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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.
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A 2 minute Fizz Buzz at the beginning of the interview is great to filter people who managed to fool the recruiter. It is also a cool opportunity to "talk shop" if they go for a strange solution.
Based on the general reacion from some of the comments here, going for strange/novel solutions is seen as something to be avoided though
The requirements were way stranger and quirky than the solution, and wouldn’t really lead to any production-ready code…
Lots of comments complaining about the code completely glossed over the requirements.
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 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…
FML.
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I probably wouldn't have hired the candidate, at least for the position as stated. My reasoning is that the company advertised a position for a senior engineer with 4 years experience. Leaving aside title inflation and whether someone with 4 years experience is actually a senior engineer, and leaving aside the really dumb test, that position requires communication skills, common sense, maturity, and just generally kn…
The interesting contrast, though, is that the blog post demonstrates strong communication skills and self awareness.
All that being said, I would not be able to take the OP's side until I heard the interviewers side of the story as well.
It's not that the candidate is underqualified, it's that they demonstrated more hacking skill than programming skill in that interview. I feel like the rules about program length were mistaken for coding golf rules? A small company hiring a programmer isn't looking for super clever type system hacks, they're looking for someone to crank out code to solve problems fast. It's not readable or efficient to use the type c…
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> His solution is clever, but if that's indicative of how he's going to do engineering work at my company, I guess that means I can expect clever solutions for everything I think this is uncharitable. The interviewer's demands to not use numeric types or any mathematical operations is inherently preposterous, and at that point the author can't be judged negatively for whatever contortions they needed to perform in or…
That's fair, the interviewers did put unreasonable restrictions on the challenge that forced the overly clever solution. It was my kneejerk response from personal experience seeing candidates come up with overly clever solutions even to simple job challenges. But even still, let's assume there is a problem out there with unreasonable requirements. And let's say an engineer architects a solution to that problem in 100…
That wasn’t part of the criteria. If that’s something they wanted to assess, they should have told him “no” when he asked if it would be alright to encode the rules in the types.
Maybe you have an issue with the interview, rather than the interviewee?
I've created a joke Python library, hoping that I would get asked to code it in an interview. No luck so far https://github.com/leoffx/fizz
I get the point, but update your library to support entries higher than 100. :-)
The interviewing company does seem like a dodged bullet at first glance, but: - the requirements being weird might very well be modeling how weird things often get in reality. Rules are often not recorded and not repeated, and very often they seem arbitrary from the POV of the developers. - the interviewers hinted that the direction was not what they were looking for - a senior dev needs to apply his own common sense…
No, they said they couldn’t see the utility in what he was doing, which is very different than being told that his solution is unsatisfactory.
I have had countless interviews where I’ve been told that they don’t see where I’m going with something, and when I’m finished they admit (after some time processing) that they are impressed that I came up with such an elegant, simple solution. When asked what they had in mind, it turns out they (initially) thought the optimal solution was some contrived, overly complicated thing. If I let everyone’s interjections derail me, I’d never get through most interviews.
Think: have you ever seen a candidate give a crazy, overly complicated solution in an interview? Yes? Well, such interviewees (the ones that write 100+ line Fibonacci functions that look like they might be doing some memoization, but if you squint it turns out they aren’t even using the memo table they constructed) go on to be become interviewers — it shouldn’t be a surprise that many interviewers unintentionally throw candidates curveballs by expressing incredulity in the face of a non-shitty solution. If something is truly a hard “no”, then a “no” must be said — expecting the candidate to guess what’s going through the interviewers head is ridiculous.