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The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

kranga.notion.site

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Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#281

Post by sgarland »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #137
mcherm wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the requirements of the exercise had been "write FizzBuzz" then I would agree: doing weird tricks like this rather than writing straightforward code is a red flag. But the requirements were "write FizzBuzz in ANY language. Then change it so it doesn't use use numbers (!!!). Stick to strict and unreasonable code length constraints." The only POSSIBLE interpretation is that the interviewers don't WANT straightforwar…

The interviewers clearly expected the candidate to give up on his weird solution early. They should have just said, "Do it another way, we don't like this." But they let him dig his own grave instead. This solution is impractical in many cases, and fundamentally difficult to debug. They said many things that suggested that they wanted "easy to extend" and that implies "easy to debug." I don't really have much sympath…

It seemed like it was actually trivially easy to extend. I’m not saying it’s an optimal solution in general, but given the absurd requirements, I think it was well done.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#282

Post by cwmoore »

croes wrote: post #24
sjducb wrote: post #12

I think you’re an A player. You were rejected by a B player that was looking to hire C players. Apply to other companies. In this case it’s not you, it’s them.

To be fair, we only heard one side of the story

"What a terrible day to have ears!"

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#283

Post by quietbritishjim »

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…

The person who invented FizzBuzz [1] did so because he was interviewing senior developers and a consistently high proportion could give really convincing explanations about their programming skills but, when it came down to it, could not program. And that doesn't just mean they were a bit rusty because they had been focusing on the big picture or managing people etc. Instead, they literally couldn't write a for loop but had jobs because they were good at interviews. That's why FizzBuzz is not done Google-style tree inversion exercise but basically just "please write a for loop". I wouldn't want to work a company that doesn't filter those idiots out. A full blown exercise with real code would be fine but a toy exercise would also totally do.

[1] Imran Ghory. He wrote a blog post about it but it now seems to be down, but I know it was him and the reason why he did it because I was working with him at Bloomberg when he came up with it.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#284

Post by throw16180339 »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #195

What's the plan for the candidate choosing C when they hit rule 7 and simultaneously have to use strings but the `char` type is banned? How are they supposed to loop through the input array without an increment operation? Pointers are basically also numerical types, are those banned as well?

There's always recursion.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#286

Post by cgriswald »

James_K wrote: post #269
cgriswald wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t accept an employee or a boss who thought this was a reasonable definition of a job.

Why? It is a simple fact that people only go to work because they get paid. You can verify this for yourself by seeing how many people continue to work for a company after it has stopped paying them.

Because it’s absurdly reductionist and in my experience suggests either a poor work ethic or a lack of empathy or both.

Additionally your argument isn’t logical. An unwillingness to do something for free isn’t equivalent not wanting to do it. You’ve moved the goalposts.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#287

Post by pas »

James_K wrote: post #199
mcherm wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the requirements of the exercise had been "write FizzBuzz" then I would agree: doing weird tricks like this rather than writing straightforward code is a red flag. But the requirements were "write FizzBuzz in ANY language. Then change it so it doesn't use use numbers (!!!). Stick to strict and unreasonable code length constraints." The only POSSIBLE interpretation is that the interviewers don't WANT straightforwar…

Why is that your takeaway? The test isn't just "write a fizzbuzz", it's "write a fizzbuzz better than all the other candidates". Suppose one candidate produces straightforward readable code within those restrictions and the other doesn't, which would you hire? This guy chose deliberately to write an unreadable solution that is highly impractical against the advice of the interviewer.

This is supposedly a NodeJS / NestJS / backend position. If they seem like a good team fit then I would hire someone this good with TS types in a heartbeat.

Especially that this is a small company, so if I'm some kind of mid-level decision maker there then having someone versatile is a big advantage for this company.

If this would be a huge boring enterprise recruiting for the maintenance of their legacy COBOL.TS backend? Then probably the orthodox candidate.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#288

Post by firesteelrain »

What if the interviewers were offended that this guy is smarter than them?

I once was given an interview question for a position at a company. Wanted me to create build scheduler in any language. It was a build engineer position. I started to do their at home exercise but ended up telling the recruiter I won’t do the exercise. It was pointless since Bamboo, Jenkins, or GitLab is what they should be using. Not some home grown build system.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#289

Post by [deleted] »

James_K wrote: post #272
doctorpangloss wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, everyone who has ever invoked "drones" to describe a subordinate hires the absolute worst candidates. They never get far enough in interviewing to the made up situation you are describing, they hired someone terrible long ago.

Are you trying to insult me?

[deleted]

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#290

Post by stickfigure »

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…

I argue the contrary case - the interview style is pretty reasonable, but the interviewers screwed up the process (and ultimately, the grading).

"Adding additional requirements which test a candidate's ability to refactor code" is a pretty good exercise. And it's ok to force candidates people down a specific development path. The problem is that the interviewers didn't do this. They let the candidate pick a strategy the interviewers weren't expecting, then were disappointed with the results.

Actually we have no idea why the interviewers rejected the candidate. Maybe they were just as impressed with the solution as I am. Maybe the candidate presented poorly in other ways. Maybe they agonized over hiring this candidate vs someone else who was even more amazing, and could only afford one.

Ghosting the candidate is pretty inexcusable. But maybe it was just old fashioned corporate dysfunction and someone dropped the ball.

You do not need to waste 45 minutes of someone's time on whether they can correctly interpret and execute some joke requirements -- this is absolutely not the case. I interview a lot of people and most are bad programmers, despite having impressive resumes. 45 minutes of a progressively difficult programming exercise is a minimum.

--

All that said, there are red flags that make me question the veracity of the whole thing:

* Author claims to speak English very poorly, but writes incredibly well! Maybe they leaned on LLMs, but this seems pretty good even for an LLM.

* Author says they have 2 years of work experience in a company that doesn't use Typescript, but then proceeds to create a solution ad-hoc that requires incredibly deep knowledge of the type system. Certainly not impossible, but I don't know anyone that could pull this off.

* Author doesn't have a name. There's no contact information. I don't even know if I should write "he" or "she". Here's a viral calling card that would almost guarantee countless interviews (including from my company!) and they aren't capitalizing on it.

* There's nothing else on this domain, no link to a CV, nothing. It's a ghost.

The story is too good. I'm defaulting to skepticism.

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