3 ms·
Decades of poor technical interview practices started by a blog post (the one about fizzbuzz). It's amazing how a single blog post changed the entire industry
by bit_logic 5y ago
Decades of poor technical interview practices started by a blog post (the one about fizzbuzz). It's amazing how a single blog post changed the entire industry by causing such fear about "false positives". Looking at that blog post now, it's obvious how it lacks real analysis of the situation:
* The blog post complains that even experienced engineers they interviewed couldn't write some simple code on paper. Did anyone stop and think that maybe it's writing code on paper in an interview setting that's the problem? Stop and think about this. Imagine writing code like you usually do in a text editor. And then writing code with pen and paper. Backspace? Can't do that. Copy/paste some line to move code? Can't do that. Add some newlines? Can't do that. Run the code using the compiler? Can't do that. Of course most developers, even experienced ones, will do poorly under these conditions, this is not how code is normally written. On top of the already stressful situation of an interview, there's this suddenly completely foreign and limited way to write code.
* Even the blog post only mentioned fizzbuzz as a quick, easy question to filter out zero coding ability. Another way to say this, it was meant to filter out coding skill <= 0. Not skill <= 50 or skill <= 90. Zero. After that, the interview was supposed to move on to things that actually matter for software engineering. The present day interview has strayed extremely far from this. These days, you get asked two leetcode questions during an interview and even if you perfectly answer the first one, if you don't get the second one then you're an automatic fail. That was certainly not the intent of the original fizzbuzz, since answering any leetcode clearly shows coding ability. And the interview never has a chance to move on to the part that actually discusses software engineering skills. Or even if it does and they do very well on those interviews, the failure of only getting 1/2 leetcode questions correct overrules everything else since they must avoid "false positives".