> Either that or there's something very seriously wrong with CS programs I've been involved in hiring. I've seen top uni CS grads fail (not borderline - train

> Either that or there's something very seriously wrong with CS programs I've been involved in hiring. I've seen top uni CS grads fail (not borderline - train wreck) a programming exercise not much more complicated than fizzbuzz. And a variation: cheat on the exercise. I've interviewed people who clearly were not the authors of the code sample they'd submitted. We administer the test online and the candidate can take it on their own time. A decent programmer can easily complete it in less than 20 minutes, a good one in five, and judging from the proportion of people who get it wrong, I'd argue it's a good filter to make sure we're not wasting each others time. And I think it goes both ways: It costs us very little to evaluate a response, so we can filter very lightly at the top of the funnel. The first round of interviews are much more costly, so if they were the first point of contact, we'd have to filter much harder on CVs, which isn't always fair to candidates who didn't take the beaten path (and excessively fair to candidate with good degrees). It should be mentioned that we skip the programming exercise if a candidate come through a personal recommendation.