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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

#211

Post by lproven »

lproven wrote: post #209
jajko wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

thinks more

2 characters wrong? 10 MB hard disks?

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#212

Post by throwaway173738 »

317070 wrote: post #118
vkou wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and if you'd change tack because of the question alone, it would seem like you really lack self-confidence. Or because the candidate realized that they've messed up, and by dropping the issue can at least salvage the next XY minutes of the interview by not going down the wrong rabbit hole. "Could you tell me more about this?" and "Are you sure about this?" are invitations for providing the rationalization for your…

I know, I have now spent enough time in the Anglosphere to understand this cultural code. But I do want to emphasize that, yes, if you only know English as a language, that that subcontext is not obvious. In France, professors would literally say "You are wrong." as an invitation to explain yourself better. There are only 500km between London and Paris, but the culture behind these words is the complete opposite.

That phrase in English has a strong connotation of the recipient screwing up somehow though, so I’d probably say “that’s not what I was looking for in this case. Try something else.”

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#213

Post by arp242 »

alkyon wrote: post #127
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…

Failing this interview saved the candidate from working for a crappy company, doubling their salary isn't really worth it. Why on earth would the interviewer think that 0 is not a multiple of 3 and 5?

It sounds like they're currently unemployed(?)

But even if they weren't: going from 22k to 50k is a massive difference. People are willing to put up with a lot of bollocks for it. Dismissing that so easily is a really privileged attitude.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#214

Post by BearOso »

whstl wrote: post #134
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…

This rule alone would make me walk out: "New rules will be revealed one by one. The candidate should note them as there won’t be shown again" This feels more like a Squid Game parody than an interview. I interview people from all walks of life. I would definitely not have hired some of the best engineers I worked with if I was trying to be too clever and quirky when giving out requirements.

Personally, I think it's literally unbelievable. It reads like fiction.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#215

Post by xtracto »

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…

You mean you had never had to traverse a 2D number array in spiral order to fix the 500 error in the site?

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#216

Post by blharr »

whstl wrote: post #175
skeeter2020 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're building some sort of basic, crud app you shouldn't hire this candidate, or at least recognize they are a project - is that what you want? But if you're doing anything unique, or experimental they might be a great fit. Most of us are doing the second.

I mean, the interview requirements are quirky and unconventional as heck. Anyone saying "you gotta check divisibility without math" on the job would get laughed out of the room.

The only thing I can think of is they were fielding for them to say "that's not possible" and push back, potentially as a way to gauge if they would reject unreasonable client expectations or something.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#217

Post by sasmithjr »

macNchz wrote: post #205
alok-g wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 requir…

The only thing that might be tricky about FizzBuzz is if the person doesn't know about the modulo operator. I can't remember the last time I used it in production code; I use it far more thinking about FizzBuzz than I do anywhere else.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#218

Post by BobbyTables2 »

Never considered using base-15 for FizzBuzz - that’s brilliant!

This may sound surprising, but interviews are equally about convincing the candidate to join the company as they are about convincing the company to hire the candidate. The former involves much more than just the number for compensation.

I think you dodged a bullet here.

Once found myself in a similar ridiculous situation (Google interview). Looking back, I have to wonder if they expected me to put my foot down and tell them why their scenario was getting ludicrous instead of continuing along. In the end, they determined I wasn’t even fit to be a sysadmin, much less a SRE, despite 10 years of relevant development experience with a wide technical background and numerous patents.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#219

Post by pavel_lishin »

> They didn’t want to tell me if I would be a contractor or an employee during the personal interview. They told me that they were just looking for the right person and that technicalities would be discussed later.

... that's not a "technicality", that's a crucial distinction that's as important as salary range or other benefits. This would be a huge red flag for me.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#220

Post by plasticchris »

qsort wrote: post #26
riffraff wrote: post #10

I loved the article and would probably have hired this person. But as a suggestion to them: 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. Also reminded me of my compiler class, we had some homework to write a pascal/C transpiler and a friend of mine somehow managed to implement it via bison errors(?). The teacher was not happy but ha…

> 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…

If the interviewer were better they would instead ask: if no one else on the dev team knows the type system how do you handle that situation?

Which gets at the real risk, maybe valid, that someone super smart who isn’t the best communicator will go and make a bunch of code that no one else in the company can reason about. Maybe you get a really nice explanation of the type system, or they are aware this is an esoteric approach but used it anyway because you said anything goes and it’s cool.

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