Comment by pkteison | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pkteison | Hacker News Reader

I have interviewed a lot of people with great resumes who literally could not fizzbuzz, or even write a simple for loop. And then if they can write the for loop, most fail when it's a nested for loop. And I don't mean got the syntax wrong - I mean just can't even start, on the simplest of tasks.

I hate that I have to question whether candidates can code, but as near as I can tell, a lot of them truly can't. It leads to an interview process that I'm embarrassed to need to use, but it seems reckless to skip it. I've worked with people who really can't code, and don't want to be back in that situation again. I'd love to have a better interview process, and I'd love to spend more time talking about higher level concepts, but most of the process seems to be stuck just verifying that the things on your resume are really things you did, and not just things you were on the team for but didn't actually do, or outright fabrications.

After college, I was interviewing with the company I eventually ended up with. This was the second technical interview (and we eventually had a third). The very first question I was asked was to write a function that prints out a triangle like:

.

..

...

....

At the time I thought this was an attack to my honor. I literally felt terrible, and thought the interviewer was mocking me, for some reason. I also thought maybe I couldn't make my resume clear. Anyway, this was only a few moments, since questions gradually became harder. Needless to say, after this interview I was really curious why would they ask me such a simple question, which is nothing more than 2 lines of python code.

But then I started learning about this mythical men, who have good resumes but can't even write for loops. I guess I was naive and assumed everyone with a degree in CS would be competent.

no offset for the triangle, not too bad

I believe I pretty much came out with this interview question. When I was 16 I learned programming from a BASIC book and there was a set of exercises like that. Years later (~ 1994?) when I first started hiring software engineers I noticed that many didn't even know how to do for loops. So I remembered these and started using them for the initial screening. Over the years I have worked with many people and I know many of them adopted these.

I have heard about these mythical people but never met one. Usually ten minutes of questions and you can see who is full of crap on their CV, but I have yet to meet someone who can't code at all.

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