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I think that FizzBuzz is just filtering out incompetent applicants who shouldn't be trying for programming jobs to begin with. Joel on Software described this p

I think that FizzBuzz is just filtering out incompetent applicants who shouldn't be trying for programming jobs to begin with. Joel on Software described this phenomenon back in 2005. [1] His key takeaway is that 99%+ of people applying for developer jobs may be unqualified for pretty much any coding job, but they keep applying anyway. He describes how he and other companies get 200 applicants for most job postings, of which only one may actually be "good enough." I've seen numbers like that myself when on the hiring end. So everyone thinks they're hiring the top 0.5%, even though the same 199 losers are spamming their resumes to every job posting. Well, a simple way to filter out that 199 is to apply FizzBuzz or equivalent. [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html

halbermensch 14y ago
So everyone thinks they're hiring the top 0.5%, even though the same 199 losers are spamming their resumes to every job posting. Yeah, when you think about it, this whole "we only hire the top 0.5%" condescension really amounts to a basic statistical reasoning fallacy. To construct an alternate hypothesis: the "real" threshold for ranked competence[1] at "elite" companies might, just might, be more like "the top 5%". But we can safely assume that 95% of the available talent pool in this category will be employed (and not actively seeking), compared with say 70% in the bottom, or "sub-elite" category, at any given time.[2] So for example in a "town" of 1000 putative developers, with skill levels ranging from god-like to "good enough" to mediocre to utterly bogus and self-deluding, let's say 50 (or 5%) of these are truly "elite", and 950 are "non-elite". Further, of the elite category, 47.5 will be employed (and not actively looking), and only 2.5 will be in the job market -- versus, out of the 950 non-elite developers, we might have 665 (or 70%) employed, versus 285 (or 30%) on the market and actively looking. Given this over-simplified (but arguably "less wrong") hypothesis, and assuming that a given opening draws applicants whose fitness ranking is evenly distributed across the pool of in-the-market candidates, it's easy to see that for any given opening, we'll have a ratio of 2.5:285 for elite:non-elite developers -- or a paltry 0.869%(!) of the candidate pool (2.5/287.5) will appear to be from the "elite" category. That is, for every 1 "elite" resume in your inbox, you'll be seeing 114 "non-elite" resumes. And since tech geeks are, by and large, an insecure, envious lot, they like to brag and fudge a bit -- so that 114 easily becomes 199 in their minds (or the 1 a 0.6, whichever). Which gives you the infamous "we only hire the top 0.5%" urban legend right there. Even though they're all really just angling over the... top 5% (ranked over the general pool of putative developers). And since hot-shots like Joel Spolsky, not to mention nearly all of the investment bank / hedge fund types, and well, probably half or more of everyone in the monthly "Who's hiring?" thread just keeps repeating it, and repeating it, and repeating it... well, shucks, it must be true. [1] As such a thing as generic competence exists can be objectively measured, etc, etc, but that's a separate issue. [2] Which corresponds -- conservatively, for the purposes of this argument -- to another widely espoused, but never quantitatively substantiated belief out in startupland: that "all" of the good developers are "always" employed and "almost never" on the job market longer than 2 days.
- vampirechicken 14y ago
  ...and then you'll offer a salary that has been painstakingly researched and calculated to be as close to median as you can get it, without going over.
  - halbermensch 14y ago
    ...or a notch under, for good measure.

halbermensch 14y ago

So everyone thinks they're hiring the top 0.5%, even though the same 199 losers are spamming their resumes to every job posting. Yeah, when you think about it, this whole "we only hire the top 0.5%" condescension really amounts to a basic statistical reasoning fallacy. To construct an alternate hypothesis: the "real" threshold for ranked competence[1] at "elite" companies might, just might, be more like "the top 5%". But we can safely assume that 95% of the available talent pool in this category will be employed (and not actively seeking), compared with say 70% in the bottom, or "sub-elite" category, at any given time.[2] So for example in a "town" of 1000 putative developers, with skill levels ranging from god-like to "good enough" to mediocre to utterly bogus and self-deluding, let's say 50 (or 5%) of these are truly "elite", and 950 are "non-elite". Further, of the elite category, 47.5 will be employed (and not actively looking), and only 2.5 will be in the job market -- versus, out of the 950 non-elite developers, we might have 665 (or 70%) employed, versus 285 (or 30%) on the market and actively looking. Given this over-simplified (but arguably "less wrong") hypothesis, and assuming that a given opening draws applicants whose fitness ranking is evenly distributed across the pool of in-the-market candidates, it's easy to see that for any given opening, we'll have a ratio of 2.5:285 for elite:non-elite developers -- or a paltry 0.869%(!) of the candidate pool (2.5/287.5) will appear to be from the "elite" category. That is, for every 1 "elite" resume in your inbox, you'll be seeing 114 "non-elite" resumes. And since tech geeks are, by and large, an insecure, envious lot, they like to brag and fudge a bit -- so that 114 easily becomes 199 in their minds (or the 1 a 0.6, whichever). Which gives you the infamous "we only hire the top 0.5%" urban legend right there. Even though they're all really just angling over the... top 5% (ranked over the general pool of putative developers). And since hot-shots like Joel Spolsky, not to mention nearly all of the investment bank / hedge fund types, and well, probably half or more of everyone in the monthly "Who's hiring?" thread just keeps repeating it, and repeating it, and repeating it... well, shucks, it must be true. [1] As such a thing as generic competence exists can be objectively measured, etc, etc, but that's a separate issue. [2] Which corresponds -- conservatively, for the purposes of this argument -- to another widely espoused, but never quantitatively substantiated belief out in startupland: that "all" of the good developers are "always" employed and "almost never" on the job market longer than 2 days.

vampirechicken 14y ago
...and then you'll offer a salary that has been painstakingly researched and calculated to be as close to median as you can get it, without going over.
- halbermensch 14y ago
  ...or a notch under, for good measure.