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Ask HN: What % of your job interviewees pass FizzBuzz type questions?

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Ask HN: What % of your job interviewees pass FizzBuzz type questions?

#1
I'm sent 100 resumes a month, then interview about ~10 people. Of those, about 50% can do FizzBuzz style questions. On paper, all of these ~10 people would be qualified to do the work, however (I think) some have become rusty, or focused more on management or other areas.

What percentage of your job interview candidates pass FizzBuzz style questions? Any tips to improve the signal to noise ratio?

Re: Ask HN: What % of your job interviewees pass FizzBuzz type questions?

#2
In the actual interview, I find that most give up after spitting out some pseudocode. About 40% have reasonable psuedo code that makes me think they'd get there (but these half-answers don't give me enough confidence to give them a thumbs up).

Actual code that works (and running it from a terminal), we are seeing only about 15% tops maybe lower.

We have started sending a fizzbuzz-ish question, a relatively easy css question, and a word-problem about performance as pre-interview questions through recruiters. This has dropped our resume inflow dramatically and saved a lot of time, but that's depressing in a way.

We are looking for a Rails or PHP dev in waltham (near boston) currently without a lot of luck. The job has a lot of pros, but probably doesn't do itself justice on-paper.

Re: Ask HN: What % of your job interviewees pass FizzBuzz type questions?

#4
post #2

In the actual interview, I find that most give up after spitting out some pseudocode. About 40% have reasonable psuedo code that makes me think they'd get there (but these half-answers don't give me enough confidence to give them a thumbs up). Actual code that works (and running it from a terminal), we are seeing only about 15% tops maybe lower. We have started sending a fizzbuzz-ish question, a relatively easy css q…

> We are looking for a Rails or PHP dev in waltham (near boston) currently without a lot of luck. The job has a lot of pros, but probably doesn't do itself justice on-paper.

Are you attending local PHP and Ruby/Rails meetups and user groups? If none are available, consider starting one.

Re: Ask HN: What % of your job interviewees pass FizzBuzz type questions?

#6
Just curious if you expect perfect code on a sheet of paper or give them an IDE and say go for it.

As I remember fizzbuzz (print numbers 1 thru x, then fizz if divisible by 3, buzz if divisible by 5, fizzbuzz if divisible by both)

I did it in a text editor in under a minute. Got two errors because I did it without thinking, fixed it, and had a working solution in 90 seconds. It's taking me longer to write this response.

I can't imagine anyone who writes code daily who couldn't get this right in under 5 minutes given a text editor and a way to run the code, but I could imagine plenty of people who trying to do it on a sheet of paper who would make goofs. And most of those would make good employees.

Re: Ask HN: What % of your job interviewees pass FizzBuzz type questions?

#8
post #2

In the actual interview, I find that most give up after spitting out some pseudocode. About 40% have reasonable psuedo code that makes me think they'd get there (but these half-answers don't give me enough confidence to give them a thumbs up). Actual code that works (and running it from a terminal), we are seeing only about 15% tops maybe lower. We have started sending a fizzbuzz-ish question, a relatively easy css q…

> We are looking for a Rails or PHP dev in waltham (near boston) currently without a lot of luck. The job has a lot of pros, but probably doesn't do itself justice on-paper. Are you attending local PHP and Ruby/Rails meetups and user groups? If none are available, consider starting one.

That is good advice. We are at just about every Boston Ruby Group meeting, though...
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