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> On-location tests/leet code are a crapshoot They aren't 'fair' in avoiding every false negative, but they at least tell me that the passing candidates know a
by vkou 2y ago
> On-location tests/leet code are a crapshoot
They aren't 'fair' in avoiding every false negative, but they at least tell me that the passing candidates know and can do something.
If I ask someone who claims to know Python or Java whether or not you can have a memory leak in them, and their answer is 'no' or 'Maybe, but I don't know how', I get a pretty good idea of whether or not they know anything about this topic.
If you can't do fizzbuzz, you probably aren't a good fit for a SWE position either, you should be aiming for something more director-level. Given how much people struggle with coding, I sometimes feel like I may as well ditch my regular question, and just ask them to write that.
- QuercusMax 2y agoBack when I was at a small company doing a lot of new-grad interviews, it was really shocking how many people couldn't solve fizzbuzz or something equally trivial, like reversing an array in-place. When I was at Google, most of these were filtered out before I got to see them, but for a while I was doing iOS development interviews and a lot of the candidates applying to Google clearly didn't know anything.
- Syonyk 2y agoThe first time I saw FizzBuzz, I immediately assumed it was some sort of "trap" or "trick" interview question - that there's some deviously subtle little thing in it that you'll miss at first or second glance, as a "gotcha." It literally never occurred to me that it was, in fact, a basic "Can you code your way out of a paper bag given a map?" sort of question to check for basic code competence in languages. Then I started interviewing, and... yeah. I get it now. It really is that simple, should take a competent coder a few minutes, and 80% of people interviewing will take 45 minutes to muddle their way through it.