9 ms·

OK, I'll write your desired fizzbuzz in Haskell in a way that you won't be able to understand it for the next 30 years. You'll moreover piss me off and get a pl

by bitL 7y ago

OK, I'll write your desired fizzbuzz in Haskell in a way that you won't be able to understand it for the next 30 years. You'll moreover piss me off and get a placement on my blacklist of companies to never work for and me actively spreading the news about your interview to anyone capable I know, hoping nobody is going to waste time interviewing for your jobs. Happy now?

taneq 7y ago
I think in your case the test worked perfectly.
- bitL 7y ago
  Help me to decode your statement please. Your point was ...?
  - taneq 7y ago
    That your response to the question revealed multiple important facts about your attitude and inclinations (many of which have been pointed out by sibling comments to mine) which would give me serious pause before hiring you.
    - bitL 7y ago
      Could it be that I am simply fed up with the infantilization creeping into our business everywhere, pushing everyone to standardize on the lowest common denominator, yet I am capable of "building rockets" in metaphorical sense and refuse to play this insane game? Maybe I wouldn't want to work for a person like you and am assessing your abilities during interview, coming to a conclusion that we aren't compatible and I would be just massively slowed down by your attitude instead of unleashing my full potential? I've wasted too much time on these types of people, it never led to anything, and my filters are now calibrated to identify and reject them quickly.
      - taneq 7y ago
        It certainly could be, and I don't know I'd even disagree with you. A fair proportion of us here have ambitions and a bit of an ego. But the ones I'd want to work with also have some empathy. I know I'm good, but the interviewer doesn't, so if it they ask me to show I can do 2+2 I'll tell them 4 because it costs me nothing and the only reason they're asking is that the last candidate talked the talk and then said -17 and burned them. I mean, it's been a long time now since I did an interview, but that's what I'd do. Now that I think of it, why are you interviewing if you're such a hotshot? Shouldn't they be chasing you? Or was this purely hypothetical and you're already set for life?
        bitL 7y ago
        I am beginning to be intolerant to anyone one-sidedly requesting my empathy; I did it for multiple years but it turned people into takers and I believe they need to grow up personally instead of expecting somebody to be nice to them when they aren't willing to be. I don't leak personal info about me on HN; let's say I have my own clients and too little time to do more things, and from time to time I interview as a sport to keep me up-to-date in case I need it in the future. In the past year and something I turned down Mark Z's company a few times as well as I work on more interesting things for more $ and with more flexibility (travel around the world yay! studying part-time at top schools etc.) than I would have achieved there.
ThrowawayR2 7y ago
> You'll moreover piss me off and get a placement on my blacklist of companies to never work for and me actively spreading the news about your interview to anyone capable I know, hoping nobody is going to waste time interviewing for your jobs. I think that sort of worldview puts you below the hiring bar, regardless of your technical ability.
- bitL 7y ago
  So you are only willing to employ desperate people that allow you to literally walk over them in the interview? Like there is no other suitable exercise to give them, just the absolutely worst one to make them depressed? Next time you need a lawyer (I am sure you will), ask them which new laws were enacted in the UK in the year 1648 and if they couldn't answer, don't hire them!
  - scarface74 7y ago
    I hire people that can follow the process. I’ve had to establish processes for a department that the cowboy coder in me didn’t like and that I made myself follow. I’ve also had to implement processes for some type of compliance reasons - most of the time HIPAA. The last thing I need is to be sitting in front of lawyer as Directly Responsible Individual, explaining why we weren’t in compliance.
    - bitL 7y ago
      OK, it makes sense in regulated industries; I had to pass some HIPAA-related exams to even process some medical data for Deep Learning so I understand that part. Still, it's premature to call anyone not willing to do FizzBuzz a cowboy coder, isn't it? ;-)
      - scarface74 7y ago
        There are a lot of things that you aren’t going to want to do but we had to for various reasons - everyone has a boss. The last thing I need is someone who is going to fight the process the entire way.
scarface74 7y ago
Well that tells me two things. - if when you looked at the job req and it said we were looking for C#/Java/Python/JavaScript developers and you wrote it in Haskell, that’s one signal that you probably won’t produce solutions that meet the customer’s need. - if we are hiring Haskell developers and I can’t understand the code that means you write unmaintainable, over architected code and that you would still be a net negative for the company.
- bitL 7y ago
  You didn't get it, linguistic gymnastics here is unnecessary. I could do the same in a language of your choice. But testing me with FizzBuzz without looking at my CV at all is putting you into "garbage employer" category and I wouldn't want to waste time with you. Did you get 5th grader questions on your university exams as well?
  - jasonlotito 7y ago
    > But testing me with FizzBuzz without looking at my CV at all is putting you into "garbage employer" category and I wouldn't want to waste time with you. This would concern me that you don't validate your input. Just because the contract says something doesn't mean that's what you are getting. Trust, but verify. I trust that your CV is accurate, so I'm giving you a test that won't take up too much of either of our time to verify that you can code. Why? Because I've seen enough CVs better than yours where people can't do FizzBuzz. Not wanting to FizzBuzz is also concerning because if it's a proven method of validation, why spend extra time and resources on something more that will only tell you the same thing? So, to me at least, your antagonism here is really you wanting to waste resources and/or not validate input. Neither are good signs. > Did you get 5th grader questions on your university exams as well? If a 5th grader question is good enough to answer something, why bother with a 3-hour exam?
    - bitL 7y ago
      > So, to me at least, your antagonism here is really you wanting to waste resources and/or not validate input. Neither are good signs. No, I want you to give me properly challenging questions to prove you deserve to be my employer (as I will be doing the hard work to make you a gazillionaire). FizzBuzz tells me you read one article a few years ago, didn't think about it at all (why could that be a problem?), and now give it left and right to anyone that has the bad luck of interviewing with you. You are telling me you are arrogant, prideful and lazy.
pjc50 7y ago
As others have said, not being willing to do it fails the attitude test. It's not actually demeaning or difficult for most people, although for underprepared people from nontraditional backgrounds it can be a bit upsetting. So smile, write the answer, say thankyou and move on to the next question.
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
No, not happy now. Your technical skills may be off the charts, and your criticism of fizzbuzz may be completely valid, but I don't want people with that kind of attitude anywhere near my team. There's going to be stuff that isn't done the way you want, in the company policies, in the code base, in the architecture, in the way the team works. If you're going to respond in an I'm-above-this, salt-the-earth kind of way when that happens, then no, I don't want to hire you. Go destroy some other workplace. As I said, this is orthogonal to whether your criticism of the use of fizzbuzz is valid. Your response may make you feel better, but it's showing me a lot about who you are, and it's not improving your hireability. If I were asked fizzbuzz in an interview, I think I'd say something like "I'll answer that. But I expect the rest of the interview to be at a considerably deeper level."
- bitL 7y ago
  You are making amazingly far-reaching decisions from very limited information, a quality I definitely wouldn't want to see in my superior. A dislike of a certain test must mean "to destroy some workplace". I am now wondering if all the issues we see with politics lately are happening because people are becoming single-dimensional, unable to even consider someone else's view if the way it's presented slightly deviates from what they demand. As somebody who was often interviewing other people fighting for jobs at top companies I worked for, I would never ever offend them by throwing FizzBuzz in their faces; I don't have such arrogance in me. I would rather try to figure out what clicks with them and throw them something tasty where they can show off, then increase pressure to see what needs more work, then explain/discuss what could have been improved. I would respect their time and help them to learn something on that single interview they had with me. Never throw into their faces that they are frauds which is implied by employing FizzBuzz. One doesn't have to be a super psychologist, just simple empathy is sufficient to understand that people perform best when they are respected and treated as adults.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    In the great-grandparent, you said: > > > You'll moreover piss me off and get a placement on my blacklist of companies to never work for and me actively spreading the news about your interview to anyone capable I know, hoping nobody is going to waste time interviewing for your jobs. Now you say: > A dislike of a certain test must mean "to destroy some workplace". That was a bit more than "a dislike of a certain test". If we hired you and you reacted that way to something you didn't like, that would be in "destroy the workplace" territory.
gjm11 7y ago
My desired fizzbuzz? I don't use fizzbuzz when giving interviews. "This person doesn't appear to understand why people use fizzbuzz in interviews" is not the same proposition as "Everyone should use fizzbuzz in interviews". Anyway: If it somehow happens that I'm interviewing you and you write a fizzbuzz program in super-fancy Haskell designed to be incomprehensible (if it's not designed to be incomprehensible then no, I'm not going to be unable to understand it for 30 years), then from my perspective I've learned: (1) you can indeed write code, (2) you're very smart, (3) you're a bit of an asshole. That's actually quite a lot of information for five minutes of interview time. (If you're super-smart but it takes you more than five minutes to write that fizzbuzz program, then you're prioritizing being an asshole over doing the job, because for sure you could have done it way quicker if you'd wanted; might not be a good sign.) And if it somehow happens that I'm interviewing you and you misinterpret something entirely different that I say as advocacy for fizzbuzz in interviews, and go off on a rant about how no one any good should ever work for my company: no hire, have a nice day.
- bitL 7y ago
  Instead of considering me an asshole, maybe you could think of it as a silent protest done in an intelligent fashion. You are indicating I am a fraud by employing FizzBuzz on me, I am trying to maneuver out of it by showing you my dominance and the level of my abstract thinking you won't reach. Now who is a bigger asshole when it comes down to it? You started it... I'd have preferred a reasonable interview to be honest, but when it comes to responding to unreasonable requests, I can do my part... I value my time, you attempted to offend me, so in order to get something out of it for myself instead of writing off that time segment, I have some fun with your inability to understand. If this offends you, you were repaid in kind.
  - gjm11 7y ago
    Once again, I am not employing fizzbuzz on anyone. But it's not indicating you are a fraud, it's indicating that some people in your situation are frauds, which lamentably appears to be the case. And your response to this situation where someone who at this point knows only what's on your CV and therefore hasn't yet ruled out the possibility that you might be a fraud gives you the chance to show you aren't one is ... to "show[] you my dominance"? Yeah, that's definitely a good idea in an interview situation. No one "attempted to offend" you. (Well, I dare say people have from time to time. But if you interview for a job and someone asks you to write a fizzbuzz program, they are not doing it because they want to offend you.) They were in the unfortunate situation of having to hire someone in an environment where some candidates turn out to be much worse at the job than the readily available evidence suggests. They gave you a chance to show that you aren't one of those candidates. You took offence at that because somehow the interviewer was supposed to just know that you're one of the good ones, and reacted by trying to demonstrate your "dominance". I suppose the good news here is that everyone's glad you didn't get that job. (As for "the level of my abstract thinking you won't reach", once again you are making assumptions that go beyond what you actually know. Like it or not, some people who are plenty capable of abstract thinking use fizzbuzz-like interview questions.)

by bitL 7y ago

taneq 7y ago

I think in your case the test worked perfectly.

bitL 7y ago
Help me to decode your statement please. Your point was ...?
- taneq 7y ago
  That your response to the question revealed multiple important facts about your attitude and inclinations (many of which have been pointed out by sibling comments to mine) which would give me serious pause before hiring you.
  - bitL 7y ago
    Could it be that I am simply fed up with the infantilization creeping into our business everywhere, pushing everyone to standardize on the lowest common denominator, yet I am capable of "building rockets" in metaphorical sense and refuse to play this insane game? Maybe I wouldn't want to work for a person like you and am assessing your abilities during interview, coming to a conclusion that we aren't compatible and I would be just massively slowed down by your attitude instead of unleashing my full potential? I've wasted too much time on these types of people, it never led to anything, and my filters are now calibrated to identify and reject them quickly.
    - taneq 7y ago
      It certainly could be, and I don't know I'd even disagree with you. A fair proportion of us here have ambitions and a bit of an ego. But the ones I'd want to work with also have some empathy. I know I'm good, but the interviewer doesn't, so if it they ask me to show I can do 2+2 I'll tell them 4 because it costs me nothing and the only reason they're asking is that the last candidate talked the talk and then said -17 and burned them. I mean, it's been a long time now since I did an interview, but that's what I'd do. Now that I think of it, why are you interviewing if you're such a hotshot? Shouldn't they be chasing you? Or was this purely hypothetical and you're already set for life?
      - bitL 7y ago
        I am beginning to be intolerant to anyone one-sidedly requesting my empathy; I did it for multiple years but it turned people into takers and I believe they need to grow up personally instead of expecting somebody to be nice to them when they aren't willing to be. I don't leak personal info about me on HN; let's say I have my own clients and too little time to do more things, and from time to time I interview as a sport to keep me up-to-date in case I need it in the future. In the past year and something I turned down Mark Z's company a few times as well as I work on more interesting things for more $ and with more flexibility (travel around the world yay! studying part-time at top schools etc.) than I would have achieved there.

ThrowawayR2 7y ago

> You'll moreover piss me off and get a placement on my blacklist of companies to never work for and me actively spreading the news about your interview to anyone capable I know, hoping nobody is going to waste time interviewing for your jobs. I think that sort of worldview puts you below the hiring bar, regardless of your technical ability.

bitL 7y ago
So you are only willing to employ desperate people that allow you to literally walk over them in the interview? Like there is no other suitable exercise to give them, just the absolutely worst one to make them depressed? Next time you need a lawyer (I am sure you will), ask them which new laws were enacted in the UK in the year 1648 and if they couldn't answer, don't hire them!
- scarface74 7y ago
  I hire people that can follow the process. I’ve had to establish processes for a department that the cowboy coder in me didn’t like and that I made myself follow. I’ve also had to implement processes for some type of compliance reasons - most of the time HIPAA. The last thing I need is to be sitting in front of lawyer as Directly Responsible Individual, explaining why we weren’t in compliance.
  - bitL 7y ago
    OK, it makes sense in regulated industries; I had to pass some HIPAA-related exams to even process some medical data for Deep Learning so I understand that part. Still, it's premature to call anyone not willing to do FizzBuzz a cowboy coder, isn't it? ;-)
    - scarface74 7y ago
      There are a lot of things that you aren’t going to want to do but we had to for various reasons - everyone has a boss. The last thing I need is someone who is going to fight the process the entire way.

scarface74 7y ago

Well that tells me two things. - if when you looked at the job req and it said we were looking for C#/Java/Python/JavaScript developers and you wrote it in Haskell, that’s one signal that you probably won’t produce solutions that meet the customer’s need. - if we are hiring Haskell developers and I can’t understand the code that means you write unmaintainable, over architected code and that you would still be a net negative for the company.

bitL 7y ago
You didn't get it, linguistic gymnastics here is unnecessary. I could do the same in a language of your choice. But testing me with FizzBuzz without looking at my CV at all is putting you into "garbage employer" category and I wouldn't want to waste time with you. Did you get 5th grader questions on your university exams as well?
- jasonlotito 7y ago
  > But testing me with FizzBuzz without looking at my CV at all is putting you into "garbage employer" category and I wouldn't want to waste time with you. This would concern me that you don't validate your input. Just because the contract says something doesn't mean that's what you are getting. Trust, but verify. I trust that your CV is accurate, so I'm giving you a test that won't take up too much of either of our time to verify that you can code. Why? Because I've seen enough CVs better than yours where people can't do FizzBuzz. Not wanting to FizzBuzz is also concerning because if it's a proven method of validation, why spend extra time and resources on something more that will only tell you the same thing? So, to me at least, your antagonism here is really you wanting to waste resources and/or not validate input. Neither are good signs. > Did you get 5th grader questions on your university exams as well? If a 5th grader question is good enough to answer something, why bother with a 3-hour exam?
  - bitL 7y ago
    > So, to me at least, your antagonism here is really you wanting to waste resources and/or not validate input. Neither are good signs. No, I want you to give me properly challenging questions to prove you deserve to be my employer (as I will be doing the hard work to make you a gazillionaire). FizzBuzz tells me you read one article a few years ago, didn't think about it at all (why could that be a problem?), and now give it left and right to anyone that has the bad luck of interviewing with you. You are telling me you are arrogant, prideful and lazy.

pjc50 7y ago

As others have said, not being willing to do it fails the attitude test. It's not actually demeaning or difficult for most people, although for underprepared people from nontraditional backgrounds it can be a bit upsetting. So smile, write the answer, say thankyou and move on to the next question.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

No, not happy now. Your technical skills may be off the charts, and your criticism of fizzbuzz may be completely valid, but I don't want people with that kind of attitude anywhere near my team. There's going to be stuff that isn't done the way you want, in the company policies, in the code base, in the architecture, in the way the team works. If you're going to respond in an I'm-above-this, salt-the-earth kind of way when that happens, then no, I don't want to hire you. Go destroy some other workplace. As I said, this is orthogonal to whether your criticism of the use of fizzbuzz is valid. Your response may make you feel better, but it's showing me a lot about who you are, and it's not improving your hireability. If I were asked fizzbuzz in an interview, I think I'd say something like "I'll answer that. But I expect the rest of the interview to be at a considerably deeper level."

bitL 7y ago
You are making amazingly far-reaching decisions from very limited information, a quality I definitely wouldn't want to see in my superior. A dislike of a certain test must mean "to destroy some workplace". I am now wondering if all the issues we see with politics lately are happening because people are becoming single-dimensional, unable to even consider someone else's view if the way it's presented slightly deviates from what they demand. As somebody who was often interviewing other people fighting for jobs at top companies I worked for, I would never ever offend them by throwing FizzBuzz in their faces; I don't have such arrogance in me. I would rather try to figure out what clicks with them and throw them something tasty where they can show off, then increase pressure to see what needs more work, then explain/discuss what could have been improved. I would respect their time and help them to learn something on that single interview they had with me. Never throw into their faces that they are frauds which is implied by employing FizzBuzz. One doesn't have to be a super psychologist, just simple empathy is sufficient to understand that people perform best when they are respected and treated as adults.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  In the great-grandparent, you said: > > > You'll moreover piss me off and get a placement on my blacklist of companies to never work for and me actively spreading the news about your interview to anyone capable I know, hoping nobody is going to waste time interviewing for your jobs. Now you say: > A dislike of a certain test must mean "to destroy some workplace". That was a bit more than "a dislike of a certain test". If we hired you and you reacted that way to something you didn't like, that would be in "destroy the workplace" territory.

gjm11 7y ago

My desired fizzbuzz? I don't use fizzbuzz when giving interviews. "This person doesn't appear to understand why people use fizzbuzz in interviews" is not the same proposition as "Everyone should use fizzbuzz in interviews". Anyway: If it somehow happens that I'm interviewing you and you write a fizzbuzz program in super-fancy Haskell designed to be incomprehensible (if it's not designed to be incomprehensible then no, I'm not going to be unable to understand it for 30 years), then from my perspective I've learned: (1) you can indeed write code, (2) you're very smart, (3) you're a bit of an asshole. That's actually quite a lot of information for five minutes of interview time. (If you're super-smart but it takes you more than five minutes to write that fizzbuzz program, then you're prioritizing being an asshole over doing the job, because for sure you could have done it way quicker if you'd wanted; might not be a good sign.) And if it somehow happens that I'm interviewing you and you misinterpret something entirely different that I say as advocacy for fizzbuzz in interviews, and go off on a rant about how no one any good should ever work for my company: no hire, have a nice day.

bitL 7y ago
Instead of considering me an asshole, maybe you could think of it as a silent protest done in an intelligent fashion. You are indicating I am a fraud by employing FizzBuzz on me, I am trying to maneuver out of it by showing you my dominance and the level of my abstract thinking you won't reach. Now who is a bigger asshole when it comes down to it? You started it... I'd have preferred a reasonable interview to be honest, but when it comes to responding to unreasonable requests, I can do my part... I value my time, you attempted to offend me, so in order to get something out of it for myself instead of writing off that time segment, I have some fun with your inability to understand. If this offends you, you were repaid in kind.
- gjm11 7y ago
  Once again, I am not employing fizzbuzz on anyone. But it's not indicating you are a fraud, it's indicating that some people in your situation are frauds, which lamentably appears to be the case. And your response to this situation where someone who at this point knows only what's on your CV and therefore hasn't yet ruled out the possibility that you might be a fraud gives you the chance to show you aren't one is ... to "show[] you my dominance"? Yeah, that's definitely a good idea in an interview situation. No one "attempted to offend" you. (Well, I dare say people have from time to time. But if you interview for a job and someone asks you to write a fizzbuzz program, they are not doing it because they want to offend you.) They were in the unfortunate situation of having to hire someone in an environment where some candidates turn out to be much worse at the job than the readily available evidence suggests. They gave you a chance to show that you aren't one of those candidates. You took offence at that because somehow the interviewer was supposed to just know that you're one of the good ones, and reacted by trying to demonstrate your "dominance". I suppose the good news here is that everyone's glad you didn't get that job. (As for "the level of my abstract thinking you won't reach", once again you are making assumptions that go beyond what you actually know. Like it or not, some people who are plenty capable of abstract thinking use fizzbuzz-like interview questions.)