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It's important to remember the purpose of questions such as these. The purpose is to short-circuit the interview process when you're presented with someone so h

It's important to remember the purpose of questions such as these. The purpose is to short-circuit the interview process when you're presented with someone so hopelessly unqualified that they're wasting your time and everybody else's. That's why they tend to be laughably simple. More detailed questions -- how they react in real-world situations, how they manage under pressure, and so on -- can come later, once they've cleared that first hurdle. An article well worth reading here is "The Five Essential Phone Screen Questions" by Steve Yegge.[1] He gives some good advice on what to look for in the candidate's answer as well as how to construct FizzBuzz-style questions of your own. [1] https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-phone-screen-questions https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-pho...

raverbashing 11y ago
I understand the reasoning. You want to test my programming ability that's fine. Just don't make me be present on site (if this involves more than going somewhere in the same city or in the vicinity) Or do a phone screen. You can filter people that can't code FizzBuzz with that, with a high confidence level. Just ask the right questions. Because you can believe that to get called for a senior job interview and being asked to do FizzBuzz P! me off! It's extremely disrespectful.
- collyw 11y ago
  Still better than an hour and a half timed hacker rank challenge. Who the hell even needs to implement an algorithm in an hour and a half?
- sokoloff 11y ago
  I don't see the issue in being asked to write FizzBuzz. If you're remotely qualified, this is a 3-5 minute task before I can see, "OK, you pass the 'can fog a mirror' level of test; sorry about that, but you wouldn't believe the trainwrecks we get sometimes..." I had a senior level candidate on-site about 15 years ago who seemed ready to physically fight me when I asked him to write some (approximately) FizzBuzz level code on the whiteboard. I'd gotten a whiff of, "Johnny can't code" from some of his answers and figured I needed to see how deep the rot went. Come to find out, he couldn't do it and had snowed the phone screen and first two interviewers and was angry that the jig was up. Interviewing for a senior-level position is, sadly, no guard against hopelessly unqualified applicants. With the advent of glassdoor and pre-briefed interview candidates, phone screen questions are fairly game-able as well.
  - raverbashing 11y ago
    I find it funny that I never needed to do such test to gauge people's ability. Also, when I saw people using, I never saw it fail. Example questions: (Python) When should you use a list instead of a tuple? What's the difference between range and xrange? What does ' %s' in a string means? Then elaborate from there. I don't think that anyone who can't pass FizzBuzz knows the answers to those questions.
  - falcolas 11y ago
    We had an IT candidate with the same problem. Extremely strong interpersonal skills allowed him to skim past the first three interviews, but couldn't get past "how do you view the IP of your computer" in the technical interview. And he also got really mad at the interviewer for daring to ask the question. Amazing what you can get away with if you have strong interpersonal skills and no sense of morals to hold you back.

raverbashing 11y ago

I understand the reasoning. You want to test my programming ability that's fine. Just don't make me be present on site (if this involves more than going somewhere in the same city or in the vicinity) Or do a phone screen. You can filter people that can't code FizzBuzz with that, with a high confidence level. Just ask the right questions. Because you can believe that to get called for a senior job interview and being asked to do FizzBuzz P! me off! It's extremely disrespectful.

collyw 11y ago
Still better than an hour and a half timed hacker rank challenge. Who the hell even needs to implement an algorithm in an hour and a half?
sokoloff 11y ago
I don't see the issue in being asked to write FizzBuzz. If you're remotely qualified, this is a 3-5 minute task before I can see, "OK, you pass the 'can fog a mirror' level of test; sorry about that, but you wouldn't believe the trainwrecks we get sometimes..." I had a senior level candidate on-site about 15 years ago who seemed ready to physically fight me when I asked him to write some (approximately) FizzBuzz level code on the whiteboard. I'd gotten a whiff of, "Johnny can't code" from some of his answers and figured I needed to see how deep the rot went. Come to find out, he couldn't do it and had snowed the phone screen and first two interviewers and was angry that the jig was up. Interviewing for a senior-level position is, sadly, no guard against hopelessly unqualified applicants. With the advent of glassdoor and pre-briefed interview candidates, phone screen questions are fairly game-able as well.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  I find it funny that I never needed to do such test to gauge people's ability. Also, when I saw people using, I never saw it fail. Example questions: (Python) When should you use a list instead of a tuple? What's the difference between range and xrange? What does ' %s' in a string means? Then elaborate from there. I don't think that anyone who can't pass FizzBuzz knows the answers to those questions.
- falcolas 11y ago
  We had an IT candidate with the same problem. Extremely strong interpersonal skills allowed him to skim past the first three interviews, but couldn't get past "how do you view the IP of your computer" in the technical interview. And he also got really mad at the interviewer for daring to ask the question. Amazing what you can get away with if you have strong interpersonal skills and no sense of morals to hold you back.