10 ms·

The "No One Believes Anyone Can Actually Code" point is right on the money by my anecdotal experience. Just a few weeks ago I was asked to implement FizzBuzz i

The "No One Believes Anyone Can Actually Code" point is right on the money by my anecdotal experience. Just a few weeks ago I was asked to implement FizzBuzz in an interview for the first time in my 15 years of engineering! This was despite having a large amount of verifiable open source Haskell projects.

time0ut 8y ago
I usually ask a trivial problem like this. Not really to see if they can code (I have had one or two people fail here though), but more to serve as a conversation topic. Why did you do this? How would you do that? etc...
- diminoten 8y ago
  But I don't want to talk about FizzBuzz! It's boring! There's a "right" answer, and not a lot/any real choice or nuance. Ask me about your current problems, problems the person filling the position would need to have opinions about. If nothing else, maybe I could crack a tough issue for you that would have material value. I've given FizzBuzz, and I've done FizzBuzz. It's hard to do it/get it and not feel like there's some degree of insult involved.
  - imron 8y ago
    > and not a lot/any real choice or nuance. Exactly! And people still get it wrong. It's a low-pass filter to weed out programmers who can't even do FizzBuzz, because despite their lack of coding prowess their résumé will still look similar to yours. > and not feel like there's some degree of insult involved. That's just reading far too much in to it.
  - pixeloution 8y ago
    I can't talk to you about my team's current problems, and neither should anyone else. If I do and you offer up a solution I'm in real trouble ... because that's a lawsuit waiting to happen. Try to remember, this is the country where a range check function resulted in a lawsuit: private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex { if (fromIndex > toIndex) throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex + ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")"); if (fromIndex < 0) throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex); if (toIndex > arrayLen) throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex); }
  - time0ut 8y ago
    Even something as boring as FizzBuzz can foster an interesting, if short, conversation. I've had candidates bring up everything from unit testing strategies to the implications of branch prediction. It can also help less confident candidates to start with a softball. Anyway, it is just the first question and we are usually past it in five minutes. Then we discuss, in general terms, the types of problems we are solving and the related computer science topics. It certainly isn't meant to insult. I hope I haven't insulted anyone and, if I have, they've never made it known to me. I will say that it'd be a huge red flag to me if a candidate acted like this was beneath them. The reality is that, while we will be solving some cool and hard problems, there will be lots of problems that are beneath us, too.
eire1130 8y ago
I'll be honest, if anyone asked me to write a FizzBuzz style test, I would just walk out on the spot.
- Clubber 8y ago
  I'm sure they'll chalk it up to you being incompetent.
bojo 8y ago
That last bit is what pisses me off the most. Some companies make it a point that they only hire people with open source projects, yet when interview time comes they don't bother to talk about these projects. You literally have a data point with way more than the typical 4~8 hours a throwaway homework would take, and don't use it as an a) talking point, b) nice way to sidestep wasting more time? Argh.

time0ut 8y ago

I usually ask a trivial problem like this. Not really to see if they can code (I have had one or two people fail here though), but more to serve as a conversation topic. Why did you do this? How would you do that? etc...

diminoten 8y ago
But I don't want to talk about FizzBuzz! It's boring! There's a "right" answer, and not a lot/any real choice or nuance. Ask me about your current problems, problems the person filling the position would need to have opinions about. If nothing else, maybe I could crack a tough issue for you that would have material value. I've given FizzBuzz, and I've done FizzBuzz. It's hard to do it/get it and not feel like there's some degree of insult involved.
- imron 8y ago
  > and not a lot/any real choice or nuance. Exactly! And people still get it wrong. It's a low-pass filter to weed out programmers who can't even do FizzBuzz, because despite their lack of coding prowess their résumé will still look similar to yours. > and not feel like there's some degree of insult involved. That's just reading far too much in to it.
- pixeloution 8y ago
  I can't talk to you about my team's current problems, and neither should anyone else. If I do and you offer up a solution I'm in real trouble ... because that's a lawsuit waiting to happen. Try to remember, this is the country where a range check function resulted in a lawsuit: private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex { if (fromIndex > toIndex) throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex + ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")"); if (fromIndex < 0) throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex); if (toIndex > arrayLen) throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex); }
- time0ut 8y ago
  Even something as boring as FizzBuzz can foster an interesting, if short, conversation. I've had candidates bring up everything from unit testing strategies to the implications of branch prediction. It can also help less confident candidates to start with a softball. Anyway, it is just the first question and we are usually past it in five minutes. Then we discuss, in general terms, the types of problems we are solving and the related computer science topics. It certainly isn't meant to insult. I hope I haven't insulted anyone and, if I have, they've never made it known to me. I will say that it'd be a huge red flag to me if a candidate acted like this was beneath them. The reality is that, while we will be solving some cool and hard problems, there will be lots of problems that are beneath us, too.

eire1130 8y ago

I'll be honest, if anyone asked me to write a FizzBuzz style test, I would just walk out on the spot.

Clubber 8y ago
I'm sure they'll chalk it up to you being incompetent.

bojo 8y ago

That last bit is what pisses me off the most. Some companies make it a point that they only hire people with open source projects, yet when interview time comes they don't bother to talk about these projects. You literally have a data point with way more than the typical 4~8 hours a throwaway homework would take, and don't use it as an a) talking point, b) nice way to sidestep wasting more time? Argh.