Comment by john-radio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by john-radio | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I personally know FANG engineers with half a dozen years of high-profile work who had to spend weeks training coding golf and algo&data structures trivia before passing the first round of interviews, all because these trivia games bear no resemblance with real world software engineering. In fact, I will go as far as to claim that they serve more as ladder-pulling than actual technical assessments...

FizzBuzz is a trivial technical problem, though, not a leetcode medium or even an easy. I agree with you that you shouldn't have to grind leetcode all day in order to be considered a valuable software developer; but the existence of people selling themselves as "engineers" but who can't solve fizzbuzz would go a long way towards explaining how we got into this leetcode situation in the first place, because such a person would not be able to be successful as a software developer and they need to be weeded out during the candidate search somehow because they are around and they do want the job.

> FizzBuzz is a trivial technical problem (...)

No, it is not. The term fizzbuzz doesn't refer explicitly to the loop with the modulus example. Fizzbuzz is an umbrella term for tests that are used to assess proficiency, but in practice they tend to have weird gotchas that get you disqualified for random reasons.

Case in point, there are online coding challenge tests where you do fizzbuzz tests that flag you as disqualified for cheating if you move your focus away from the page. That's one way to fail fizzbuzz tests: you start the test, switch your browser window, boom you're tagged as an incompetent moron.

Why wouldn't FizzBuzz refer explicitly to the challenge that shares its name?

I said “FizzBuzz-level.” I’ve used actual FizzBuzz for new grads who I suspected couldn’t code, but normally I’m using questions that require looping, conditional logic, perhaps the use of a simple helper data structure like a map. I consider “reverse a string” to be advanced FizzBuzz. Anything requiring DFS or binary search is not FizzBuzz. “Print a tic tac toe board using asterisks, one character at a time” is FizzBuzz.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com