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Comment by wirrbel | Hacker News Reader

>> My anecdotal experience is that you never want people who can't write a for-loop or whatever in your team > Yes, you don't. But you don't need to ask them that directly, or have them code live.

How will you know if you don't ask them a question that asks them to solve a small-scale problem that can be solved via a for loop? In our process it takes like 10 minutes. Granted we don't ask fizz buzz, but also we don't ask for implementations of textbook algorithm. Just a simple programming problem or two.

The way I see it is, the most condescending interview for a programmer is the one that contains no coding at all. And if you refuse to implement FizzBuzz, well, that is okay, but I will not recommend you for being hired.

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> The way I see it is, the most condescending interview for a programmer is the one that contains no coding at all.

Why is that?

The last two interviews I had involved no coding. Both led to an offer.

In one of them, I demoed a personal project and showed bits of its code. I think it would've been quite condescending of them to have me do a fizzbuzz after I've shown them 10k lines of working code.

The other company didn't even care to see my code even though I brought my laptop.. they just took it for granted that I can code.

> In one of them, I demoed a personal project and showed bits of its code. I think it would've been quite condescending of them to have me do a fizzbuzz after I've shown them 10k lines of working code and its credibly your own code. Most candidates I see have some repos on their GitHub which are implementations of coursera coursework.

I guess its a reasonable substitute, IFF the candidate has such a project to show.

> The other company didn't even care to see my code even though I brought my laptop.. they just took it for granted that I can code.

With such a company I would have doubts that I might start in a team with people who cannot code or code fairly badly. I expect, in an interview as an applicant, to see that the position that I start in has a certain appreciation of engineering work. If the prospective employer can convince me that they are caring about their staff's skill levels and code quality, etc without a code-interview, I guess its ok. But most companies that have no coding part in their interview process just don't assess the skill-level.

> > The other company didn't even care to see my code even though I brought my laptop.. they just took it for granted that I can code.

> With such a company I would have doubts that I might start in a team with people who cannot code or code fairly badly.

FWIW that was a military contractor hiring for a fighter jet project. Expensive machinery and lives at stake. They must have a bar for quality, and they can't leave it to the skill of an individual contributor.

> to solve a small-scale problem that can be solved via a for loop?

Why do you need to ask them specifically to code fizzbuzz? There's nothing magical about it and it's a condescending coding exercise.

Ask stuff about their everyday coding and their favourite language. What's the difference between an Array and a Set (in your language of choice). How do you add an element to those? (if it's your day to day language you should remember, right?)

Tell me about an issue you had to debug. Tell me how (something) works in general. Something basic, no need to go into much detail, but just to see if they get the basic idea and have used it.

Again, who cares about fizzbuzz when you can ask them about http headers, network delays, etc (it will be more job relevant as well). People who can't code fizzbuzz will usually fall flat on those questions as well.

Fizz buzz is a low-pass filter. Who cares?

Someone who wants to know if you can code at all, or if you’ve just learned to talk the talk. Those people exist.

You mean high-pass filter right? Lowpass filter means you're filtering our the higher freqs. In this type of discussion, you're trying to get rid of the people who learned to talk the talk, meaning the lower end of fakers and trying to keep everyone above that level. High pass filter.

Hope this isnt too pedantic but as "noise" is commonly perceived as higher freq (ignoring aliasing) I think low-pass is meant to imply removing the "noise" in your pipeline. Your interpretation makes sense if freq == quality, but statistically a high pass output has higher variance, so sounds like the opposite of the intended effect

I mean cutting out everyone below the level.

So you are correct in your pedantry, I did indeed mean high-pass :) Good job I'm not a signal-processing engineer! Or pretending to be...

Fizz-Buzz (or equivalent tasks) are just a quick way to tell whether the minimal basics are met. I don't ask Fizz Buzz but give problems that are only slightly more complex.

I'd consider it to be a "handshake". If the basics don't work you don't need to waste both sides time.

> People who can't code fizzbuzz will usually fall flat on those questions as well

yes, but it is harder to tell whether they were completely incapable (what FizzBuzz will tell you) or whether they just didn't touch certain topics in their career. I'll gladly hire a capable engineer who was active in a different domain who I am certain will be able to grasp the necessary knowledge quickly.

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