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Comment by iopq | Hacker News Reader

Humans are very bad on whiteboard interviews. I like giving people a laptop better now

The point is to make folks answer without the help of external tools, such as an IDE, on the basis that they will be able to reliable accomplish more advanced tasks with such tools in practice. Whether or not this theory is mostly reliable or barely, or not at all, depends on the viewpoint.

If a more advanced question is posed, then the assumption is that the requirement is for the prospective employee to accomplish even more advanced tasks in practice.

Would you rather get someone who can do fizzbuzz correctly on a board the first time in 7 minutes or someone who can write it in 1 minute on a laptop incorrectly, test it, and fix it in 30 seconds?

I see no value in the "gotcha" of you made a logic mistake since we all make them and there's a reason why we test code

If they make 1 'logic mistake' on fizzbuzz then it's likely they'll make 10x, or more, 'logic mistakes' on their actual work. Even with a laptop and all the tooling that makes them 10x better, because the real work will be at least 100x more complex.

I made a mistake in fizzbuzz the first time I did it on a whiteboard because I wrote it in "pseudocode"

I wrote if (n % 15) print "fizzbuzz" ...

I got away with it because my interviewer assumed it was some kind of shell which means 0 is true

I should have written n % 15 == 0 to be absolutely clear what I'm doing

note that in Rust this won't even compile:

    3 |     if n % 15 {
      |        ^^^^^^ expected `bool`, found integer

But I don't have the type checker to find mistakes for me when writing on a whiteboard which is not realistic. I can't commit this code because CI wouldn't merge a build failure anyway

Huh? Did you accidentally share private notes?

No, I'm saying I've made a logic mistake in Fizzbuzz in an interview because I forgot to put == 0 in the condition. If you think that makes me a bad programmer, that's your problem, I just don't think whiteboard interviews are representative of the pull requests I do after working for several hours on something

What? It seems like you have the problem?

I don't think I've ever interviewed anyone like this, so far?

The comment is bit too bizarre to puzzle out.

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