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Comment by zulban | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like you're thinking about filters the wrong way. You're not finding gold, you're quickly filtering out the poop.

> I don't care if someone can answer FizzBuzz .... All that can be learned.

Of course. But... sometimes it isn't. If a software engineer cannot do a question like FizzBuzz (and this does happen) then you can save a lot of time by cutting short the interview. If you're hiring SEs who cannot FizzBuzz, then I wish you the best of luck.

This isn't some leetcode or data structures trivia question that excellent candidates might fail. This is a test that I cannot imagine any good candidate failing.

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I think people get optimistic about the quality of candidates out there. FizzBuzz winds up being "do you know what modulus is", which screens out so so many candidates. So many.

There's a difference between a diamond in the rough who many not know $lang or $datastructure but is proficient elsewhere, and candidates that literally cannot put together a basic looping conditional. It's like hiring a network engineer that doesn't know what a network route is.

I've seen two things here: People getting too optimistic about the quality of candidates, as you say, but also people in entry level positions with entry level knowledge dismissing basic interview questions outside of their aptitude as "useless leetcode/whiteboard coding".

I've seen someone say they have never used a linked list, not even implemented themselves but used, and, on top of that, that they likely never will. I've also seen someone putting down the most basic knowledge about the most simple data structures (i.e. simple questions about what you can and cannot do efficiently with an array) as "premature optimization".

That thinking worked for their job, so they thought that's universal.

There's a ton of solutions to FizzBuzz that do not use modulo.

> > I don't care if someone can answer FizzBuzz .... All that can be learned.

> Of course. But... sometimes it isn't.

Right, it goes both ways. If FizzBuzz is so easy to learn, it's reasonable to ask, why are you applying for this position without having already learned it?

Not sure if your question is rhetorical but... lots of people get a SE degree just to earn money and they don't even like programming. They still end up earning lots of money.

(I'm copy/pasting what I answered to another similar comment)

I don't disagree with your first point.

The problem is that asking questions like FizzBuzz is also a filter in the other way. Higher quality candidates aren't going to bother answering your filter question and bail out of the process.

I spent several years working on a large tech hiring platform and a thing we noticed again and again is that putting up any filters immediately drove away top tier candidates. They're just not going to jump through hoops when they have so many other options available to them.

Now if you goal is to hire a more average quality candidate, then you can get away with filter questions, coding tests, etc.

Experienced candidates know why these filter questions are necessary and are going to wonder what they're getting into if nobody is asking any.

I was offered a job that had no filter questions and I declined because of that. They were clearly hiring goofballs into senior positions.

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