. If 95% of applicants fail, then this is a very useful screen is it not.