Comment by eximius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eximius | Hacker News Reader

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EDIT: to people emailing me (thanks!), I am currently on PTO overseas so I will respond, but maybe not super timely. Also, we're looking for our first QA and our first DevOps role if non-SEs are reading...

If you're willing to work in Texas, send me an email (check my profile). We absolutely do not mind if you have gaps.

semi-OT: To all people in this thread who say there is no shortage of developers: if you know any of these developers willing to work in Texas, send them my way!

We are struggling to hire for front-end/full-stack developers. It isn't a problem with pay - we offer quite competitively AND Texas has low cost of living! The problem is that we seem to get people who can't pass variations of fizzbuzz (i.e., implement max, min, mean, median on a list) or who we filter out after an intro call due to red flags (claimed to be a web application security specialist but also claimed no experience with web browser APIs, another that claimed to be an expert in databases but didn't know what a schema was!).

I am willing to believe the talent is out there, but we are having a hard time tapping into it.

I don't understand why people would believe there wasn't a shortage, when unemployment is so low right now. There was a shortage of tech talent when unemployment was 10%. Now it's like 3-4% (and for engineers probably half that).

I have twenty years of impressive experience, work is highly complimented, took me a year last time to find a job, was one month away from homelessness. “Shortage” self inflicted.

How do you react when someone fails to implement the max of a list? And how do they react?

I can't imagine how awkward it is for both the interviewer and interviewee.

Can you imagine how awkward it would be to discover it a week into their new job?

On the job you'd have a computer and just google 'list max min median <language of choice>'

If they are looking for 'get list 4th largest', they will need more than Google search...

is it a major city in Texas, or middle-of-the-desert Texas? have you considered hiring remote? I'm not on the job market, I'm just wondering.

Houston. :)

Hiring remote would be an exception to the rule, for us. Not impossible, but you'd have to be worth it.

I am just curious, why do you need to test somone's ability to find max of a list. Language designers have recognized this as a basic utility and incorporated them into the language. Is the hypothesis that - if someone cannot write a simple algo to find the max of a list then what other difficult tasks he/she can perform ? Even though in reality we all understand no one needs to write a max algorithm.

Not GP, but I'll add my 2 cents. It's to test that you have at least a tenuous grasp of the programming language at hand. It should be an absolutely trivial task and take only a couple of minutes to do.

It shows you can iterate over an array and use conditionals, something literally everyone should be able to do if they know the language. These kinds of tests are a quick way to screen out applicants who are straight up lying about experience with a particular language.

It's not like asking them to write a sorting algorithm or implement Dijkstra's algorithm, which requires specific knowledge of algorithms and isn't trivial to implement. And it's not some obscure brainteaser that has no relevance to their normal work.

Iterating over arrays and using conditional logic is something I do every day. In fact, I'd say that's basically 80% of what my job is.

Yeah, I'd say the latter. Finding the max element in a list is an extremely straightforward thing to code; if someone can't do that, it's almost certain they're going to be lacking in a lot of other ways as well. Of course it's not the only thing you would check, but it would make for an easy early filter (which, unfortunately but conveniently, would probably weed out the majority of your resumes).

Fizzbuz removed us 90% of potential hires and saved a lot of money in cutting interview short.

Granted this is a rural area and ymmv depending on the local average skill level, but still if you want to grade someone from zero to ten you need to start with exercisers close to zero.

Otoh if your interview questions are all 9 or 10 in difficulty most of your candidate will fail them and you'll have no data for a decision because all 8s will fail to answer in the same way as 6s and 3s

Much better to start with some stupid loop and work up from there.

> Otoh if your interview questions are all 9 or 10 in difficulty most of your candidate will fail them and you'll have no data for a decision because all 8s will fail to answer in the same way as 6s and 3s

Besides, it's a waste of their time and yours to have someone attempt a 9 or 10 before they show they can pass a 1.

It's a fizz-buzz bozo filter. If you can't write a loop over a list, chances are you are a charlatan that can't provide any value as a programmer.

As everyone else has said, it's essentially just a fizzbuzz test without using FizzBuzz. I don't need someone to write an algorithm to compute max, but I DO need someone who can take simple verbal requirements and write a program to do it. Everyone understands max/min/mean/median (or can quickly understand if they are unfamiliar). If they can't take that concept and apply it to code, then I don't trust them with inevitably more complex requirements.

One problem we just encountered in production that I'm trying to work into a prompt was our impression generation created a large amount of duplicates. Identifying the duplicates and eliminating them takes some simple verbal requirements but has a lot of depth. If they cant't do max/min/mean/median, they surely can't do answer that (which our least senior developer was able to do, with guidance (mostly on optimization)).

We have other questions that are much more relevant to day-to-day tasks, but both kinds are important.

>One problem we just encountered in production that I'm trying to work into a prompt was our impression generation created a large amount of duplicates. Identifying the duplicates and eliminating them takes some simple verbal requirements but has a lot of depth. If they cant't do max/min/mean/median, they surely can't do answer that (which our least senior developer was able to do, with guidance (mostly on optimization)).

Does that problem not require separate thought processes though?

In terms of a max/min/mean/median style problem, the candidate needs to come up with an algorithmic solution to find those values. In the later case of finding duplicates, there is minimal (depending on problem complexity, I suppose) amount of algorithmic complexity and the focus is more on data structures; for instance, does the candidate know they could use a data structure like a hashmap or variant to find unique items with the drawback being an additional storage unit.

So, I guess what I'm trying to trace back to is how you say if they can't answer one then surely they can't solve the other, but (while relatively 'simple' problems) I'd argue they take different mindsets to solve. Obviously in the grand scheme of things one mindset works for both, but in this it can vary a bit.

Anyway, late-night thoughts so hopefully that's not a jumbled-up response.

A self declared mathematician that can't tell you what the answer to 4x + 7 = 19 is, is not going to be a good mathematician even though it's generally not the case that solving trivial algebraic problems makes up any meaningful chunk of a mathematicians daily work.

I think your point would be fair for more complex problems, but getting the max of a list is something anybody of a logical mind could easily do even without knowing any formal programming language. And for those that do know a formal programming language it comes down to the most incredibly trivial basics of a language - comparison/variable/iteration.

In other words a self declared software developer who can't tell you how to get the max of a list is not going to be a good software developer.

I agree with what you've said, though you have some mistaken assumptions.

They aren't exact duplicates. Instead, the code to send an impression was firing repeatedly, so it'd be more like that person refreshing the page once per second thousands of times (except the page content never changes if they don't refresh).

At it's most basic, you're essentially just finding chains of impressions based on lag from the last impression. In practice, we also need to maintain data integrity (foreign keys) and deal with several other issues stemming from common cases where the assumption 'if they are within X seconds, count as duplicate' doesn't hold.

So you could completely ignore performance and still have a question that could prompt a lot of discussion with a candidate (though performance should be part of that discussion). I'm not sure if we'll end up using it due to the relatively large amount of baggage associated with the problem (table layout and business requirements), I've just been toying with reducing the problem down to a simpler prompt that would be feasible.

I'm fairly new to interviewing/hiring, but I really like questions that cut across multiple 'areas of competency' and are amenable to asking followup questions ('what if we wanted to add X?'). Algorithmic questions have their place, but have less day-to-day relevance. We can teach algorithmic stuff on the job.

Reading this, one could be confused into thinking that you’re arguing that a developer shouldn’t have to prove they can write find max of a list. Is this task too below them? Does it not adequately demonstrate knowledge? What else?

I think what you’re might be missing is the basic fact that programming is so stupid lucrative, especially compared to the other jobs that are out there, people will do anything to get these jobs. I’m pretty sure you want your new hire to know HOW the magical library list.max is written. Writing code is surely more than piecing together other people’s utility functions and ideas?

By way of analogy, should your new EE hire be able to compute basic ohms law voltage drop over a resistor? We teach kids this formula. Is this knowledge too below a senior electrical engineer to still know? Of course not.

Finally, someone’s attitude towards answering these questions will tell you a lot about what kind of person they are to work with. If they are surely and refuse to implement list.max, well then, what will their attitude be when it comes to grungy code tasks?

It's a very basic filter for the right way of thinking. Even if you have never programmed it before you should not have any problem with it.

I interned in a medium sized cloud company this summer and they require you to complete a homework project within 4 hours before interviews. You have to setup an environment in your language of choice, query an rest api, parse some json, do a rather easy rearranging of data and post that back to the api as json. Took me about 1 1/2 hours with simple documentation and cleaning up my code. It really only asked basics you should know, if you ever worked with a CRUD app. They also told you before the clock started that it's about HTTP, REST and JSON so you could prepare.

I heared from multiple people from the local colleges that were friends with other interns that this project was way to hard and they had no way of doing it. But it was the bare minimum you needed to do your job there without having to be babysitted by a senior fulltime.

We use such things too, it's exactly to test if someone is at least in general able to code. Surprisingly often there seem to be candidates which look good on paper and talk like that but are unable to perform such toy coding tasks.

Even if you usually would use a library function, finding the max of a list or similar problems are still sufficiently simple tasks which every programmer should be able to perform. It's straightforward and not about remembering some complicated algorithm from some CS class years ago nobody ever implements themselves.

I don't mind getting downvoted but can someone please explain why - this is an honest question. Many devs have scoffed at interviews when I've asked them some really basic quesitons such as finding max element in an array.

I don't think you should have been downvoted. Likely, people expected you to already understand the purpose of the question because I called it a variation of FizzBuzz - which is fair as it's quite well known, though maybe not worthy of downvotes.

Those devs don't understand the reality of interviewing or take offense too easily. The reality is that people lie on their resumes, which makes such questions necessary. If they can pass, they can feel scoff all they want, but they had best answer the question or I will assume they are acting to avoid showing they can't answer it.

It's an unfortunate waste of everyone's time.

Yep, being unable to write a function to find the max of a list correlates pretty highly with being unable to do pretty much anything else in programming. It's one of the simplest possible things you can do.

You don't need to write one but if you have only a little bit of coding skills you definitely should be able to whip one up if you have to. Same for fizzbuzz or maybe invent some simple sort algorithm.

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