Hacker News Reader

Comment by duderific | Hacker News Reader

At least you can do it well, imagine the grind when you can't.

Remember when fizzbuzz was the gold standard in trick interview questions? And Joel was a revolutionary for advocating it? Things have certainly changed.

In some sense, leetcode is fizzbuzz on steriods. As I recall, the "trick" to fizzbuzz is knowing about the modulo operator. Most leetcode problems have a similar trick that you need to know/learn to complete them correctly.

Fizzbuzz wasn't about seeing if a candidate knew the 'tricks', it was to test if you knew how to code at all. If you know about loops and if statements you can do fizzbuzz even you've never heard about modulo operators. Fizzbuzz was designed to catch the complete bullshitters who literally could not code. Apparently that was a real problem people were having at the time.

At the time? It's still happening today!

The key is to jump jobs before they catch on

    > Fizzbuzz was designed to catch the complete bullshitters who literally could not code.

I'm unsure if we are in agreement or not. To me, the expansion of leetcode and friends is driven by the desire to filter for higher quality candidates. For example, in year 2000, fizzbuzz was good to filter out people who could barely write a for loop. Then, big tech needed higher and higher gates to keep out people who did not meet their standards. So fizzbuzz was given a healthy dose of anabolic steriods and told to "hit the gym". In a sense, fizzbuzz was transformed into leetcode, but the spirit was unchanged.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com