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I’ve lived both sides of this. I’ve been subjected to the mysterious whims and casual insults of the job-seeking process. I’ve also interviewed and rejected ex

I’ve lived both sides of this. I’ve been subjected to the mysterious whims and casual insults of the job-seeking process. I’ve also interviewed and rejected experienced candidates who talked a great game but couldn’t demonstrate the ability to code FizzBuzz-level problems in any language. It’s not a choice between “the tech interview sucks” and “the job market has many unqualified candidates.” Both can be true, and in fact I think they are related in a market-for-lemons way.

rewmie 3y ago
> I've lived both sides of this. I’ve been subjected to the mysterious whims and casual insults of the job-seeking process. I've grown to learn that it's important to understand that interviewing in particular and job-seeking in general is not an objective and impartial process, and the output is not deterministic or reproducible. You can be hired even when there are objectively better people in the race, and you can be sidelined right on the phone screening even though you are the ideal candidate. It's a crapshoot, and the only people claiming otherwise are motivated by a mix of survivorship bias with a need to avoid recognizing that the process is flawed by nature. > I’ve also interviewed and rejected experienced candidates who talked a great game but couldn’t demonstrate the ability to code FizzBuzz-level problems in any language. I'm afraid that this take is also a reflection of the cargo cult mentality that plagues recruiting. I personally know FANG engineers with half a dozen years of high-profile work who had to spend weeks training coding golf and algo&data structures trivia before passing the first round of interviews, all because these trivia games bear no resemblance with real world software engineering. In fact, I will go as far as to claim that they serve more as ladder-pulling than actual technical assessments. For example, once I was automatically rejected from a C++ position to work on a desktop app because I wasn't familiar with placement new. This also extends to framework tests. I know a guy who applied for a backend position who was rejected because even though he rolled out a Spring service from scratch that passed all integration tests, the interviewer complained about how the service did not commented the controllers. These are things that takes a single comment in a PR to address. I mean, is adding a comment w challenging technical feat? But somehow some interviewers reject candidates based on this nitpicking.
- john-radio 3y ago
  > I personally know FANG engineers with half a dozen years of high-profile work who had to spend weeks training coding golf and algo&data structures trivia before passing the first round of interviews, all because these trivia games bear no resemblance with real world software engineering. In fact, I will go as far as to claim that they serve more as ladder-pulling than actual technical assessments... FizzBuzz is a trivial technical problem, though, not a leetcode medium or even an easy. I agree with you that you shouldn't have to grind leetcode all day in order to be considered a valuable software developer; but the existence of people selling themselves as "engineers" but who can't solve fizzbuzz would go a long way towards explaining how we got into this leetcode situation in the first place, because such a person would not be able to be successful as a software developer and they need to be weeded out during the candidate search somehow because they are around and they do want the job.
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > FizzBuzz is a trivial technical problem (...) No, it is not. The term fizzbuzz doesn't refer explicitly to the loop with the modulus example. Fizzbuzz is an umbrella term for tests that are used to assess proficiency, but in practice they tend to have weird gotchas that get you disqualified for random reasons. Case in point, there are online coding challenge tests where you do fizzbuzz tests that flag you as disqualified for cheating if you move your focus away from the page. That's one way to fail fizzbuzz tests: you start the test, switch your browser window, boom you're tagged as an incompetent moron.
    - ursakhiin 3y ago
      Why wouldn't FizzBuzz refer explicitly to the challenge that shares its name?
      - shermantanktop 3y ago
        I said “FizzBuzz-level.” I’ve used actual FizzBuzz for new grads who I suspected couldn’t code, but normally I’m using questions that require looping, conditional logic, perhaps the use of a simple helper data structure like a map. I consider “reverse a string” to be advanced FizzBuzz. Anything requiring DFS or binary search is not FizzBuzz. “Print a tic tac toe board using asterisks, one character at a time” is FizzBuzz.

rewmie 3y ago

> I've lived both sides of this. I’ve been subjected to the mysterious whims and casual insults of the job-seeking process. I've grown to learn that it's important to understand that interviewing in particular and job-seeking in general is not an objective and impartial process, and the output is not deterministic or reproducible. You can be hired even when there are objectively better people in the race, and you can be sidelined right on the phone screening even though you are the ideal candidate. It's a crapshoot, and the only people claiming otherwise are motivated by a mix of survivorship bias with a need to avoid recognizing that the process is flawed by nature. > I’ve also interviewed and rejected experienced candidates who talked a great game but couldn’t demonstrate the ability to code FizzBuzz-level problems in any language. I'm afraid that this take is also a reflection of the cargo cult mentality that plagues recruiting. I personally know FANG engineers with half a dozen years of high-profile work who had to spend weeks training coding golf and algo&data structures trivia before passing the first round of interviews, all because these trivia games bear no resemblance with real world software engineering. In fact, I will go as far as to claim that they serve more as ladder-pulling than actual technical assessments. For example, once I was automatically rejected from a C++ position to work on a desktop app because I wasn't familiar with placement new. This also extends to framework tests. I know a guy who applied for a backend position who was rejected because even though he rolled out a Spring service from scratch that passed all integration tests, the interviewer complained about how the service did not commented the controllers. These are things that takes a single comment in a PR to address. I mean, is adding a comment w challenging technical feat? But somehow some interviewers reject candidates based on this nitpicking.

john-radio 3y ago
> I personally know FANG engineers with half a dozen years of high-profile work who had to spend weeks training coding golf and algo&data structures trivia before passing the first round of interviews, all because these trivia games bear no resemblance with real world software engineering. In fact, I will go as far as to claim that they serve more as ladder-pulling than actual technical assessments... FizzBuzz is a trivial technical problem, though, not a leetcode medium or even an easy. I agree with you that you shouldn't have to grind leetcode all day in order to be considered a valuable software developer; but the existence of people selling themselves as "engineers" but who can't solve fizzbuzz would go a long way towards explaining how we got into this leetcode situation in the first place, because such a person would not be able to be successful as a software developer and they need to be weeded out during the candidate search somehow because they are around and they do want the job.
- rewmie 3y ago
  > FizzBuzz is a trivial technical problem (...) No, it is not. The term fizzbuzz doesn't refer explicitly to the loop with the modulus example. Fizzbuzz is an umbrella term for tests that are used to assess proficiency, but in practice they tend to have weird gotchas that get you disqualified for random reasons. Case in point, there are online coding challenge tests where you do fizzbuzz tests that flag you as disqualified for cheating if you move your focus away from the page. That's one way to fail fizzbuzz tests: you start the test, switch your browser window, boom you're tagged as an incompetent moron.
  - ursakhiin 3y ago
    Why wouldn't FizzBuzz refer explicitly to the challenge that shares its name?
    - shermantanktop 3y ago
      I said “FizzBuzz-level.” I’ve used actual FizzBuzz for new grads who I suspected couldn’t code, but normally I’m using questions that require looping, conditional logic, perhaps the use of a simple helper data structure like a map. I consider “reverse a string” to be advanced FizzBuzz. Anything requiring DFS or binary search is not FizzBuzz. “Print a tic tac toe board using asterisks, one character at a time” is FizzBuzz.