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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

#311

Post by sdenton4 »

James_K wrote: post #234
wiseowise wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by job you mean acting as a circus bear.

This reply seems very witty until you realise that there are actual people whose job it is to act in a circus. In the real world, a job is mainly being told to do things that you don't really want to do, but deciding to do them anyway because you're getting paid.

Huh. The folks I know who work in circus are extremely creative, driven people, who often scrape by for years between gigs that pay decently. They're definitely not really in it for the money, though they do need to eat, and definitely aren't just taking orders. The ring leader is just another role...

And as for the bear, it doesn't get paid at all...

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#312

Post by lowbloodsugar »

camel-cdr wrote: post #32

I've got a hard time imagining they were going for a solution other than you adjusting the base. That seems to be what all restrictions, especially #7, lead to and it is a concept everybody that understands how module works should understand. > 15. Hardcoding matrices is forbidden. This was definitely meant to nudge you into the direction of adjusting the base. The excessive number of rules was really weird, surely t…

The problem is that adjusting the base selects for two kinds of people:

1. People who have come across that trick before.

2. People who have a lightbulb moment in the 45 minutes of the interview.

Now, given that someone has passed the test, what is the probability that it is because of 1 or 2? The VAST majority who pass the test will fall into category 1.

The test manages to have both low sensitivity and low specificity. Well done!

Most likely, the interviewers are completely unaware that the solution is only obvious to their uncurious minds because someone else told them the answer. They don’t appear to have an understanding of where quantum-leap ideas come from, or how to foster them.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#313

Post by James_K »

pas wrote: post #287
James_K wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bac…

I don't think you'd really like to see any code like that in production. The point of an interview is to demonstrate your talents as they relate to the job. While fiddling with types is fun, it is not really relevant and is the exact opposite of what you should be doing in a real codebase. The person in this interview chose to do something silly to show off. They could have demonstrated their actual TS knowledge but instead they chose to write something totally unreadable after the interviewer asked them not to once, then made a specific rule which is basically telling them to drop the silly type stuff and just write normal code. If you really wanted the job, would you behave like that in the interview?

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#314

Post by drewhk »

guccihat wrote: post #136
spacechild1 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that they came up with this solution after the interviewers forbid the use of numeric types and math while still keeping a limit of 30 lines. What do you expect? I found the solution impressive given the circumstances. At this point I would have thrown the towel.

I think the interviewers were looking for the key insight that a number is divisible by 3 iff the sum of the individual digits is divisible by 3. That is easy to verify, even constrained to using single digit data types. To be clear, I am not saying this was a great interview question and I agree the solution OP came up with is impressive.

You clearly did not read the article...

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#315

Post by xeromal »

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…

I had a set of interviews at a relatively large tech company and I was pretty pleased with the process.

1 tech interview which was progressively implementing a banking system. Final question involved threading

1 tech interview which involved building a banking system but it was more systems and database design.

1 business logic interview which was breaking down how credit card numbers worked and then asking me to do a code review

1 was just a personal fit interview.

It took a lot of time but it all felt realistic and useful in the context of hiring someone.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#316

Post by eieio »

mark-r wrote: post #308
quietbritishjim wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm curious, when was the FizzBuzz problem invented? And how did it get publicized to the wider world? If you can come up with a URL the Internet Archive will probably have a copy.

I was really curious reading this. Many years ago I read this blog post (from 2007!) by Jeff Atwood[1] that mentioned FizzBuzz, and I guess I had mentally filed away that Jeff Atwood invented FizzBuzz! But that is not true.

Jeff's blog mentions Imran. Jeff's blog is still up, but Imran's isn't! However it is up on the internet archive, and Imran's post is also from 2007[2].

My sense is that Imran wrote a blog in January 2007 mentioning FizzBuzz and that Jeff's post in February 2007 is what made FizzBuzz the meme that it is today. This is probably very obvious to some readers of HN, but Jeff's blog (Coding Horror) has been around for a very long time and was one of the 'big' tech blogs back in that era of blogging (Jeff went on to, among other things, cofound Stack Overflow with Joel Spolsky a year after writing about FizzBuzz).

Thanks for asking this - if someone asked me yesterday "who invented FizzBuzz?" I would have pretty confidently said "Jeff Atwood!" and I would have been totally wrong.

For completenesses sake, the other really influential interview question blog I remember from this era is Steve Yegge's "five essential phone screen questions," which is even earlier (2005!)[3]

I think interviewing discourse on message boards is tricky; folks have strong opinions, and if someone says "this is an essential question" and the question is hard for you, it's hard not to take that personally. In a past life I thought a lot about interviewing (here is a resource on interviewing I helped create for Jane Street back when I worked there[4]). I have never asked a FizzBuzz-style question, but I do think that "explicitly telling the candidate what you want and give them lots of help to get there" is really important.

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20080405225407/http://imranontec...

[3] https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-pho...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8DGdPkBBxg

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#318

Post by erikerikson »

stickfigure wrote: post #290
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…

I would have led with your skepticism.

This story reads like concept art poking at our empathy to send us through an emotional journey.

I know my reading journey took me through the sadnesses of so many of the interviews in my life and the dysfunction that gets pushed in our industry. I have wondered whether this is part of psychological positioning and pre-negotiation or simply emotional, psychological, or/and organizational ineptitude.

Re: The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

#320

Post by [deleted] »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #283
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…

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…

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