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The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

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Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#201

Post by darkwater »

em-bee wrote: post #171
darkwater wrote: post #115

Since I'm in the process of seeking a job, I would like to share a somehow related experience in one technical interview, this time for a senior DevOps role. So, after the initial introductions and talking a bit about infra as code with Terraform, they interviewer asked a question: "What would you use if you cannot use Terraform for a project?" To which I initially answered, since it was a SENIOR position, with a war…

are you sure it was the answer for the first question? i went through a fast paced interview recently. i was told that it would be fast paced and the interviewer did cut me off when i gave an answer like that for a different question, but i can't imagine that that would be the reason to reject me. (i didn't know all the answers so it was fair in my case)

Yes, they explicitly mentioned it in the rejection mail. I quote: "the answers regarding terraform vs Ansible were overcomplicated".

Obviously I'm biased towards myself, but I've been an interviewer as well and if someone develops on their own an answer like I did, they would pass the interview with flying colors, because they would have shown me that they understand what's behind the thing.

Again, it's my side of the story, they probably have another version, but still I think I dodged a bullet.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#202

Post by James_K »

bhaney wrote: post #11

> I don’t think it would be fair to name and shame them. I disagree, but of course that's entirely up to you.

Do you think you'll make it to the interview stage of the hiring process if the interviewer looks on your personal website and finds that you wrote an entire blog post calling out your last interviewer by name? I would not risk inviting such a person.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#203

Post by pockmarked19 »

If this is what people imagine when they hear of whiteboard interviews, no wonder they hate them! What this was and what a technical interview is supposed to be could not be any more different. This interview reminds me of some experiences I've had in my early career, and now I know better than to spend more than 5 minutes with this kind of nonsense.

The easiest tell is the adversarial nature of it, but the moment the "max of 30 lines" slide was revealed I'd be out. Scratch that - I'd be out when I saw there were slides. The point of a technical interview isn't to repeatedly try and throw caltrops in front of someone, and a company that doesn't know that is unlikely to be a great place to work.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#204

Post by bluGill »

darkwater wrote: post #102
constantcrying wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then ask . Ask the candidate if he has experience in some teams, ask what he would do if someone else was challenging his technical decisions. Ask him what he would do if he was ordered to do something which he believes was a bad technical decision. Instead of talking the company relies on easily misinterpreted hints that he might or might not be someone able to work in a team. People can be both self confident and a…

Agree as a general rule BUT candidates can (and some WILL) lie to those questions. See how they react naturally although in a simulated scenario can give you a better idea. But you should do both things, probably in 2 different interviews.

There is plenty of research on interviews and how to prevent them - or so the interview trainers hr made me take classes from before I was allowed to interview anyone.

disscussions here universially show no evidence anyone knows it exists much less what it is. I at least know it evists but I don't know how to find it

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#205

Post by macNchz »

alok-g wrote: post #182
constantcrying wrote: post #61

What a genuinely terrible interview. Seems like a great way to learn absolutely nothing about the candidate. I would have walked out half way through. These types of questions are very telling of an organization which is extremely insecure in its own abilities. For anyone who is a somewhat experienced programmer it is not hard to tell if someone else knows what he is talking about. You do not need to waste 45 minutes…

In general, any made up problem (i.e., with no real utility) is just a puzzle and I would prefer to walk out unless I do need the/a job. What a pity when interviewers can't even think of a real world problem for an interview. Most interviewers are like that. No wonder, the industry has the candidates solve various coding problems, and once hired, all the candidates end up dealing with is company politics or other slo…

There’s a spectrum of reasonableness with technical interview questions—the process described in this post is unreasonable, but I think plain old fizzbuzz is about as reasonable as it gets. It’s actually pretty “real world” if the candidate will be writing code in their job.

It’s not a trick question nor does it require memorization or study to prepare. You’re not being given 20 minutes to solve something that requires knowledge of an algorithm that researchers worked on for decades that you’ve either practiced or will stumble through deriving from first principles—you’re writing a very simplistic function.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#206

Post by bowsamic »

em-bee wrote: post #108
bowsamic wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough I’m just saying I live in Germany and just entered my first software position and get 73k, and I don’t live in Berlin or anything. I suppose in Spain living expenses are much cheaper. Your monthly expenses including food are less than my rent. Tho I still think I have more than 2100 left over after expenses

73k as a junior? (your first software position) that sounds like a major exception. the average for juniors in germany is 50k or below.

I have a PhD, maybe that's the difference. I asked for 65k but they refused and gave me 73k

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#208

Post by bluGill »

Mawr wrote: post #114
bootsmann wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree, this is a significant step up from the leetcode-style programming puzzles that other companies do. It doesn't bank on the interviewee knowing the specific trick that makes the puzzle work and instead tries to somewhat test the skills that are more significant for the job at hand like debugging, refactoring and dealing with changing requirements.

That was likely the thought process of the interviewers, however wrong. FizzBuzz works well enough as a lowest common denominator screening test, but it doesn't scale up. At its core, it's an entirely made up problem with no relevance to anything you may ever do at a job. How do you evaluate requirements for a problem that is not real? The higher level the skills you want to test, the more realistic your questions ha…

A real job is often simialar to fizzbuzz in that there is no eligant solutians. There are several solutions but they all have some special case. a real world problem would take you a week to solve though and so we can't give them to you in an hour.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#209

Post by lproven »

jajko wrote: post #152
rokkamokka wrote: post #82

Interestingly, unlike many in this thread I would've avoided hiring this person based only on the code example. This code is almost unreadable to me, certainly to most on my team. I would request changes it if it was a PR going into production (ignoring that the problem itself is made up). The code I would've liked to see would be easy to read, easy to follow, and would make me understand the underlying rules that ma…

I have to agree. When I was junior decades ago, I saw all those cool one liners as some sort of holy grail and had huge respect for the authors, like we had 10KM HDDs so every char counts. Then I realized how hard they are to debug once codebase looks like this, and any serious production code will get debugged to hell, no doubt there. Also implementing changes require same mindset, which is rare in teams generally,…

I admire terse code too. I can relate. I'm also old.

But:

> we had 10KM HDDs so every char counts.

Ten kilometre hard disk drives?

It can't be 10kB. Hard disks were never that small. Floppy disks were never that small.

Maybe it's not hard disk drives.

It can't be length of tape, or of mercury delay lines.

I am mystified.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#210

Post by throwaway173738 »

constantcrying wrote: post #69
qsort wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if an interviewer says "I don't think that will be a good idea" just take the hint that it won't be what the expect and change it. I'd like to underline this just in case the author reads the thread. He really does seem great and I wish all the best to him, but reading between the lines is a useful skill regardless of this specific situation. He says he doesn't speak English well, that might have played a role in t…

Good leadership starts with clearly communicating expectations. If your boss can not say "I want you to use this tool" or "use whatever you seem fit", but instead hints to you as to some possible drawbacks of certain tools he is bad at his job. There are multiple ways to read that suggestion. It can also be read as the interviewer saying he does not believe in the technical depth of the candidate, which can be taken…

Yeah as an interviewer if the type-heavy solution wasn’t what I wanted to look at I would’ve asked the candidate to pretend like they don’t understand the type system and adjust the solution accordingly.

Actually though if they wanted to test for debugging ability, presenting some real code with defects would have worked a lot better than this.

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