4 ms·

> Look at fizzbuzz as an obvious, if not entirely complete, example. I am not entirely convinced this is not partially a resume screening and talent pipeline p

> Look at fizzbuzz as an obvious, if not entirely complete, example. I am not entirely convinced this is not partially a resume screening and talent pipeline problem. Has anyone ever given Fizzbuzz problems to everyone who applied to a position? If you haven't, have you ever considered that your screening process may be broken in the sense that you are passing too many liars who then bomb the Fizzbuzz portion, but who bump competent people off the stack entirely so you never test them?

shubb 12y ago
I find this idea that there are lots of fake programmers kind of nuts. Presumably, when you do a resume sift, you look for people with either a qualification or work experience. Either they somehow faked it through those, or your test is bad. Fizzbuzz actually tests if you know what % does. Is that critical knowledge for a webdev?
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  I don't think there are "lots", but I think there are enough to distort the view of the labor pool. Additionally, there is the issue of these fakers staying in the pool much longer and spraying their resumes out more often further distorting the view. As for how they get through the screen, I think they just blatantly lie on their resume hoping to get a company that doesn't do its due diligence in determining if the stated experience is real.
- Kalium 12y ago
  > I find this idea that there are lots of fake programmers kind of nuts. I don't know about "lots", but there are definitely people out there who claim to be programmers but lack the basic competencies they claim. I've encountered several. A couple of years ago, I was part of a battery of interviews for a candidate who claimed a Master's in CS. Their resume said they had done advanced work in parallelization of video compression. I asked them about it - I wanted to know how they had handled synchronization and locking. The candidate looked at me blankly for a couple of seconds. Then they began, haltingly, to talk about web sessions and logging. We didn't hire the person, but there was definitely some bullshit along the way...
  - crucini 12y ago
    To be fair, they are kind of separate problems. In Clojure, for instance, you can write parallel code and the nuts and bolts are handled for you.
    - Kalium 12y ago
      With the tools this person claimed to have used, they very much would have handled all the nuts and bolts.
- cheald 12y ago
  I've interviewed people for programming positions with work experience who had trouble articulating solutions to very simple problems. I don't know that I'd call them "fake programmers", but "bad programmers who lack the ability to reason about code and instead rely on StackOverflow answers to provide solutions to the problems they're faced with" are all over the industry.
- emodendroket 12y ago
  I'm generating some HTML. I would like to create a new row on every third element. How might I do this?
- DanBC 12y ago
  > Fizzbuzz actually tests if you know what % does. Is that critical knowledge for a webdev? The point about fizzbuzz is that some people fail it even when you give them a list of functions and how to use them. Finding out whether this is relevant to how they do when actually working rather than in a high pressure interview situation is an open question.
- dbenhur 12y ago
  The world of actual programmers is NOT filled with fake programmers. The world of people actively applying for advertised programming positions IS dominated by fake programmers. That's why FizzBuzz is an effective screen. As to your last question, a "webdev" who doesn't understand integer modulus is a fake programmer. Is it critical? I suppose it's not if your grid is never wider than one column and you never want to alternatively style rows in a list or table.
Lawtonfogle 12y ago
In which case it becomes bimodal in the sense there are people who consider themselves programmers but who do not meet enough skill to be considered one.
lolatu54 12y ago
We give fizzbuzz style tests to all our candidates. Most fail, but it's not an indicator of experience at all. Some of the quickest to pass just got out of GA and never worked in the industry before. It really tests aptitude at a specific type of problem. Because of this it does not make or break the interview. We also look at their portfolio/code samples as well. After interviewing many candidates I've found the one's who pass our fizzbuzz tests also have much better code. Because of this I'm convinced that aptitude and passion are significantly important to the ability to program. Just grinding your way through CS classes will not a programmer make. I should add we let the candidates use google, so even if they don't know modulus or whatever, they still can prove their ability to look up things.
- sokoloff 12y ago
  > Because of this it does not make or break the interview. You mean that you continue the interview process for a coding position with someone who failed FizzBuzz algorithmically/structurally (not for a trivial syntax error)? At a prior game company we gave what I felt was a FizzBuzz-level task on paper: in C, given a string of characters representing a hex number, return the long it represents. (basically, write strtol(input, NULL, 16); without using strtol) I was appalled at the number of people who couldn't come close (not subtle bugs or mis-handling case issues, but rather: show someone else their code and have that person guess what function the person was trying to write). When the Fizzbuzz blog post(s) came out, representing a much simpler problem, I couldn't believe that someone would bother to shower and leave the house to interview for a programming position and be unable to do Fizzbuzz. So I gave Fizzbuzz to a few candidates, often in a joking sort of way (so as to not offend any qualified candidates). Results were predictably shocking and dismaying. It's a problem simple enough that you either can do it or not; there's precious little middle ground. (As other posters mention, these are the people that interview over and over, so hopefully the actual employed population of programmers is overwhelmingly able to do it.)

shubb 12y ago

I find this idea that there are lots of fake programmers kind of nuts. Presumably, when you do a resume sift, you look for people with either a qualification or work experience. Either they somehow faked it through those, or your test is bad. Fizzbuzz actually tests if you know what % does. Is that critical knowledge for a webdev?

vonmoltke 12y ago
I don't think there are "lots", but I think there are enough to distort the view of the labor pool. Additionally, there is the issue of these fakers staying in the pool much longer and spraying their resumes out more often further distorting the view. As for how they get through the screen, I think they just blatantly lie on their resume hoping to get a company that doesn't do its due diligence in determining if the stated experience is real.
Kalium 12y ago
> I find this idea that there are lots of fake programmers kind of nuts. I don't know about "lots", but there are definitely people out there who claim to be programmers but lack the basic competencies they claim. I've encountered several. A couple of years ago, I was part of a battery of interviews for a candidate who claimed a Master's in CS. Their resume said they had done advanced work in parallelization of video compression. I asked them about it - I wanted to know how they had handled synchronization and locking. The candidate looked at me blankly for a couple of seconds. Then they began, haltingly, to talk about web sessions and logging. We didn't hire the person, but there was definitely some bullshit along the way...
- crucini 12y ago
  To be fair, they are kind of separate problems. In Clojure, for instance, you can write parallel code and the nuts and bolts are handled for you.
  - Kalium 12y ago
    With the tools this person claimed to have used, they very much would have handled all the nuts and bolts.
cheald 12y ago
I've interviewed people for programming positions with work experience who had trouble articulating solutions to very simple problems. I don't know that I'd call them "fake programmers", but "bad programmers who lack the ability to reason about code and instead rely on StackOverflow answers to provide solutions to the problems they're faced with" are all over the industry.
emodendroket 12y ago
I'm generating some HTML. I would like to create a new row on every third element. How might I do this?
DanBC 12y ago
> Fizzbuzz actually tests if you know what % does. Is that critical knowledge for a webdev? The point about fizzbuzz is that some people fail it even when you give them a list of functions and how to use them. Finding out whether this is relevant to how they do when actually working rather than in a high pressure interview situation is an open question.
dbenhur 12y ago
The world of actual programmers is NOT filled with fake programmers. The world of people actively applying for advertised programming positions IS dominated by fake programmers. That's why FizzBuzz is an effective screen. As to your last question, a "webdev" who doesn't understand integer modulus is a fake programmer. Is it critical? I suppose it's not if your grid is never wider than one column and you never want to alternatively style rows in a list or table.

Lawtonfogle 12y ago

In which case it becomes bimodal in the sense there are people who consider themselves programmers but who do not meet enough skill to be considered one.

lolatu54 12y ago

We give fizzbuzz style tests to all our candidates. Most fail, but it's not an indicator of experience at all. Some of the quickest to pass just got out of GA and never worked in the industry before. It really tests aptitude at a specific type of problem. Because of this it does not make or break the interview. We also look at their portfolio/code samples as well. After interviewing many candidates I've found the one's who pass our fizzbuzz tests also have much better code. Because of this I'm convinced that aptitude and passion are significantly important to the ability to program. Just grinding your way through CS classes will not a programmer make. I should add we let the candidates use google, so even if they don't know modulus or whatever, they still can prove their ability to look up things.

sokoloff 12y ago
> Because of this it does not make or break the interview. You mean that you continue the interview process for a coding position with someone who failed FizzBuzz algorithmically/structurally (not for a trivial syntax error)? At a prior game company we gave what I felt was a FizzBuzz-level task on paper: in C, given a string of characters representing a hex number, return the long it represents. (basically, write strtol(input, NULL, 16); without using strtol) I was appalled at the number of people who couldn't come close (not subtle bugs or mis-handling case issues, but rather: show someone else their code and have that person guess what function the person was trying to write). When the Fizzbuzz blog post(s) came out, representing a much simpler problem, I couldn't believe that someone would bother to shower and leave the house to interview for a programming position and be unable to do Fizzbuzz. So I gave Fizzbuzz to a few candidates, often in a joking sort of way (so as to not offend any qualified candidates). Results were predictably shocking and dismaying. It's a problem simple enough that you either can do it or not; there's precious little middle ground. (As other posters mention, these are the people that interview over and over, so hopefully the actual employed population of programmers is overwhelmingly able to do it.)