3 ms·

I get the impression you latched on to the word leetcode and took away something very different FizzBuzz, reversing a sentence -- this is programming your way

I get the impression you latched on to the word leetcode and took away something very different FizzBuzz, reversing a sentence -- this is programming your way out of a wet paper bag, not elite and esoteric skills that need advanced study and cramming

seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
Similar concept. You have them do some task like fizzbuzz to see if they can program stuff on the fly that they would never need to do in real life. You practice that since school doesn't prepare you for that unless you do ACM programming contests or something. The interview demands this to see if the candidate is capable of cramming for the interview, which correlates with the effort, ability they could put into the job, not with what the skills they actually apply on the job, which are hard to measure in a one hour interview slot anyways.
- integralid 11mo ago
  If someone doesn't know how to reverse words in a sentence they are absolutely not qualified to be a programmer. Yes they probably won't do this exact task often, but this is like a doctor that can't distinguish heart from the liver. It tells you something has gone horribly wrong.
  - ThunderSizzle 11mo ago
    In many languages, the basic version can be just one line of code, if you know the right libraries to leverage. C# leveraging Linq, for example: String.Join(" ", String.Split(" ", sentence).Reverse()))
  - chongli 11mo ago
    What if the sentence is in Japanese (which doesn’t use spaces)?
    - mghackerlady 11mo ago
      Japanese can use spaces and does in some contexts
- sokoloff 11mo ago
  I agree that some random leetcode-hard problem is not a good indicator, but if you can’t write fizzbuzz or can’t sum an array of integers, you’ve given me important data about your skills as a programmer on that day.
  - seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
    I’ve never had an interview question that asked me to do something straightforward. If I did get a question like that, I would be immediately suspicious about what the catch was.
    - sokoloff 11mo ago
      For campus, we ask very straightforward questions to try to weed out the very lowest of coding fluency at that early stage. (Basically to try to guard against late track changers who haven’t actually coded but know that the SWE market is better than whatever their original interest was.) If I ask that of a senior candidate, it’s because I got a whiff of “this candidate might not be able to code at all, and I’d like to save us both some time and frustration.”
      - seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
        I don’t know, I still think 22 year old me might still flub even a simple on the fly question (granting that I do my first internship with IBM writing lots of code when I was 20).
        sokoloff 11mo ago
        If they flub half of the time and go on seven such interviews, they have over a 99% chance to pass at least one of them. And that’s for someone with only a 50/50 success rate at summing an array of integers. Do you want to hire someone for a software role who is an underdog to be able to sum an array of ints?
        11mo ago

seanmcdirmid 11mo ago

Similar concept. You have them do some task like fizzbuzz to see if they can program stuff on the fly that they would never need to do in real life. You practice that since school doesn't prepare you for that unless you do ACM programming contests or something. The interview demands this to see if the candidate is capable of cramming for the interview, which correlates with the effort, ability they could put into the job, not with what the skills they actually apply on the job, which are hard to measure in a one hour interview slot anyways.

integralid 11mo ago
If someone doesn't know how to reverse words in a sentence they are absolutely not qualified to be a programmer. Yes they probably won't do this exact task often, but this is like a doctor that can't distinguish heart from the liver. It tells you something has gone horribly wrong.
- ThunderSizzle 11mo ago
  In many languages, the basic version can be just one line of code, if you know the right libraries to leverage. C# leveraging Linq, for example: String.Join(" ", String.Split(" ", sentence).Reverse()))
- chongli 11mo ago
  What if the sentence is in Japanese (which doesn’t use spaces)?
  - mghackerlady 11mo ago
    Japanese can use spaces and does in some contexts
sokoloff 11mo ago
I agree that some random leetcode-hard problem is not a good indicator, but if you can’t write fizzbuzz or can’t sum an array of integers, you’ve given me important data about your skills as a programmer on that day.
- seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
  I’ve never had an interview question that asked me to do something straightforward. If I did get a question like that, I would be immediately suspicious about what the catch was.
  - sokoloff 11mo ago
    For campus, we ask very straightforward questions to try to weed out the very lowest of coding fluency at that early stage. (Basically to try to guard against late track changers who haven’t actually coded but know that the SWE market is better than whatever their original interest was.) If I ask that of a senior candidate, it’s because I got a whiff of “this candidate might not be able to code at all, and I’d like to save us both some time and frustration.”
    - seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
      I don’t know, I still think 22 year old me might still flub even a simple on the fly question (granting that I do my first internship with IBM writing lots of code when I was 20).
      - sokoloff 11mo ago
        If they flub half of the time and go on seven such interviews, they have over a 99% chance to pass at least one of them. And that’s for someone with only a 50/50 success rate at summing an array of integers. Do you want to hire someone for a software role who is an underdog to be able to sum an array of ints?
        11mo ago