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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

No, not happy now. Your technical skills may be off the charts, and your criticism of fizzbuzz may be completely valid, but I don't want people with that kind of attitude anywhere near my team.

There's going to be stuff that isn't done the way you want, in the company policies, in the code base, in the architecture, in the way the team works. If you're going to respond in an I'm-above-this, salt-the-earth kind of way when that happens, then no, I don't want to hire you. Go destroy some other workplace.

As I said, this is orthogonal to whether your criticism of the use of fizzbuzz is valid. Your response may make you feel better, but it's showing me a lot about who you are, and it's not improving your hireability.

If I were asked fizzbuzz in an interview, I think I'd say something like "I'll answer that. But I expect the rest of the interview to be at a considerably deeper level."

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You are making amazingly far-reaching decisions from very limited information, a quality I definitely wouldn't want to see in my superior. A dislike of a certain test must mean "to destroy some workplace". I am now wondering if all the issues we see with politics lately are happening because people are becoming single-dimensional, unable to even consider someone else's view if the way it's presented slightly deviates from what they demand.

As somebody who was often interviewing other people fighting for jobs at top companies I worked for, I would never ever offend them by throwing FizzBuzz in their faces; I don't have such arrogance in me. I would rather try to figure out what clicks with them and throw them something tasty where they can show off, then increase pressure to see what needs more work, then explain/discuss what could have been improved. I would respect their time and help them to learn something on that single interview they had with me. Never throw into their faces that they are frauds which is implied by employing FizzBuzz. One doesn't have to be a super psychologist, just simple empathy is sufficient to understand that people perform best when they are respected and treated as adults.

In the great-grandparent, you said:

> > > You'll moreover piss me off and get a placement on my blacklist of companies to never work for and me actively spreading the news about your interview to anyone capable I know, hoping nobody is going to waste time interviewing for your jobs.

Now you say:

> A dislike of a certain test must mean "to destroy some workplace".

That was a bit more than "a dislike of a certain test". If we hired you and you reacted that way to something you didn't like, that would be in "destroy the workplace" territory.

You mean me employing colored words, even if they nowadays became pretty much colloquial without harsh emotional content? In that case I apologize, though at that moment when I was writing it I wanted to emphasize that I viewed this whole FizzBuzz charade insulting, basically treating interviewees as frauds. I think sometimes for the sake of proper behavior reinforcement the use of those words is vital and they fulfill their proper linguistic function when needed, otherwise they wouldn't have existed. They likely made you feel bad, which is exactly what I wanted to achieve whenever anything about FizzBuzz is mentioned; I hope this feeling stays with you and just for the sake of feeling good you would avoid FizzBuzz from now onwards.

Your words made me feel bad about you, not about myself or even about FizzBuzz. If your intent was to emotionally manipulate me into not using FizzBuzz, you utterly failed.

I have interviewed candidates for Senior DBA positions who didn't know to write a simple JOIN statement.

Reading this thread only solidifies my desire to ask for FizzBuzz, so that I weed out 2 types of candidates :

- those who are too bad for it

- those who are too good for it

I was specifically addressing the FizzBuzz problem as stated in the original article a few years ago, not some random sanity checks for some positions. If you read that article and used it in interviews, you'd have demonstrated to me your disregard of experience, your lack of inventiveness, laziness, and far reaching arrogance, qualities I wouldn't want to see in my superior, so it's obvious it'd be better to avoid each other and maybe meet only on the golf course or as competitors/suppliers.

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