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> No one believes that anyone can actually code. Is it just our industry where you have to prove you aren't a complete impostor every time? Basically we trea

by matt_s 9y ago

> No one believes that anyone can actually code. Is it just our industry where you have to prove you aren't a complete impostor every time? Basically we treat every applicant like they are Frank Abagnale [0]. A senior role should be focused on more overall system and performance aspects of the software, using good practices. What does writing out a solution for fizzbuzz (or equivalent) prove during an interview? If they do it easily do you suspect they memorized it (our base assumption seems to be they are an impostor right)? If they fail, do they fail the interview? In the real world if you had a database call in some recursive loop that would be bad for performance. The number of times I jump to using recursion in a solution is near zero. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale

zeroxfe 9y ago
> Is it just our industry where you have to prove you aren't a complete impostor every time? Basically we treat every applicant like they are Frank Abagnale [0]. The problem is that a large majority of candidates lie on their resumes. This means that hiring managers have to work harder to qualify a good candidate -- which often ends up turning into a process that hurts and annoys those that are actually qualified.
- cema 9y ago
  Quote: a large majority of candidates lie on their resumes Is it really true? I do not think it has been my experience (some, but not the majority).
  - jldugger 9y ago
    I've definitely seen candidates stretch the truth. Like Jenkins babysitters who list every technology the Jenkins server uses in builds as a skill. So they list Chef as bold item on their resume, but can't explain what a Chef server is, or how a file resource differs from a cookbook_file resource.
  - munchbunny 9y ago
    I've definitely seen people stretching the truth to various degrees. I do it too, because you're in for unnecessary difficulty getting past the recruiter screen if you don't do _some_ spinning. The key is to only stretch it to the extent that you can explain your background in detail to the hiring manager and be able to openly admit where you don't know much if those areas come up. Generally speaking a hiring manager you actually want to work for understands that experience is heavily dependent on what your last role needed, and skills can be picked up as long as you have enough of the bare minimum covered.
    - zimou13 9y ago
      Having a plan to write a postmortem once a job is landed might actually be useful, since it forces seekers to track their data, analyze the results of what they did, and carefully consider what they could have done better. see: https://luckypatcher.pro/ https://luckypatcher.pro/ https://kodi.software/ https://kodi.software/ https://showbox.software/ https://showbox.software/
      - munchbunny 9y ago
        I'm a bit confused... how do your links relate to your comment?
lostcolony 9y ago
We do a fizzbuzz-like question, but one we created ourselves so it's not easily google-able or memorizable. Anyone with basic coding chops should be able to solve it; it would be equivalent to a CS101 quiz. It is still shocking how many people fail it. Yes, we have to test for it. My wife is in digital marketing, her -boss-, who insists on being involved in every decision, and will override her knowledgeable subordinates based on her own feelings, knows nothing about digital marketing (and is the reason my wife is looking to change jobs), but nevertheless managed to impress people above her (who also know nothing about digital marketing, but to be fair, don't have marketing related titles or roles) with her resume. Imposters in jobs are super common; it's just that in development we have easy ways to check for basic understanding. Unfortunately we try to scale those up to look for expert level understanding, and that fails (because we're really bad at testing for expert level understanding in areas we actually care about. That 'implement a red black tree' is probably appropriate if your company builds a data structure library as part of their core product, and probably inappropriate for almost anything else).
- taurath 9y ago
  I wonder what would happen if you asked those that failed the fizzbuzz question what they DID know and wanted to demonstrate. The idea that there are flat out imposters who cannot code that have held coding jobs for more than a few months is ridiculous. Right out of college with no experience, I understand. Have you considered that: 1. People have imposter syndrome, all the time. They're stressed out about being able to code, when running up against code interviews having nothing to do with the actual job they're doing. 2. People have anxiety, and they know how tough code interviews can be. They crammed and crammed and crammed, and 10 years of coding is now all this big amorphous blob in their heads. They're ready for some big systems questions. 3. People have bad days. The environment might suck. Their dog just died. You're a very adversarial interviewer, and they only work well and creatively when someone isn't going to come in and bully them about the response (or maybe they just imagine this) Of course, you have no way of knowing this as an interviewer. But FFS, we need a way to inject some fucking empathy into this process. I'd say 99% of the time people aren't in interviews demonstrating what they know or can do, they're being asked to demonstrate what somebody else thinks INDICATES they have things that they know or can do. I know the response to this is going to be, well yeah, but its Fizzbuzz! And I'd like to ask those people if there's ever been a point in your life that you wouldn't be able to write Fizzbuzz. To dramatize for effect, if someone came up to you and said they have access to your bank account, and for them to not take every bit of money you've made over the past year, including the money for your daughter's braces or something important, and in order to get it back you needed to make as concise and clean as possible an implementation of his variation on Fizzbuzz, you will not be thinking just of Fizzbuzz. Your brain is going to be churning at 1000 miles a minute, and you'll be trying to pull out every trick you know (out of hundreds) to get it as concise as possible, while thinking to yourself this is my future on the line. Thats how I feel in interviews at least. I've always passed Fizzbuzz tests, but I've crashed and burned in interviews due to any of the above popping up on interview day. If we all could have a bit more humanity and understanding hiring would go a lot better.
strong_silent_t 9y ago
I think it is a very reasonable test. There are other industries that regulate themselves in other ways. For example, a huge training process and then jail time for lying about it, for doctors or lawyers. Or other ways to eliminate the risk like hiring as contractors for specific jobs, or comission based payment. For a senior role: 1. Someone who can't write and debug a for-loop and an if-statement isn't going to be able to provide training and support to junior level hires. At all. 2. Making high-level changes and performance improvement both require good process discipline, and the ability to write a lot of code to actually accomplish it. I think there are high value software management tactics that can be implemented without knowing how to code, for example, change control, or enforcing limits on work in progress via. kanban, but for a role that has either "software" or "developer" I think fizzbuzz is a very low bar. I personally like binary search as in interview question. The basic principle is simple, but there are enough edge cases and variations to make it interesting.
pcunite 9y ago
Talk Frank Abagnale gave about his life https://youtu.be/vsMydMDi3rI https://youtu.be/vsMydMDi3rI

by matt_s 9y ago

zeroxfe 9y ago

> Is it just our industry where you have to prove you aren't a complete impostor every time? Basically we treat every applicant like they are Frank Abagnale [0]. The problem is that a large majority of candidates lie on their resumes. This means that hiring managers have to work harder to qualify a good candidate -- which often ends up turning into a process that hurts and annoys those that are actually qualified.

cema 9y ago
Quote: a large majority of candidates lie on their resumes Is it really true? I do not think it has been my experience (some, but not the majority).
- jldugger 9y ago
  I've definitely seen candidates stretch the truth. Like Jenkins babysitters who list every technology the Jenkins server uses in builds as a skill. So they list Chef as bold item on their resume, but can't explain what a Chef server is, or how a file resource differs from a cookbook_file resource.
- munchbunny 9y ago
  I've definitely seen people stretching the truth to various degrees. I do it too, because you're in for unnecessary difficulty getting past the recruiter screen if you don't do _some_ spinning. The key is to only stretch it to the extent that you can explain your background in detail to the hiring manager and be able to openly admit where you don't know much if those areas come up. Generally speaking a hiring manager you actually want to work for understands that experience is heavily dependent on what your last role needed, and skills can be picked up as long as you have enough of the bare minimum covered.
  - zimou13 9y ago
    Having a plan to write a postmortem once a job is landed might actually be useful, since it forces seekers to track their data, analyze the results of what they did, and carefully consider what they could have done better. see: https://luckypatcher.pro/ https://luckypatcher.pro/ https://kodi.software/ https://kodi.software/ https://showbox.software/ https://showbox.software/
    - munchbunny 9y ago
      I'm a bit confused... how do your links relate to your comment?

lostcolony 9y ago

We do a fizzbuzz-like question, but one we created ourselves so it's not easily google-able or memorizable. Anyone with basic coding chops should be able to solve it; it would be equivalent to a CS101 quiz. It is still shocking how many people fail it. Yes, we have to test for it. My wife is in digital marketing, her -boss-, who insists on being involved in every decision, and will override her knowledgeable subordinates based on her own feelings, knows nothing about digital marketing (and is the reason my wife is looking to change jobs), but nevertheless managed to impress people above her (who also know nothing about digital marketing, but to be fair, don't have marketing related titles or roles) with her resume. Imposters in jobs are super common; it's just that in development we have easy ways to check for basic understanding. Unfortunately we try to scale those up to look for expert level understanding, and that fails (because we're really bad at testing for expert level understanding in areas we actually care about. That 'implement a red black tree' is probably appropriate if your company builds a data structure library as part of their core product, and probably inappropriate for almost anything else).

taurath 9y ago
I wonder what would happen if you asked those that failed the fizzbuzz question what they DID know and wanted to demonstrate. The idea that there are flat out imposters who cannot code that have held coding jobs for more than a few months is ridiculous. Right out of college with no experience, I understand. Have you considered that: 1. People have imposter syndrome, all the time. They're stressed out about being able to code, when running up against code interviews having nothing to do with the actual job they're doing. 2. People have anxiety, and they know how tough code interviews can be. They crammed and crammed and crammed, and 10 years of coding is now all this big amorphous blob in their heads. They're ready for some big systems questions. 3. People have bad days. The environment might suck. Their dog just died. You're a very adversarial interviewer, and they only work well and creatively when someone isn't going to come in and bully them about the response (or maybe they just imagine this) Of course, you have no way of knowing this as an interviewer. But FFS, we need a way to inject some fucking empathy into this process. I'd say 99% of the time people aren't in interviews demonstrating what they know or can do, they're being asked to demonstrate what somebody else thinks INDICATES they have things that they know or can do. I know the response to this is going to be, well yeah, but its Fizzbuzz! And I'd like to ask those people if there's ever been a point in your life that you wouldn't be able to write Fizzbuzz. To dramatize for effect, if someone came up to you and said they have access to your bank account, and for them to not take every bit of money you've made over the past year, including the money for your daughter's braces or something important, and in order to get it back you needed to make as concise and clean as possible an implementation of his variation on Fizzbuzz, you will not be thinking just of Fizzbuzz. Your brain is going to be churning at 1000 miles a minute, and you'll be trying to pull out every trick you know (out of hundreds) to get it as concise as possible, while thinking to yourself this is my future on the line. Thats how I feel in interviews at least. I've always passed Fizzbuzz tests, but I've crashed and burned in interviews due to any of the above popping up on interview day. If we all could have a bit more humanity and understanding hiring would go a lot better.

strong_silent_t 9y ago

I think it is a very reasonable test. There are other industries that regulate themselves in other ways. For example, a huge training process and then jail time for lying about it, for doctors or lawyers. Or other ways to eliminate the risk like hiring as contractors for specific jobs, or comission based payment. For a senior role: 1. Someone who can't write and debug a for-loop and an if-statement isn't going to be able to provide training and support to junior level hires. At all. 2. Making high-level changes and performance improvement both require good process discipline, and the ability to write a lot of code to actually accomplish it. I think there are high value software management tactics that can be implemented without knowing how to code, for example, change control, or enforcing limits on work in progress via. kanban, but for a role that has either "software" or "developer" I think fizzbuzz is a very low bar. I personally like binary search as in interview question. The basic principle is simple, but there are enough edge cases and variations to make it interesting.

pcunite 9y ago

Talk Frank Abagnale gave about his life https://youtu.be/vsMydMDi3rI https://youtu.be/vsMydMDi3rI