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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

So you are only willing to employ desperate people that allow you to literally walk over them in the interview? Like there is no other suitable exercise to give them, just the absolutely worst one to make them depressed?

Next time you need a lawyer (I am sure you will), ask them which new laws were enacted in the UK in the year 1648 and if they couldn't answer, don't hire them!

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I hire people that can follow the process. I’ve had to establish processes for a department that the cowboy coder in me didn’t like and that I made myself follow.

I’ve also had to implement processes for some type of compliance reasons - most of the time HIPAA. The last thing I need is to be sitting in front of lawyer as Directly Responsible Individual, explaining why we weren’t in compliance.

OK, it makes sense in regulated industries; I had to pass some HIPAA-related exams to even process some medical data for Deep Learning so I understand that part. Still, it's premature to call anyone not willing to do FizzBuzz a cowboy coder, isn't it? ;-)

There are a lot of things that you aren’t going to want to do but we had to for various reasons - everyone has a boss. The last thing I need is someone who is going to fight the process the entire way.

How do you think bosses are made? Usually two ways - by kissing up and befriending managers or by improving processes & methods that are no longer functional and becoming detrimental to the future of the company. I would side with the latter even if it is way more difficult than to make somebody feel good about themselves.

But that’s what you don’t get. It’s much easier to get your ideas through if the manager and your coworkers like you and trusts you. You would be amazed at the processes and changes you can make just by having the interpersonal skills to do it.

What if I have those skills, can "make everybody love me" (...) & build a wonderfully harmonious company together, but I still hate FizzBuzz and avoid anyone who uses that on me, hard pass/hard filterish-way?

As you mentioned above, you treat it as a double Bozo filter, I treat the use of it as a Bozo indicator and as "passing the Bozo event horizon in this company right now"; and my decision to walk away is like getting out of a dangerous situation with a black hole next to me.

That’s up to you if I needed “smart people” (tm) to solve “hard problems” (tm), you may be that special snowflake that could write the next PageRank algorithm, but if I am hiring for yet another software as a service CRUD app, finding “full stack developers” either locally or overseas is relatively simple.

The FizzBuzz challenge is not aimed at good coders. It is aimed at bad coders. Assume you are in the hiring seat. You need a simple and quick way to find out if the person is completely B.S his resume, so that you can move to tougher questions, or end the interview.

For instance, if you said you were a skateboarding pro on your resume, the first thing I would ask you to do is an ollie.

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