5 ms·
It can work in favor of but also against you :) Where I work, once most of the candidates have been filtered out and there are only 1-5 remaining, managers get
by dyingkneepad 7y ago
It can work in favor of but also against you :)
Where I work, once most of the candidates have been filtered out and there are only 1-5 remaining, managers get help from the senior engineers to assess the candidate's technical skills before interviewing. In my specific team we try to find code samples from github and contributions to open source communities (we love ohloh.net).
But we also do a "technical interview" with some fizzbuzz stuff. More than once we found candidates with good-looking open source patches but that couldn't implement fizzbuzz-like stuff on a whiteboard.
- probinso 7y agoAgreed! Whiteboarding is a skill and should be practiced prior to onsite interviews.
- tcbasche 7y ago> But we also do a "technical interview" with some fizzbuzz stuff Why does anyone still think this is a good interview technique that provides any valuable metrics?
- dyingkneepad 7y agoBecause in the past we hired some programmers that were really good at BS-ing during interview and really crappy at programming. So now we make sure we hire people who know what "a &= b" does in C and what a #define statement achieves.
- tcbasche 7y agoI'm not saying you don't screen them at all with a technical task, but it should be something representative of what your organisation does, rather than some overdone toy problem
- dyingkneepad 7y agoWhen I said 'fizzbuzz-like' I meant a simple program that is representative of what we do in the organization. Fizzbuzz is supposed to be a simple challenge as far as I'm aware. Stuff like flipping bits with & and |, or knowing how to use preprocessor macros (since we abuse macros a lot). Or awareness of function pointers.
- tcbasche 7y agoI guess I missed that fizzbuzz now means things like fizzbuzz, rather than actual challenge
- codingdave 7y agoBecause there are still people who can look good on paper, and even talk their way through interviews, but can't actually code. You do not need the multiple-hour-whiteboard overkill that some places do, but you do need at least one coding gate to prove their resume is not a sham.
- ccajas 7y agoI look at FizzBuzz as a "assert" test before the thorough evaluation. It should be logically impossible for an experienced developer to not pass a simple test like that. Those tests are not for metrics- they're just for prematurely weeding out corner cases.