121–130 of 156 posts
You can judge programmer's ability in 60 minutes. Can someone program? 60 minutes is way more than enough. How great of a programmer are they? You're going to need more than 60 minutes, unless already had a chance to look at their prior code base. What's difficult to judge is, are they organized? are they hard working? how do they handle stress? how's their communication and attitude? do they write great documentatio…
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Funny that this was brought up. I agree fully that it's rare. But...a friend of mine was "den mother" for graduate students in a top 20 comp sci program. The students were often doctoral candidates but could also be MS students doing a thesis. A large part of her job was prepping them for interviews with companies like Google, MS, Oracle, etc. Here are a few gems she had to remind/inform them of. "Yes, you have to sh…
If I was going to an interview with a company like that, I would want to know - will they reject me if I wear a suit? If so, what is safe to wear?
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> You definitely can't tell in 60 minutes whether someone will be a success at your company. > But you often can tell, with very very nearly 100% confidence if someone will not be a success. These two statements are at odds. If you can tell one you can tell the inverse. The truth is you can't tell in either direction from a single 60 minute interview. Your "very very nearly 100% confidence" rate is outlandishly wrong…
> These two statements are at odds. If you can tell one you can tell the inverse. Only if you treat candidate aptitude as binary. Really, aptitude is probably better thought of as a spectrum, and if that's the case then it is not a contradiction to say that you know that (1) someone wouldn't be an obviously bad employee and (2) that same candidate might only be a meh employee.
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Fizzbuzz isn't a trick questions that you have to have heard of. It's designed to be an EXTREMELY easy question, answerable by anyone with even a basic knowledge of programming. It's not a game. It's a way to weed out people that don't know anything. If you have been programming for 35 years, you'll probably be appalled by how easy it is. Look it up.
I never said it was a trick question. Where did you and the other guy come up with that? It may be easy but you would have to explain it to me if you were interviewing me. After looking up what it is, as I said I did, yes, I could do it easily but don't ask me to code your game "fizzbuzz" as if I would know what it was.
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Why did they reject him the first time around? As a recruiter what percentage of the time are you throwing candidates at jobs to see what sticks?
>> Why did they reject him the first time around? Because most people do a really bad job at technical interviewing and selection - there's so much to say about why it would take a book to explain it all. BUT importantly - everyone thinks they do a great job at interviewing and selection. >> As a recruiter what percentage of the time are you throwing candidates at jobs to see what sticks? I'm not sure I understand th…
I have been on the receiving end of a lot of bad recruiters. I have found that my needs were ignored and anyone who could fog a mirror was thrown my way has made me somewhat cynical of recruiters. If you are doing the right thing then this is fantastic. I wish people like you weren’t so rare.
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In internet discussions, people say "write fizzbuzz" because it's a well known trivial problem. In an interview, they ask you to print the numbers 0..n to the screen, while replacing numbers divisible by 3 with the string literal fizz, and numbers divisible by 5 with the string literal buzz. The biggest trick or gotcha is that they will also specify that numbers divisible by 15 should be replaced with 'fizzbuzz', but…
I never said fizzbuzz was a trick question. The OP said that one should know how to write a fizzbuzz. I said I couldn't cause I don't know what it is. That doesn't mean I couldn't once it was explained to me.
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But someone hiring doesn't need you to use "has worked at a FAANG or similar" as a filtering mechanism, so that's not the value you can provide. Perhaps they'd have trouble finding someone who "has worked at a FAANG or similar" for a contract job without you, and that's it.
Senior software engineers are reluctant to leave their safe FTE jobs to go contract because they don't want to do sales, chase payments, manage a business, etc. We help contractors with that. Once a contractor goes full-time contract through Facet, we try to keep them always busy with as much work as they want. So yeah, it's hard to hire those types of devs on a single contract. It's also hard to find them on sites l…
FizzBuzz in Python with nested conditional expressions and a generator expression:
https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2018/12/fizzbuzz-in-python-with-...
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> Can this person code at all? How well? He's trying to draw the distinction between these two questions.
The distinction is meaningless. No company wants someone who can merely code (as determined by their ability to solve fizzbuzz-type stuff). They want someone who can code well.
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An awful lot of programmers have very high and entirely unjustified view of their programming abilities. I'm sure they find the hiring process weeding them out to be very frustrating.
And then there are those of us who, even with an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary, feel incompetent.