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> VP of Engineering who asked me to code FizzBuzz on a whiteboard (no kidding)

I agree that a VP in a late stage interview should not be asking this of the candidate, but I will say that I recently had to hire a new team member, and FizzBuzz helped me to immediately weed out the candidates during the initial interview. I'm talking like 50% of the candidates, and one guy even asked if he could take it home and send me the code. Another acted like I was asking him to produce something for the company for free, before even reading the three lines of requirements, and then tried to back peddle when he did read them - of course, I was already holding the interview room door open for him by that time. All told, a FizzBuzz test in the initial round saved hours of my (and their) time.

Out of curiosity, what sort of (non-personality) mistakes did you see?

I've seen:

1) Incorrect ordering of output "Buzz Fizz"

2) Printing only Fizz or Buzz for 15.

3) Starting at a number different to 1 (say 0)

4) Off by one error at the end (going to 99, instead of 100)

5) Forgetting to print out the number when neither Fizz nor Buzz is output (first output is Fizz for 3)

6) Always printing out the number. (3 Fizz)

and that's the people who can code at all.

Then you get people who can't code, and can't even produce a for loop.

Oh and extra points for arguing about the solution being correct, particularly after prompting that there is a bug "Is it correctly dealing with 15?" is a pretty huge hint that there's a bug.

Wow! Thanks, that's illustrative.

Fantastic list of mistakes!

It made realize that I've made all of these mistakes on tasks similar in complexity of Fizzbuzz. I write a lot of scripts in different languages some of them quite domain specific.

Why do I make mistakes? Most of time the mistakes stem from the fact that I do not have to get it right the first time and I may have misread the specifications. As Hemingway said: "The first draft of anything is always shit"

So take 1000 applicants who can code but are in a stressful situation and I would not be shocked that there would be 50 mistakes on something so seemingly trivial.

I don't think mistakes or a lack of them in FizzBuzz are that relevant at all. You are not supposed find a clever solution as a candidate, or as the interviewer to spend more than a minute reviewing or discussing it.

The FizzBuzz test exists to quickly filter out candidates who really cannot code at all, despite what they say in their CV, what jobs they have done in the past, or what courses they have passed.

If you can show that yes, you understand what for loops and if statements are, and can write 10 lines of code roughly correctly, the test is passed and the interview can continue with more interesting questions.

If no, then it saves everyone time to just cancel the interview.

While I didn't quite see all of the possible mistakes pointed out by jpollock in a parallel comment, all of the mistakes I did see were nicely covered there.

Another interesting data point was that only 2 of the 10 candidates had ever heard of FizzBuzz. That surprised me more than anything else.

  Another interesting data point was that only 2 of the 10 candidates had ever heard of FizzBuzz.

This is a good indication that the exercise is testing culture, rather than programming ability.

Well, if you had known about it, I suppose it would be an advantage, but any professional programmer should be able to write fizzbuzz. I really don't like whiteboard situations and I think it is really important to give someone a real computer and also give them time to settle down / warm up because people can panic, even with a small problem like this. However fizzbuzz is a bit like asking typists to take a typing test and to manage at least 20 WPM. If you can't do it, even in a disadvantageous situation, then you aren't a typist.

Having said that, we tend to pair program for our interviews. Our current interview system is to do a quick telephone interview and then follow up with a 4 pomodoro pair programming session. Usually we ping pong and offer to drive first so that the candidate has a chance to settle in. Generally we TDD a fun kata.

I've been surprised at how effective this is. For the people we've hired recently, the programming session really shows what the person is like to work with (to be fair, we actually pair program on most work so it is easy to judge the effectiveness of the hiring system). Apart from that initial telephone screening, we've dispensed completely with formal interview questions because more than anything it was biasing us away from hiring people with qualities that we cared about (being able to program, being able to pair, being able to TDD).

I've had the experience of cutting interviews short before, when it was obvious that the candidate was well out of their depth. We've stopped doing that. We go through all 4 pomodoros with each candidate. Even if we are sure it's a poor fit, it's important to give something back to the candidate who has taken time out of their day to come and visit. It sometimes turns into a 2 hour coaching session, but that's fine. Hopefully it helps the candidate sometime in the future.

It's kind of expensive, but trying to have an interview system that leaves a positive feeling should eventually lead to a good reputation in the industry. That, in turn, should make recruiting easier/cheaper. If you leave the impression, "those people are awesome -- I really want to work there", then it's worth the added expense, I think.

That's why my code test question is not FizzBuzz, but something almost like it: people who know FizzBuzz spot the similarity and proceed, people who've never heard of it just solve my weird variation of a prime sieve.

> I'm talking like 50% of the candidates, and one guy even asked if he could take it home and send me the code.

I'm still trying to reconcile this with my own experience at work. I work for a university department, and hire student employees. Zero people have ever failed our fizzbuzz question on the interview, while it was on there.

You would think that post graduation there would be a _lower_ number of degree holders who can't code.

> You would think that post graduation there would be a _lower_ number of degree holders who can't code.

I think that there are a good number of people who manage to float through life, never really producing anything, just claiming to be idea men, or appearing busy but never quite delivering, or …

Even if they did once know how to program, it's conceivable that they've forgotten.

There are a lot of "HTML programmer" types out there who piece together snippets without ever having to think about how best to solve a problem, deal with the fundamentals of computer arithmetic, or data structures. These people can't do fizzbuzz or something simple like construct a linked list (good one for the managed code generation used to containers).

Hmm I wonder only the better students apply for these kinds of job?

Or perhaps your university is just good? :)

I worked in the same coworking space as them when it was ~2-5 people, and chatted with the founders a bunch at lunch. They were honestly nice people who seemed to genuinely care about doing something well.

Not trying to down-play your experience, thank you for sharing, just providing my own experience.

It is funny how I will instinctively trust more an anonymous post on HN over an article published on a "reputable" site like Bloomberg...

Among others this is probably confirmation bias at work. I'm feeling exactly the same right now.

To be fair the original article is good though, it presents different sides of the story and reports criticisms too. There's even an interesting history fact on how old the tradition of swapping currency actually is!

My intention wasn't to discredit their product or the article, but to offer a (hopefully interesting) "insider view" on a certain kind of culture.

In theory I think this is the appropriate give and take between established Journalism (eg: Bloomberg) and what Social Media (eg: Hacker News) can enhance a story and context.

It was really clear with the Ferrari in an apartment story I linked where a family member actually could vouch for the published article.

I see such instances as examples of what good can come of a balance.

Ah that definitely explains the vibe I got from their "naked march" where they got what looks like a sea of frat boys and sorority girls (I assumed largely their employees/ friends, in reality) to strip down to their underwear and scream and shout and walk around for a "viral" stunt. I know I'm just piling on here, but the vibe certainly had some doucheyness and it made me think their founders were the party bro types trying to get rich.

[http://www.techworld.com/news/startups/transferwise-leads-na...

> I assumed largely their employees

Nah, they just paid a bunch of random guys to pretend to be hysterically excited about low-fees bank transfers. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZufqOLl6ajE

I remember Nerve.com doing the same thing back in the mid-90s. (Correction: 2000 Maybe you see some more similarities: https://vimeo.com/2413616 )

Were you impressed by anything at TranferWise? Their security and stability? Maybe their confidence comes from top-notch engineering skills?

Their marketing material in NYC was incredibly douchey, like "stick it to the big banks".

I was using Xoom (https://www.xoom.com) at the time, which had a brand image of a trustworthy and cut-the-bullshit kind of financial company.

TransferWise's subway ads focused on a people's revolution: http://l3.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/Rjm3dY.BU5FmdQmId3yj1w--/Y... or http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03525/TransferWi... are two examples.

Another thing that threw me off is how needlessly technologically-heavy their website was at the time: Javascript front-end app with big animations and the unavoidable browser-incompatibility bugs it created back then (you refresh the page and it redirects to the root page for instance).

Anyway, I tried it once and had slightly better rates than Xoom, enough to convince me to go through their bullshit to save some money on large transfers, but I almost kept using Xoom because of how much I didn't like Transferwise's image.

All that to say: I'm not surprised by your interview experience, it perfectly matches what I assumed from their team.

Is it really their fault, or is i just how marketing works in this day an age ?

Heck, they even got you, and you hated their marketing!

I'm the least 'get excited about the company vision' person there is and if I was starting a service that competed against banks I'd be very tempted to play that up in marketing, both to prospective clients and employees.

There are an awful lot of people that really loath banks.

Their marketing got my attention, and their rates were so much better than the competition that it outweighed the terrible brand image.

They could have gone straight to the point: "Better international transfer rates than your bank" and I'd have been very happy with it. The service is good!

But would that message be shared on social networks ? Be written to about in papers ? Recieve that much attention ?

It sounds like a culture that's not objectively bad, just different from what you respect. People use slang words and bragging everywhere. They're just different words and different ways of expressing their brags.

But to be honest, they do have a very noble goal and they have reason to be proud of it. Poor people all over the world are constantly pouring money into Western Union and banks for this seemingly trivial service.

> they do have a very noble goal

LOL

they ain't no charity, their goal is to make $$$, period. Incidentally they do so in a way that is also good for their customers, but that's nothing more than a nice coincidence.

We're all grown ups, I don't need to be sugar coated with all the "we're making the world a better place" nonsense. But no, these people want you to believe in their damn dream, as if working 5 days a week to make them rich wasn't enough already. That's true for many companies out there, not just TransferWise.

Also, mocking former candidates because they aren't cool enough is objectively a shit culture in my book, eh.

well I am as a rule also cynical regarding the motives of businesses, but one thing I have observed is that some people seem to create and pursue businesses that are good for their customers as the central purpose of that business, and some do so as a nice coincidence if it happens. These guys can be the second, but might also be the first.

Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?