The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job
kranga.notion.site
kranga.notion.site
I would have walked out half way through. These types of questions are very telling of an organization which is extremely insecure in its own abilities.
For anyone who is a somewhat experienced programmer it is not hard to tell if someone else knows what he is talking about. You do not need to waste 45 minutes of someone's time on whether they can correctly interpret and execute some joke requirements.
Why on earth would the interviewer think that 0 is not a multiple of 3 and 5?
But even if they weren't: going from 22k to 50k is a massive difference. People are willing to put up with a lot of bollocks for it. Dismissing that so easily is a really privileged attitude.
Where do they mention that they're unemployed now?
A sufficiently strong candidate can afford to wait a litle bit more.
I thought by this they meant (half jokingly) that this potential employer would double the eventual offer because at that point they had just proved how amazing their skills are. Not that they would double their existing salary, and so it doesn't necessarily imply they have an existing job.
"New rules will be revealed one by one. The candidate should note them as there won’t be shown again"
This feels more like a Squid Game parody than an interview.
I interview people from all walks of life. I would definitely not have hired some of the best engineers I worked with if I was trying to be too clever and quirky when giving out requirements.
You buried your lede IMO. The interviewers had this cute game and when the developer didn't play by the planned rules (build up a monsterous collections of branching on top of a for loop) they were screwed. Issues:
* rules revealed one by one. Spec changes and is always incomplete, but you never even hear about changing spec that your existing solution already handles.
* artificially handicaping developers. This is the opposite you want; it's a bad smell if developers are not offloading to rock solid libraries and language features
* punishing creativity. You're getting a great view into how this person works and thinks; isn't that a primary purpose of all interviews?
* anti-lookup / matrix. Some of the most efficient solutions use this aprooach, or an inherient property of the desired state/input (data as code). This is super-common in game development; John Carmack would have failed this interview too.
It is frustrating but it's not personal, it's just someone bad at their job.
This only happened once to me: I got a feedback of "jumped straight into a cloud-based solution". The funny part is that it was a company that made tooling for cloud services. Naturally they went bust.
> punishing creativity
A similar thing happened to me once in an interview. They said use any language, but were a TS shop. I went with Python, which is hardly esoteric. The interviewers were seemingly unaware of the breadth and depth of Python’s stdlib, and so I demolished their questions in short order. I don’t remember specifics, only that I used heapq for something, and itertools for something else.
The reply afterwards was along the lines of, “while you clearly have a solid grasp on Python, we didn’t get good signals from the interview.”
It’s very much worth noting that this was for an infra role, DBs specifically. The most advanced algorithm I’ve ever had (and “had” is a stretch) to use is Levenshtein.
Friend solves it in Objective-C.
"Oh, except that one."
I have shunned every Google recruiter since.
I did get the job, and with almost entirely in Ruby and PowerShell, so....
I have no affiliation with Google.
And a few years later, Google basically admitted that their interview process was trash and, in not so many words, claimed that they were going to be less douchebaggy.
It was more than 10 years ago. And the candidate was from Apple, hence his currency in Objective-C.
Another good friend worked at Google for some time after that, and reported a pretty toxic evaluation regime that pitted employees directly against each other. He eventually left.
> Mutating array operations are forbidden. Arrays cannot have content appended or removed after initialization.
In a language like C, one could interpret this rule as making arrays containing anything other than 0 or a fixed-length list of expression be forbidden. And, in any case, who comes up with what are essentially style rules that are the same regardless of language?
Additionally your argument isn’t logical. An unwillingness to do something for free isn’t equivalent not wanting to do it. You’ve moved the goalposts.
Quite frankly, I see people with your attitude as the real bad ones to work for. Expecting people to have a work ethic beyond what you pay them for, or to pretend to be passionate about whatever you're selling, these are the real red flags you should look out for when applying to a job. Not someone expecting you to do what you're told. I am exchanging my labour for money, and I think both parties understanding that is the bedrock of good professional relationship.
But I know, you've reduced it to such a degree that you can't think clearly about it any other way. So, to humor you: I know a woman who won the lottery at a young age, but kept her job as a waitress for decades because she wanted to be a waitress. I know retirees who have started new careers. I know retirees who have gone back to doing the same work they did before. None of these people needed money. They all did jobs. Nevermind volunteering, which, while you will probably argue isn't a job, is evidence that people will work for reasons other than financial incentives. Please note, these people aren't outliers, they're just people who even you have to believe are working for reasons other than money.
Regardless, the fundamental problem with your argument besides trying to prop up a poor definition of 'job' is that you're conflating needing any job with needing a particular job. Lots of people are doing the job they want to be doing. Lots of people have other choices.
> Quite frankly, I see people with your attitude as the real bad ones to work for. Expecting people to have a work ethic beyond what you pay them for, or to pretend to be passionate about whatever you're selling, these are the real red flags you should look out for when applying to a job. Not someone expecting you to do what you're told. I am exchanging my labour for money, and I think both parties understanding that is the bedrock of good professional relationship.
We definitely do not have the same definition of 'work ethic' if this is what you took from my words.
This is a lovely anecdote, but practically speaking most people do not have such enjoyable jobs. The world needs septic tank specialists and web developers and telephone sanitisers and accountants. Most of the things that need doing aren't all that desirable to do on their own. This is not to say that you can't take joy in doing them anyway, after all one must imagine Sisyphus happy, but merely that given ultimate choice, most people would not choose their current working arrangement. For instance within the field of programming, most people probably have something else they'd rather work on than what they do for living. Your millionaire waitress probably wouldn't want to work behind the fryer at MacDonalds.
> We definitely do not have the same definition of 'work ethic' if this is what you took from my words.
Clearly. In my view, work ethic is unrelated to enjoyment of your job. Someone with a good work ethic would be willing to do jobs that they don't enjoy, and would complete them at a similar standard to the work they do enjoy. It's easy to have a good work ethic when doing something you want to do; the real test of it is the things you don't want to do.
You are following that up by, I guess, trying to convince me that I should ignore my experiences in favor of your reductive arguments that are based largely on definitions that I don’t agree on in the first place.
What are we even doing here?
What you experience internally is not evidence of what “the real world” is actually like. You may very well have an amazing work ethic and view your jobs as strictly transactional (and that’s irrespective of enjoyment which is reductive of the many reasons people want to do their jobs). Honestly, I believe that about you. But that internal view is far from universal regardless of work ethic.
I understand you’ve convinced yourself that the UBI and other hypotheticals are proof but they’re only proof if you’re already subscribed to those reductive views. “Wants” don’t work that way and if they did we’d be able to reduce them further and say that people do want to do their jobs evidenced by the fact that they do them.
Far from reductive, my theory is fully explanatory. People have a certain way they would like to spend their time (what they want to do) then for every step you take away from that, you need to compensate them with something (usually money). Obviously in the real world there is the threat of starvation when you don't work, so factoring that in a lot of people will be forced to accept a lower premium for their time.
> What you experience internally is not evidence of what “the real world”
This is not an internal experience. I interact with many people on a daily basis. They work in many places. Stocking store shelves, sales, secretaries, janitors, etc. These people all would rather be doing something else, but work because they are paid. Likewise many people do take joy in those same jobs, but if I ask them, there are other things they would rather be doing. The issue is that those things don't pay. It is my assertion that almost all jobs are like this. People sacrificing their time and enjoyment for money, which may then bring them more enjoyment in the future.
> people do want to do their jobs evidenced by the fact that they do them
My point is that people don't want the job, they want the money the job provides. If you gave them the money, they would start working a different job that they like better. The same way I don't really want to eat healthy, but I do because I like being fit. If I could be lean and eat like a pig, I would certainly do it. People will often do things they don't want to in exchange for rewards. This is the distinction between work and pleasure. Things you want to do vs. things you do for the reward. Then there are some things which are a mix. Where you are moderately happy doing them and so you don't need as much of a reward to be convinced to take that action. If we're going do discuss justifying original points, perhaps you should address yours: "I wouldn’t accept an employee or a boss who thought this [the exchanged of labour for money] was a reasonable definition of a job."
Can you at least see my objection? Someone who thinks a job aught to be pleasurable is breaking down the boundary between work and pleasure. This can very easily lead to abuse, where someone believes they are entitled to their employees' work and the employees should be thankful for being exploited.
It's not reasonable to take someone saying, "I'd rather be parasailing..." to mean, "I don't want to do this work." Those are not equivalent statements. For starters, one is relative and the other is absolute. Even if that weren't the case, people can want more than one thing and even conflicting things.
If I say, "I want to fly like Superman" you can't then conclude that everything in my life that I'm doing is something I don't want to be doing since I'm not flying like Superman at any moment.
It's reductive and the only thing it fully explains is the highly reductive space it constructs.
> If we're going do discuss justifying original points, perhaps you should address yours: "I wouldn’t accept an employee or a boss who thought this [the exchanged of labour for money] was a reasonable definition of a job."
I've already justified it. In my experience, which I understand is not your experience, an employee with this attitude is more likely to not have a good work ethic. You then made up a bunch of stuff about what I mean by that, but I just mean they're less likely to do a good job. A boss with this attitude is more likely to feel entitled to my labor and make unreasonable demands, including but not limited to trying to require me to do things I don't want to do (i.e., that I haven't agreed to do as part of accepting a job).
> Can you at least see my objection? Someone who thinks a job aught to be pleasurable is breaking down the boundary between work and pleasure. This can very easily lead to abuse, where someone believes they are entitled to their employees' work and the employees should be thankful for being exploited.
There was never a moment when I couldn't see your objection. I just think the opposite is more likely, but this view is really just your opinion and not actually related to your original statement, except in terms of its explanatory power for why you want to believe the world works a certain way.
It's wholly unclear to me why a boss acting badly means all employees everywhere should have a wall between work and pleasure. That seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Should we all just do jobs we hate so this doesn't happen?
A boss can certainly try to exploit his employees by using their non-monetary interests against them. But the boss that thinks transactionally is more likely to do it!
On the flip side, any employee can have a good work ethic, but...
Suppose you have a transactional employee and an employee who wants to be there. Suppose also you have a machine that requires maintenance and it is such that it is difficult to see whether that maintenance has been done. If the maintenance isn't done, you won't know until (say) two years later when the machine breaks down and requires relatively expensive repairs.
Are you going to assign the employee that has said to you this is just transactional? What is his incentive to even do the maintenance? Yes, either employee can get away without doing the maintenance. But which one do you think is more likely to shirk the responsibility? Which one is more likely to not be around to face consequences if they don't do the work?
So, yes, I see what you are saying. But I'm not even a little bit convinced. I don't want to deal with people as employees, bosses, partners, contractors, clients, etc who view work this way, because 'the real world' just doesn't work that way and people who think it does, again in my experience are generally more likely to be a problem than others.
No it doesn't. I explicitly mention that there is one thing they want to do the most and that other things are closer to or further away from that thing.
> Are you going to assign the employee that has said to you this is just transactional? What is his incentive to even do the maintenance.
I would assign the employee which I trust more, which could well be the transnational one. Someone who claims to enjoy their job might enjoy it because they don't bother with the stuff that bores them, and someone who hates their job might hate it because they put intense effort into ensuring it is done well. I have family members who fall exactly into the latter group. They are highly committed to the idea of earning their pay and thus have a much harder time of it than they would otherwise. Someone who thinks "I must work because I'm getting paid" is far more reliable than someone who thinks "I'll work because I enjoy it". Of course some people will try to get away with doing less work, but I don't see much difference between avoiding work you don't enjoy because you don't enjoy it and avoiding work you don't enjoy because you can still get paid without doing it.
The point I'd like to make is this: someone who works for pay has a clear motivation to do work they don't enjoy. Why would someone who works for enjoyment bother with the parts they don't enjoy? You skirt this problem by saying the employee wants to be there and so wants to do all work, but there are some people who enjoy certain parts of their work and not others. "Wanting to be there" is not a motivation for working but the outcome of that motivation, where "pay" and "enjoyment" are reasons to work and it's not so clear that someone who only works when they enjoy it would be more reliable.
I agree that it's not good for people to be passionate about a job, but that's only because the company isn't equally passionate about you. That passion in today's jobs is a weapon to exploit your labor.
In a healthier form of work, where you and other workers actually own the company and share in its success equally, passion for the work and the org is great to have.
And as for the bear, it doesn't get paid at all...
What a pity when interviewers can't even think of a real world problem for an interview. Most interviewers are like that.
No wonder, the industry has the candidates solve various coding problems, and once hired, all the candidates end up dealing with is company politics or other slowdowns. Not once in my career, a debate or an issue has happened because of the type of problems brought in interviews.
there is no point in all the additions the article had the first example is enough to show you are not lieing about your ability and that is what matters.
When I interview, I only give real world problems that can be solved within an interview setting. (PS: I won't disclose the interview problems here on open Internet.)
It’s not a trick question nor does it require memorization or study to prepare. You’re not being given 20 minutes to solve something that requires knowledge of an algorithm that researchers worked on for decades that you’ve either practiced or will stumble through deriving from first principles—you’re writing a very simplistic function.
Bonus points if you use Python and demonstrate that you know the difference between the / operator and the // operator. That's much more useful in day-to-day work.
[1] Imran Ghory. He wrote a blog post about it but it now seems to be down, but I know it was him and the reason why he did it because I was working with him at Bloomberg when he came up with it.
It's always good to see how they deal with tools.
But the number of candidates that can't run a script locally or on a website and ask if they can put inside their Rails project responding to some query is astounding. For Typescript positions I get better results.
If you can come up with a URL the Internet Archive will probably have a copy.
Jeff's blog mentions Imran. Jeff's blog is still up, but Imran's isn't! However it is up on the internet archive, and Imran's post is also from 2007[2].
My sense is that Imran wrote a blog in January 2007 mentioning FizzBuzz and that Jeff's post in February 2007 is what made FizzBuzz the meme that it is today. This is probably very obvious to some readers of HN, but Jeff's blog (Coding Horror) has been around for a very long time and was one of the 'big' tech blogs back in that era of blogging (Jeff went on to, among other things, cofound Stack Overflow with Joel Spolsky a year after writing about FizzBuzz).
Thanks for asking this - if someone asked me yesterday "who invented FizzBuzz?" I would have pretty confidently said "Jeff Atwood!" and I would have been totally wrong.
For completenesses sake, the other really influential interview question blog I remember from this era is Steve Yegge's "five essential phone screen questions," which is even earlier (2005!)[3]
I think interviewing discourse on message boards is tricky; folks have strong opinions, and if someone says "this is an essential question" and the question is hard for you, it's hard not to take that personally. In a past life I thought a lot about interviewing (here is a resource on interviewing I helped create for Jane Street back when I worked there[4]). I have never asked a FizzBuzz-style question, but I do think that "explicitly telling the candidate what you want and give them lots of help to get there" is really important.
[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20080405225407/http://imranontec...
[3] https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-pho...
1 tech interview which was progressively implementing a banking system. Final question involved threading
1 tech interview which involved building a banking system but it was more systems and database design.
1 business logic interview which was breaking down how credit card numbers worked and then asking me to do a code review
1 was just a personal fit interview.
It took a lot of time but it all felt realistic and useful in the context of hiring someone.
They learned that as the spec became more complicated and twisted, his code got more and more clever.
I guarantee that there were other candidates whose code got simplified and more commented as the spec grew.
They even gave both a general hint:
> An example of this was that a 50 lines solution with a line of 110 characters would be considered.
... and a custom-tailored hint directly to the candidate:
> Asked the interviewer if it was OK to rewrite it using only types, she asked her partner and he told me it was but that he couldn’t see the point of it and advised me it would not be the right tool for the problem given that there would be many more rules.
Be honest: if you were dealing with a monstrously complicated spec would you rather read straightforward code with comments like, "Have to special case -0 here, ugh" or see two lines that inexplicably make everything into base 15?
Unquestionably the latter. Especially if its behavior matched the spec flawlessly. Doubly so if I can demonstrably break it by modifying/removing those two lines.
I’m not totally sure why that’s controversial; of course, I understand that I might inherit this nonsense without the author around to explain themself but it sounds fun to be faced with that.
> I guarantee that there were other candidates whose code got simplified and more commented as the spec grew.
I don't understand this criticism.
His code only got weird and clever when he was told not to use numbers. That is a very reasonable consequence for such a huge restriction.
And then with the switch to base 15 his code went back to being nice and simple.
“What’s the difference between call and apply in JavaScript?”
“Ah well I can never remember which is which, but they both invoke a function with arguments but accept the arguments differently, whether an array or spread.” When you reach for it you really want to be asking if you should be using bind instead, especially because of the massive gotcha of how JavaScript does binding, but with ES6 arrow functions they’re often the best option to wrap a function call.”
“Candidate did not know the difference between call and apply”
They can also be a bit useful to call one prototype’s function on another object given you get to pick what “this” is.
But in my 12 years I’ve never used them. They’re likely even less important now that we have arrow functions and other features. They probably were useful library building blocks way back in the day.
These don't come up a ton in modern code bases in part because of the advent of arrow functions, and in part because of the general trend towards FP / declarative programming in JS/TS and away from OOP / "class" use and thus less need for managing "this" throughout an application. Also most of the time if you really need a utility function it's easier to rely on a bulletproof dependency library like Ramda/Lodash/Underscore... concerns about bundle size notwithstanding.
Another use case is if you need to use array methods on array-like things (this comes up sometimes with DOM manipulation). These data structures are iterables but lack the native array methods like map/filter/reduce etc. If for some reason you can't/don't want to create a new array from your data structure to operate on you can do something like Array.prototype.filter.call(myNodeList, filterFunction). Also not terribly common in modern codebases, but useful to be aware of!
"Adding additional requirements which test a candidate's ability to refactor code" is a pretty good exercise. And it's ok to force candidates people down a specific development path. The problem is that the interviewers didn't do this. They let the candidate pick a strategy the interviewers weren't expecting, then were disappointed with the results.
Actually we have no idea why the interviewers rejected the candidate. Maybe they were just as impressed with the solution as I am. Maybe the candidate presented poorly in other ways. Maybe they agonized over hiring this candidate vs someone else who was even more amazing, and could only afford one.
Ghosting the candidate is pretty inexcusable. But maybe it was just old fashioned corporate dysfunction and someone dropped the ball.
You do not need to waste 45 minutes of someone's time on whether they can correctly interpret and execute some joke requirements -- this is absolutely not the case. I interview a lot of people and most are bad programmers, despite having impressive resumes. 45 minutes of a progressively difficult programming exercise is a minimum.
--
All that said, there are red flags that make me question the veracity of the whole thing:
* Author claims to speak English very poorly, but writes incredibly well! Maybe they leaned on LLMs, but this seems pretty good even for an LLM.
* Author says they have 2 years of work experience in a company that doesn't use Typescript, but then proceeds to create a solution ad-hoc that requires incredibly deep knowledge of the type system. Certainly not impossible, but I don't know anyone that could pull this off.
* Author doesn't have a name. There's no contact information. I don't even know if I should write "he" or "she". Here's a viral calling card that would almost guarantee countless interviews (including from my company!) and they aren't capitalizing on it.
* There's nothing else on this domain, no link to a CV, nothing. It's a ghost.
The story is too good. I'm defaulting to skepticism.
This story reads like concept art poking at our empathy to send us through an emotional journey.
I know my reading journey took me through the sadnesses of so many of the interviews in my life and the dysfunction that gets pushed in our industry. I have wondered whether this is part of psychological positioning and pre-negotiation or simply emotional, psychological, or/and organizational ineptitude.
The author claims their pronunciation is poor. Writing is a completely different skill. (Especially in English with its insane spelling rules.)
> * Author says they have 2 years of work experience in a company that doesn't use Typescript, but then proceeds to create a solution ad-hoc that requires incredibly deep knowledge of the type system. Certainly not impossible, but I don't know anyone that could pull this off.
Self-study?
It could be genuine, but I would bet against it.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1i6ooib/the_fi...
My mature interview style is a pair programming session on a specific exercise (the same for everyone). It's inspired by the "RPI" (Rob's Pairing Interview) from Pivotal (well, Pivotal of old days). There are no gotchas to it, it's not hard. But it's definitely programming. Because that's what I'm hiring for. Not talking.
The post actually has a lot of small grammatical errors typical of someone not so fluent in English:
>> My reasoning went as follow: // My reasoning went as follows.
>> Is there any other numbers where this happens? // Are there any other numbers
>> I didn’t had paper at hand // I didn't have (any) paper on hand.
I'm not here to proofread a fun blog post but it's far from incredibly well-written English.
> that requires incredibly deep knowledge of the type system.
I think the solution needed more clever maths than deep knowledge of the type system---the type system knowledge can be self-studied from documentation. The clever maths, one can get used to if you Leetcode properly (you don't even need Leetcode Hard to get exposure to that).
If anything doesn't track in this respect, it's the claim that author doesn't have any kind of formal education. Not even high school? That will be extremely impressive. But maybe something got lost in translation there, or just careless exaggeration.
> Here's a viral calling card that would almost guarantee countless interviews (including from my company!) and they aren't capitalizing on it.
>> I don’t have anything to sell just yet, I am not a tech influencer so all you got was this post about a somewhat challenging FizzBuzz.
Yeah, not everyone is out to sell something, not every blog post is written as an opportunity to self-promote.
The story is definitely rather strange, even without taking into account the language barrier and the general absurdity of most tech interviews, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.
I (not a native speaker either) probably don’t make that many grammatical errors, but I envy their ability to just write. I can’t do that, I struggle with every word in long form writing.
These small errors are easily addressed with a final pass in e.g. DeepL Writer.
So does every good writer. A full workload for a fast fiction writer is ~1000 words a day. That's, like, an aspiration for most full-time professional novelists.
There's a (probably legendary) story about Oscar Wilde telling someone who asked what he'd done that day, "I spent this morning putting a comma in, and this afternoon taking it out again."
Good writing is hard. LLMs may someday be able to write well, but they're nowhere near it yet. (They can write mediocre prose, which is considerably better than the median human, but I expect something like the 80-20 rule will come into play long before they're truly good.)
Anyway, I'm trying to tell you that you write well, and that you shouldn't feel bad (quite the contrary!) that you have to work at it.
(This comment took me eight minutes to write.)
While good employees are always just thinking: cool i will try something smart to make them think i am smart, or ok i will follow these dumb exact things to make sure they know i am obedient, jesus christ why cant i just play a video of me doing this from last week, i guess i better try it a different way since that way didnt get me hired, i guess i need to dance this angle to the moon this time...
At least AI will stop all of this nonsense
This would be basically impossible.
Also reminded me of my compiler class, we had some homework to write a pascal/C transpiler and a friend of mine somehow managed to implement it via bison errors(?). The teacher was not happy but had to agree it worked and gave him full marks.
You are interviewing them too.
I would also have hired the candidate.
It's not good, but it's an accurate reflection of the work environment.
if someone starts careening through the task using brainfuck, they ain’t thinking like a senior dev at day job i.e. simple, clear, easy to follow and maintainable code writing.
i don’t care how clever you are. i need to know you’re not going to rewrite the frontend in your first week because of a “big brain” moment [0]. using python or something simple without being told to helps me feel like you won’t do that, and that i might be able to trust you on day 0.
expectations on seniors are higher
Instead of talking the company relies on easily misinterpreted hints that he might or might not be someone able to work in a team. People can be both self confident and able to create a cheeky solution and be sociable people with decent team skills.
If your hiring process relies on psycho analysis of the candidates, it probably will not work very well.
But you should do both things, probably in 2 different interviews.
disscussions here universially show no evidence anyone knows it exists much less what it is. I at least know it evists but I don't know how to find it
Put aside your paranoia and just talk to your candidates. Ask them thoughtful questions that invite thoughtful answers. Probe gently to get at more challenging questions. Trust your ability to discern when they're BSing you.
The problem of “What does this do?” is prevalent enough, and occurs often enough under pressure, without adding excessive niftiness into the mix.
I do still like the solution though.
Also, this still properly fits the "you're interviewing the company as well" paradigm. If the author wanted a company that values cleverness or can deal with people who go unbeaten paths, they now know it wasn't the right place.
It gives off strong “your answer might be correct but it’s not on my answer key so I’m marking you wrong” teacher vibes. Avoid at all costs.
"Numeric types, number literals and their associated methods and operations are forbidden".
If this is how the interview behaved, I'm pretty sure this is a company that expects developers to write code in a certain way but doesn't really know how to guide them.
Kudos to the author, but shame on the interviewer.
My reasoning is that the company advertised a position for a senior engineer with 4 years experience. Leaving aside title inflation and whether someone with 4 years experience is actually a senior engineer, and leaving aside the really dumb test, that position requires communication skills, common sense, maturity, and just generally knowing what's going on. A candidate who misreads the situation in an interview so badly that they can't take the interviewer's unsubtle hints is going to mess up other communication within the company, has likely never been on the other side of an interview before, and is at risk of allowing the kind of "clever" code that destroys companies.
Again, this is only a problem for a senior engineer. I want junior and mid-level engineers to be clever and enthusiastic. Senior engineers are meant to understand that I have five interviews this week and their attempt to channel Aphyr[0] is going to make my life harder when I want to talk about their thoughts on maintainability.
[0] https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview
FizzBuzz is the mind-killer.
All that being said, I would not be able to take the OP's side until I heard the interviewers side of the story as well.
But if you're doing anything unique, or experimental they might be a great fit.
Most of us are doing the second.
Anyone saying "you gotta check divisibility without math" on the job would get laughed out of the room.
I'd like to underline this just in case the author reads the thread. He really does seem great and I wish all the best to him, but reading between the lines is a useful skill regardless of this specific situation. He says he doesn't speak English well, that might have played a role in the misunderstanding, but "I don't think that will be a good idea" is not a suggestion, it's an order.
"We'd like you to explore this path and show how you would deal with problems that occur there" is much easier to interpret than the passive aggressive tone of "I don't think .."
I would also go with my idea and see how the manager reacted: there is only so much micromanagement I'm willing to tolerate at work. Interviews go both ways.
But after living in the UK for a bit, in the UK that is most likely an order.
Or because the candidate realized that they've messed up, and by dropping the issue can at least salvage the next XY minutes of the interview by not going down the wrong rabbit hole.
"Could you tell me more about this?" and "Are you sure about this?" are invitations for providing the rationalization for your answers. "I'm not sure that's a good idea" is a very unsubtle, but polite way of hinting that the you have gone way off the map.
As an interviewer, I want my candidates to succeed. I want them to put their best foot forward. I've asked my question over a hundred times, and I've seen many ways that people have solved it, correctly or no. If I'm giving them this suggestion, it means that I know that they are going down one of the many, many wrong garden paths.
In France, professors would literally say "You are wrong." as an invitation to explain yourself better. There are only 500km between London and Paris, but the culture behind these words is the complete opposite.
I also think the interview setup and management were poor.
That's just patently untrue. The literal translation is "ik denk niet dat dat een goed idee is" and the better translation would be "dat is niet de bedoeling".
If I got told in an interview "dat is niet de bedoeling" I'd be damn sure to rework my solution because they're clearly trying to coax me towards whatever they're looking for. And in a way it is actually a nice thing of them, because they could just say nothing and fail me out of that round of interviews.
There are multiple ways to read that suggestion. It can also be read as the interviewer saying he does not believe in the technical depth of the candidate, which can be taken as a challenge.
It would also have been better to give a choice of a few selected languages. As that means the interviewer can be much better prepared.
>There are not really multiple ways to read "I don't think that's a good idea" in an interview. If your "technical depth" leads you to an inappropriate solution, it doesn't matter if it's right. Just because this solution worked for FizzBuzz and all their rules does not mean it's maintainable. It's obvious to most senior people that such a weird solution is brittle and overkill, even if they can't come up with a rule to break it. But here's a simple one: Output FizzBuzz if all the rules are passed, except if there is a database entry matching the number. Good luck solving that with some bullshit type theory, and good luck to anyone who comes behind this guy to add that rule to his Rube Goldberg code.
"What set of tools would you choose to build <normal software project>? And why would you choose them over alternatives?" or "We here at X make use of Y a lot, have you worked with Y or alternatives? What did you think about Y or alternatives?". Both are infinitely more telling about the candidate.
Someone's choice for a contrived joke problem will not reflect their choices for a real software project.
>For example, I worked with one mostly self-taught guy who wanted to rewrite everything in a niche compiled language, including things that really should be done in scripting languages like Python or shell. Thankfully nobody else let him do that. But deep down I think he didn't accept that he was wrong, and on multiple occasions he expressed that he thought the average person on the team was woefully inexperienced. In fact, it was him that was woefully inexperienced, because he didn't understand how inappropriate and even flat-out wrong his solutions were.
I worked with people who liked to solve silly problems in silly ways, but when it came to real projects always preferred mature languages and libraries which focused on long term support, stability and maintainability.
The problem with the interview is that instead of talking about the subjects, they themselves want to rely on subtle hints about the candidate. Which may not mean anything.
That's absolutely not the way to approach an interview. "Let me try to do things the exact way you clearly don't want, just to see if we can." Is the candidate going to try to do their next job this way? What are you going to do when their egotistical attempts to solve problems in clever ways despite your advice and even instructions bites YOU?
>"What set of tools would you choose to build <normal software project>? And why would you choose them over alternatives?" or "We here at X make use of Y a lot, have you worked with Y or alternatives? What did you think about Y or alternatives?". Both are infinitely more telling about the candidate.
I hate coding interviews but I am sympathetic to people who want to do them because I've met people who are such good bullshitters that they could fool most people. If you're talking about someone with no working experience and who claims to be self-taught, you really have to make them write code.
>Someone's choice for a contrived joke problem will not reflect their choices for a real software project.
The interviewers tried to tell him to approach it like an industrial-grade solution, not a weird academic exercise. He was in the mood to do an academic exercise, and that's what he did. The interviewers seriously don't know what he will do in the workplace. That's why they're trying to make him write some code in such a way. Self-taught people are more of a risk in that they often overcomplicate (or oversimplify) things.
>I worked with people who liked to solve silly problems in silly ways, but when it came to real projects always preferred mature languages and libraries which focused on long term support, stability and maintainability.
Good for you? I'm not talking about silly problems. I'm talking about someone who wanted to rewrite our build system in a compiled language, and our Python unit test driver in a different compiled language. He wanted to use inappropriate "fun" languages at work. I'm not categorically against using interesting new languages and tools, but when there is ZERO benefit to doing so and nobody else knows said languages, it is not to be done.
>The problem with the interview is that instead of talking about the subjects, they themselves want to rely on subtle hints about the candidate. Which may not mean anything.
The whole point of the interview is to get hints about the candidate. There are times when interviewers read too much into what the candidate does or says, but this isn't one of them. The candidate wanted to show off his knowledge of type theory despite pretty obvious hints that the interviewers didn't want that. That means he has bad social skills or else he has an ego issue. The fact he blogged about it in such a way to brag about his solution suggests he does have an ego problem. There's also a healthy chance that the whole story is fiction, just to advertise himself as a self-taught "genius" who is turned down for being "too good" lol.
Which it didn't accomplish at all, because the interviewers refused to do the single most important thing. Actually talking with their candidate about these things. Instead they are relying on psychoanalysis to divine some secret meaning in his actions.
I am not arguing that your interview shouldn't try to figure out the personality or professional approach of a person, but that this particular interview made it near impossible to do so. Simply because they refused to talk about the things they wanted to know.
The choice is not limited to made up toy problems vs not testing coding skills at all. You can give them real problems to solve.
> The interviewers tried to tell him to approach it like an industrial-grade solution, not a weird academic exercise.
Hahaha, and how exactly do you write an 'industrial-grade' FizzBuzz? ;)
Obligatory: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
> The whole point of the interview is to get hints about the candidate. There are times when interviewers read too much into what the candidate does or says, but this isn't one of them.
Oh but it is. If I were to ask you, the expert, to draw a blue line with red ink and then attempt to draw conclusions from your behaviour based on that question, could I ever get a valid assessment of you? If a test is faulty, so are its results. Garbage in, garbage out.
Interviewing is no trivial task. It is an attempt to test how well someone will do a thing without having them actually do it. By definition, that is impossible. Still, we can try to get good enough results by minimising the number of differences between our test environment (interview) and production (the job). That will involve:
a) making the interview environment resemble the job as much as possible (no hazing, minimal pressure on the candidate, writing code in and IDE instead of a whiteboard, etc.)
b) presenting the candidates with coding tasks that match what the company does on a daily basis (take a suitable bug you had in your codebase, touch it up a bit with more issues, have them fix it; pair program with them to add a new feature to your codebase, etc.)
Some concrete examples:
- https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/03/19/time/ (it suffices to read the first two paragraphs)
- https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2022/01/06/memcached-inte...
For example, I was asked to do FizzBuzz once. I laughed, said we’ve both done this dozens of times, and would they like to have fun with it? We ended up building this wild thing with recursive Python generators and itertools and a state machine or something. I don’t remember the details a decade later, except that the interviewer thought it was hilarious, and I taught them some Python (“wait, that part there, does that actually work?!”, and they paused me to test it on their laptop).
I got the job.
As a candidate, you’re interviewing them, too. If the person is a martinet who can’t look deviate from the script even slightly, and you have other options, do you really want to work with them? That sounds joyless.
Wrong. They put in silly rules like "Max of 30 lines" and "Mutating array operations are forbidden". These do not describe industrial-grade rules. They describe an academic, esoteric challenge. And then when he provides them with it, they punish him for his creativity by adding in bullshit rules retroactively e.g. "Hardcoding matrices is forbidden."
You just sound upset that he's able to walk the walk but you WANT him to be just a bullshitter.
Actually though if they wanted to test for debugging ability, presenting some real code with defects would have worked a lot better than this.
It's not all up to the interviewee to decipher everything. Both should be trying a bit to get to the same understanding, prior to setting off to work.
Anyway, the company will be wasting money when the communication works out poorly, so it's ultimately up to them.
Which gets at the real risk, maybe valid, that someone super smart who isn’t the best communicator will go and make a bunch of code that no one else in the company can reason about. Maybe you get a really nice explanation of the type system, or they are aware this is an esoteric approach but used it anyway because you said anything goes and it’s cool.
I disagree. This is not a fair ask, especially for a programming position. Programming and maths in particular puts a lot of emphasis on attention to detail.
If he can write it in X, and there's no rule against it, and the job gets done well, then there is no issue. Arguing any further of it is unproductive. He's applying for software development, not for public relations.
> "I don't think that will be a good idea" is not a suggestion, it's an order.
Then it should be a rule. "Reading between the lines" sounds like an excuse to me for bullshit criteria. It should be written, it should be explicit, and it should be known. If the interviewer is uncomfortable writing it down as a rule then that tells me they KNOW that it's too silly or pedantic. This whole idea of unwritten rules is a double standard designed to weed out neurodivergent or autistic individuals who are more than capable of fulfilling job requirements and, to me, seems like a potentially illegal form of discrimination that violates disability civil rights laws.
And the reason for the hesitance was a worry that it would have trouble with future rules, which turned out to be completely unfounded.
That was forbidden, check the rules given by the interviewer.
Of course. They can write (as in, natural language, not "just" code). In my opinion always the second most important skill for every knowledge worker, regardless of what their actual job is
If I'm interviewing someone and they give me a right answer that wasn't even in my copy of "the teacher's answer book", I realise they're good and let them ace it.
It maybe be that there was a personality clash and they simply didn't think the candidate was a good fit for the team. Been there, and understand that. Or they maybe got butt-hurt that the candidate's answer broke their test. Either way, the candidate is better off not working there.
Yep, as an interviewer I hated when I’d try to gently (then not so gently) nudge a candidate in a direction because I could see they were going down the wrong path and they insisted they knew best or refused to listen to my advice. I’m not looking for “loyal foot soldiers” who follow my every order, and I’m not looking for people to kiss my butt or blow smoke up it, but the audacity to push back on an interviewer multiple times when they’re trying to help you… (NOT what I think happened in the OPs case, I’m thinking of my own experience here).
For me it was a massive red flag. If I can’t get you to listen to my advice in a scenario where most people are trying their hardest to be “attractive” to a company then what’s going to happen when I ask you to change something in a PR? Or tell you that the approach you are taking is not going to work?
That and the person who argued with me about tabs and spaces after I made a joke about it and then proceeded to email me with more sources as to why one was better than the other. Honestly, this person was younger and I don’t think they meant to be so abrasive, but it came across very “know-it-all” and one thing I don’t like is people who come into a company and start trying to change things or do things “their way” without first getting the lay of the land and understanding _why_ things were done the way they were (aka Chesterton's Fence).
"What would you use if you cannot use Terraform for a project?"
To which I initially answered, since it was a SENIOR position, with a warning about mixing Terraform and non-Terraform managed infra because it can lead to unforeseen issues, especially if there are less visible dependencies between the 2. I then mentioned anyway it could be done with Python + boto3, with AWS CLI + bash, with Pulumi, with CDK and then after some extra talk, also with Ansible.
They didn't want a long answer with lessons learned in real prod, they wanted a oneliner answer: Ansible. They told me then to be shorter in next answers and proceeded to ask like 30 questions in a row involving bash, Linux, Terraform and Kubernetes knowledge, to which I answered all correctly (and with the one-liner answer).
The result: discarded, because I chaotically answered to that first question. Although I was somehow offended because I don't like to be discarded, I think I dodged a bullet in this case.
No somehow to it, that's just offensive.
Edit: I’m no master of replying to the correct person either.
Obviously I'm biased towards myself, but I've been an interviewer as well and if someone develops on their own an answer like I did, they would pass the interview with flying colors, because they would have shown me that they understand what's behind the thing.
Again, it's my side of the story, they probably have another version, but still I think I dodged a bullet.
It's amazing how the less experienced interviewers take it personally when a candidate answers with something that's unknown beyond their skill level.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The solution is clever and demonstrates solid knowledge of TS. However, in my experience getting too clever with the type system is not always a good idea for ordinary application code maintained by a team of average TS developers.
Where was that stated? I don't see those being mentioned as core requirements at all
"While the base algorithm is very simple, the point of the exercise is that the interviewer will add new rules to test how you update the code while keeping it readable and maintainable."
And how do easily verify this divisibility when "Numeric types, number literals and their associated methods and operations are forbidden?"
function isDivisibleByThree(num: string): boolean {
let mod3 = "012012012012";
let modulo = "0";
for (const digit of num) {
modulo = mod3[Number(digit) + Number(modulo)];
}
return modulo === "0";
}
"The programmer can use whatever representation they see fit with the only restriction being that it could only contain letters, numbers and symbols that could be typed with a single stroke"
Yeah uh I guess you missed the SUM_TABLE part of the article? That's what they're doing. And that's why the rule against matrices was added.
That version of the code is 80% checking if "the sum of the individual digits is divisible by 3", 20% the rest of the fizzbuzz.
function isDivisibleByThree(num) {
let modulo, mod3 = "012012012012";
for (const digit of num) {
[modulo] = mod3.slice(modulo).slice(digit);
}
return modulo === "0";
}But my real point is they did have the digit sum insight. Their code was already doing your previous suggestion, and if there's a compact way to slice in typescript types it could be adapted to this new method by replacing SUM_TABLE and changing one other line.
The only difference is that they're doing a sum modulo 9 instead of modulo 3, but both of those work fine.
All math operations can be implemented with bitwise operators, too, i am pretty sure
Likely the interviewer specifically needed the candidate to do that, implement the math, and tried to steer them that way numerous times (no sum table, dont use the type system, no math operators). Thats likely also why they suggest allowing limited use of Google, because they realize many people will need a refresher on bitwise operations. But they don’t want to outright tell you what to search for, they needed to see some resourcefulness. When they suggested OP was cheating they likely didn’t mean it personally and actually wanted to help steer OP towards an acceptable solution. Rather than saying it’s cheating they could have said it avoids the main thing we need to see, or outright say “please implement the low level math from first principles”
In my opinion the candidate showed resourcefulness in their own way indeed, but sometimes its not even up to the person administering an interview for example if they have been given a rubric.
If you are talking about tiny microprocessors or old ARM chips, sure. But so are programming languages! They should have really asked him to code his solution in machine code then. After all, that's what you typically do in a NodeJS job :)
And while division can be implemented as repeated subtraction, you are not going to find any CPUs 4 bits and up that don't have an adder. It would be ridiculous to try to handle addition/subtraction in software.
Fizz buzz is also much better treated like data stream and applying reactive programming.
Basic programming skill is also picking right tool for the job.
What he did was worst approach possible.
I give lots of interviews and I try very hard to resolve ambiguity in the expectations and requirements. Up front I explain what the purpose of the interview is and what I intend to evaluate. It’s silly to assume everyone is equally able to read between the lines and coding interviews are already a very poor approximation of what a day to day software engineering job looks like, so I try my best to set expectations up front.
We also had some freelancers like that and one employee who lasted 3 months - and always it was company owners who wanted to "bring help to speed things up".
Those guys ignored everything and did code the way they knew how to do it. Results were always bad and 3 months guy instead of speeding anything up trashed all team productivity for those 3 months and I guess even 2 more when we had to do the cleanup of his worst inventions.
Also the reason given (not the right tool for the problem) was demonstrably false if we take the OP at face value. They solved it and their solution was robust to changing requirements.
We only know the OPs side of the story, but if we take it at face value it reads a lot like the interviewer wanted to jump them through hoops and they made the best of it. I would have politely declined the interview pretty early on if I was in their shoes.
Pff.
Oh, you did a trick in the limited time of a single interview? You must only know that one trick, rejected.
This kind of typing in TS is used mostly for getting dynamically typed Javascript codebases under control.
I did this once for a state management library that was considered "impossible to add types to" by the authors themselves, and thanks to this I found several bugs in the library itself, and in our own codebase, due to subtle incorrect usage.
Just the fact that we got autocompletion across the whole app was worth the effort. Even the engineer that was against it ended up praising it.
I'm not the kind of person to say this but: maybe some things are not for everyone. Some people just have different interests and skills. Complicated things aren't less worth just because someone in the team can't understand them.
(see for example Scott Wlaschin)
Yes, but only on the weekends :)
If that's their code base, they shouldn't be asking these kinds of questions. They'd be better served by asking to debug a non-functioning component that looks like a real component you'd find in their code base.
Plus readability and maintainability are subjective
I could ask you to show me how well and fast you can run while making up a rule that you can’t use your legs and then tell you that you can’t run fast enough to join my sprint team… but that would be idiotic on my part.
In my books this choice alone wouldn't be cause for rejection, a good interviewer would question it though and depending on the reaction, it could be. Whether or not that happened here isn't clear. They could also have other even better candidates to pick.
I'm not surprised to see that type of sentiment from someone who is (at least self-described) at a more junior level, but still. Often the choice of what language/framework/tool to use on a given codebase or project is dictated or constrained by considerations other than which one is "best" in a technical sense.
Does this suck? Yeah, most of us have strongly held opinions or like to try out new shiny things. But it's a reality of working in this field and coworkers who refuse to learn it can be really hard to work with.
One is choice of language, which is supposed to not matter because it's just an interview exercise where you can pick any language.
The other is the contortions around not using numbers.
Anything stemming from those two factors should not be held against the candidate. It definitely shouldn't be labeled as "scratching your own itch".
That’s due to this excellent post about your excellent abilities and reasoning appearing on HN.
¡Mucha suerte!
2900 - 800 = 2100 EUR to do whatever I want with. Even if I decide to put half of that into savings, that's still ~1000 EUR to spend freely, and any unspent money would go into savings too at the end of the month.
Or in other words: With a salary like that I would be able to pay a family member's full monthly expenses if they are in rough times, and still have leftover for myself.
that sounds like a major exception. the average for juniors in germany is 50k or below.
More to you, but that isn't a common entry level, at least for companies whose main business isn't selling software.
Yep, the exact opposite.
Compared with which location?
My experience is that you're way better off in Zurich than, say, London where you'll end up having similar costs. https://livingcost.org/cost/london/zurich illustrates that. Zurich seems similar to San Jose: https://livingcost.org/cost/san-jose-us/zurich.
Prices in most supermarkets are high, but I've come to understand this as most consumers being price-indifferent for groceries, at least in Zurich, because it represents little of their overall costs anyway. If you want to save on groceries, Lidl is way cheaper than Coop/Migros, but many consumers prefer convenience. That's not even including the case of people living in Basel / Geneva who buy groceries in Germany / France such that Swiss prices don't matter to them.
Top 5% richest income in UK is €81.3k (£68.4k).
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...
If you tightly script your interview, but then present it as open-ended and flexible: that's on you.
My take if I was interviewing (and forced to use this approach): appreciate what a interesting interview this was, explicitly tell them "wow! that'd didn't go as we planned, but interesting approach!", maybe steer conversation to the pros/cons of unique/efficient solutions vs. less terse / bog-standard approaches, have some prepared code to debug and refactor (instead of expecting the candidate to produce it).
I do a lot of interviews and most of them are so boring and forgettable. The best ones are unique and the candidates shows passion about <anything> in any demonstrable way.
Which is fine.
But what's unacceptable is that a lot of people in our industry are not mature enough to admit when they don't know something, and instead just chalk it off as "unreadable" or some other adjective.
Apply to other companies. In this case it’s not you, it’s them.
The reason why you didn't get this job is because they filtered out themselves, it was not you that was bad, it was them thinking you where too smart for them. It took a lot of time for me to figure out this, that in a relation you want someone that are on the same level. I used to think that companies want to hire the smartest people... But no, they want to hire people that are like them.
Here's my tip: Start filter out jobs instead of having them filter you out! There are many jobs, especially if you are willing to relocate.
Only apply for places that are as much into types and functional programming that you are! Or at least on your "nerd" level generally.
Do the company have a technical blog that writes about this stuff? Do the company have a technical speaker that speak about this stuff? Is anyone at the company writing technical articles about this stuff?
If you see a good article, reach out to the author and ask if they have any openings or can recommend a good company to work for.
Also if you are applying for a senior position, and you get to an interview, you should be talking to them as if they where 5 year olds. Even if they say they have 30 years of experience, explain stuff like if you where talking to a kid. For me it's much easier to come up with a better algorithm then explaining to others why it's better. It feels like explaining it to my dog.
I think it's just out of touch with reality. If you are applying for a job, then they probably want someone who does what their told reliably and predictably, and you probably want to get paid. So you should show them that you are capable of doing what you're told reliably and predictably. You exchange your time for money and everybody benefits. It's just a waste of everybody's time if you are going to rage against this process—insist on not doing what you are told and then get angry when the result is not getting paid.
Instead OP is a hero who bests the interviewers at every turn with his cleverness.
That seems to be what all restrictions, especially #7, lead to and it is a concept everybody that understands how module works should understand.
> 15. Hardcoding matrices is forbidden.
This was definitely meant to nudge you into the direction of adjusting the base.
The excessive number of rules was really weird, surely they could've just asked you to consider simpler a solution.
> Asked the interviewer if it was OK to rewrite it using only types, she asked her partner and he told me it was but that he couldn’t see the point of it and advised me it would not be the right tool for the problem given that there would be many more rules
I suppose this might've been such a hint.
But I am confident that I would have been very productive in the type of work they actually perform in reality
I agree that this is probably what they were going for, but it still seems a bit ridiculous that the conversion from numbers to the chosen representation is not subject to the same rules (i.e., you can call `.toString(15)`, and this definitely uses numbers under the hood!). If this is allowed, then you could also encode your numbers as the string "{n % 3}{n % 5}" and be done with it. Or if they wanted a unique encoding, "{n}{n % 3}{n % 5}" would work too!
1. People who have come across that trick before.
2. People who have a lightbulb moment in the 45 minutes of the interview.
Now, given that someone has passed the test, what is the probability that it is because of 1 or 2? The VAST majority who pass the test will fall into category 1.
The test manages to have both low sensitivity and low specificity. Well done!
Most likely, the interviewers are completely unaware that the solution is only obvious to their uncurious minds because someone else told them the answer. They don’t appear to have an understanding of where quantum-leap ideas come from, or how to foster them.
This doesn’t assess anything meaningful, it’s an ego trip for the interviewer. Ugh.
The extra rules presented sequentially and their interactions might have revealed more about both parties, but it's hard to tell without seeing them in person.
FizzBuzz works well enough as a lowest common denominator screening test, but it doesn't scale up. At its core, it's an entirely made up problem with no relevance to anything you may ever do at a job. How do you evaluate requirements for a problem that is not real?
The higher level the skills you want to test, the more realistic your questions have to get.
A few have a trick or insight but I haven’t ran across those in interviews.
However, all of these "don't use the right tools" and "write extremely compact code" rules mostly select for people who are good in code golf, not for people who can solve actual business problems or write maintainable software.
And it seems like this was the only programming challenge in the whole interview?!
The same applies to interviews.
Learn to blend in if you want to function into society.
I'd be nervous about an applicant that came up with a very clever solution for the hard part of a problem but completely overlooked the simple part. (Again, not sure whether this is what happened here, but the change from how the problem is usually presented makes me wonder.)
I can't make up my mind whether these interviewers are simply staggeringly unaware, or gatekeeping, or that they enjoy making people suffer. The latter because, for every candidate like the author, there will be multiple candidates for whom this kind of test leaves them frozen and anxious. I wish people involved in interviewing would think more about what they're doing.
This code is almost unreadable to me, certainly to most on my team. I would request changes it if it was a PR going into production (ignoring that the problem itself is made up). The code I would've liked to see would be easy to read, easy to follow, and would make me understand the underlying rules that made the code look like it is. This, I feel, achieves none of that.
But of course, everyone is different, and certainly many in this thread feel different. I just wanted to add my perspective :)
No numerical operations on a fizzbuzz problem? Give me a damn break.
Fully granted that I'm not familiar with TypeScript, but I find it hard to believe that code like the below is more readable to anyone than the equivalent `for num in nums` loop.
type FizzBuzz<T> = T extends `${_}${_|""}${_|""}` ? `${Fizzer<T>}${Bazzer<T>}${Buzzer<T>}` : "";
type Folded<T> = T extends [infer Head, ...infer Tail] ? `${FizzBuzz<Head>}${Folded<Tail>}` : "";But the requirements were "write FizzBuzz in ANY language. Then change it so it doesn't use use numbers (!!!). Stick to strict and unreasonable code length constraints."
The only POSSIBLE interpretation is that the interviewers don't WANT straightforward readable code, but want weird tricks instead. Which is exactly what the author gave them.
This person aced some ridiculous requirements. The odds are good they're capable of writing simple, clear, non-clever code when asked to.
If the job requires simple, clear, non-clever code don't ask for FizzBuzz that can't use numerics.
Especially that this is a small company, so if I'm some kind of mid-level decision maker there then having someone versatile is a big advantage for this company.
If this would be a huge boring enterprise recruiting for the maintenance of their legacy COBOL.TS backend? Then probably the orthodox candidate.
Try reading the types in popular libraries like zod, openapi-ts, tanstack router, etc.
I believe that if the candidate is able to whip this up in 30-60 minutes they know their shit around some math and TS.
I think most problems are not this low-level and I think the questions about data management (DB, data structures in memory and on disk), API design, integration with services and other higher-level skills are more important.
So compared to the baseline "JS" at least this candidate effectively showed off one extra interesting and hard skill, while solving the problem flawlessly, and not folding under pressure, and so on.
In the text the candidate explicitly asked for permission to go with types. And if the interviewer wanted to revoke that permission they could have, but they did not, they gave some ambiguous advice.
> If you really wanted the job, would you behave like that in the interview?
Yes. I don't want to work for a company where creativity is a liability.
There is almost zero chance that a passable FizzBuzz would be produced in those interviews.
Then I realized how hard they are to debug once codebase looks like this, and any serious production code will get debugged to hell, no doubt there. Also implementing changes require same mindset, which is rare in teams generally, so its basically a technical debt right in creation.
KISS, the most important principle in any form of engineering is exact opposite of this. I've seen and experienced great success with it. I haven't seen that much success when ignored, apart from one man / tiny homogeneous team show.
But:
> we had 10KM HDDs so every char counts.
Ten kilometre hard disk drives?
It can't be 10kB. Hard disks were never that small. Floppy disks were never that small.
Maybe it's not hard disk drives.
It can't be length of tape, or of mercury delay lines.
I am mystified.
2 characters wrong? 10 MB hard disks?
What I meant was that disk space with code text was never an issue on modern PC, so optimizing for that doesn't make sense.
https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
Don't force 'clever' solutions if you're looking for readability, maintainability, changeability, debuggability etc.
On the other hand, our company doesn't do any technical interviews at all, so there's that.
Access to template literals at type-level is available since TS 4.1.
So while I am not saying I love this interview method, and other comments are correct that weird tricks seem to be required... I still think the interview served its purpose. OP is not a good match for this company. No judgment implied there - this is the purpose of interviews: for both sides to see if they work well together. In this case, they do not.
My judgment is that this company has no idea of what they are doing. Not uncommon for companies with under 50 employees.
>While the base algorithm is very simple, the point of the exercise is that the interviewer will add new rules to test how you update the code while keeping it readable and maintainable.
As for this:
>His code could handle new rules without a problem, so extensibility was not a problem either.
Ok, now I want you to query a database at runtime and write the output to a file instead if the number is in the database. Good luck with adapting this type-theory solution, and good luck with debugging this crap. It's a PhD-level solution to a freshman-level problem, that is very atypical and uses niche features of the language that might fail unexpectedly due to language limitations.
On top of all of that, the story sounds like fiction as well. But who knows.
The rules presented show that the goal is definitely not that.
Fizz buzz just lets me see their coding style (single letter variables, lack of curly braces after ifs, comments, platform - console, web, service) and whether they’re willing to allow simple mistakes into their finished product. So many mistakes.
But it’s the least I can do to get some information out of a candidate who is already overburdened by the process.
It is also a cool opportunity to "talk shop" if they go for a strange solution.
The requirements were way stranger and quirky than the solution, and wouldn’t really lead to any production-ready code…
Lots of comments complaining about the code completely glossed over the requirements.
switch (ch) {
case '1':
case '4':
case '7':
switch(rem) {
case 0:
rem = 1;
break;
case 1:
rem = 2;
break;
...
break;
case '2':
case '5':
...But if the interviewers have to be persuaded that 0 is divisible by 3, I guess you can't expect too much from them. Or anything from them.
> 2. Max width of 100 characters. Lines must break on natural breakpoints and not with the aim of optimizing for following the rules. Comments do not count toward this limit and would be positively valued if they are helpful.
This is the point at which I would say that I've heard enough and I'm not interested in working for their company, before I hang up the call.
This may sound surprising, but interviews are equally about convincing the candidate to join the company as they are about convincing the company to hire the candidate. The former involves much more than just the number for compensation.
I think you dodged a bullet here.
Once found myself in a similar ridiculous situation (Google interview). Looking back, I have to wonder if they expected me to put my foot down and tell them why their scenario was getting ludicrous instead of continuing along. In the end, they determined I wasn’t even fit to be a sysadmin, much less a SRE, despite 10 years of relevant development experience with a wide technical background and numerous patents.
The main issue that I see is that interviewers get extra picky with all the minor details and they fail candidates due to minor issues that would get solved in a code review or just with a bit more time
And while fizzbuzz using strings only is cool, it seems it didn't add anything to the predictive power of the interview
You see a "minor issue that would get solved in a code review".
I see a production outage.
You cannot rely on others catching and fixing your bugs. It happens, but it's all about probabilities. You want to reduce the probability that something bad will happen. That means not just relying on more senior people to catch problems in your code, it also means relying on you to be careful.
No, I see people complaining about a test not looking like what they expect, or minor nitpicks like variable names or not using the interviewer's favourite design pattern
Of course the same people who nitpick are the ones writing O(n^2) code and actually causing a major bug
I disagree, but of course that's entirely up to you.
Neglecting to name them just lets them get away with it.
If you use it as a chance to make a mockery of the interview process/interviewer then perhaps that is not a good idea if you actually want the job.
If you are concerned about a candidates team skills. Talk to them, do not interpret it based on, how they engage with some stupid coding puzzles.
To be clear upfront, it wasn’t simply getting the right answer spat out by the candidate’s solution.
At one level they were trying to asses that you did in fact know how to write code, but since they’re assuming most of their candidates can write code, they were also checking to see what you would do when presented with evolving requirements and constraints.
If I were the interviewers (considering candidates are more stressed than they would normally be on a job), I wouldn’t necessarily require the candidates got all the requirements met as long as they were clearly on the right track and able to explain what they were doing.
Although the technical assessment was contrived (which is okay in an interview), it was absolutely not a “leet code” style problem, but instead super approachable and easy to understand. It doesn’t seem they were doing anything to “try catch people out” so as to disqualify them, but made it interesting enough that they could hopefully get a bit of insight into how the candidate tends to think and behave.
I do think the interviewers were silly to entertain the candidate’s approach for as long as they did, after it was clear that it was very impressive, even if highly impractical for the actual task at hand (which was to show the interviewers your typical day-to-day approach to coding tasks), they should have said very clearly to the candidate “your solution is very impressive and clever, but as we’re trying to gain insight on your approach to typical day-to-day coding, please change your approach such that we’re able to do so”. And they kind of did say something similar, which the candidate essentially ignored to… outsmart them?
If you ask me, the candidate is very skilled and intelligent, but at the same time not very smart in terms of understanding what other people actually “need”.
Most properly experienced software developers have learnt that often what customers “ask for” isn’t actually what they need, very often you give them what they asked for and when they actually see it in action, they realize it won’t actually do what’s needed and then iteration happens.
The candidate in this case gave the interviewers what they asked for, but not what the interviewers needed from them.
The hard parts of software development is almost always not about building something that technically works, but rather working out what’s actually needed.
My message to the candidate is, you seem very technically talented, but you don’t seem to understand very well about how the world and most people in it tend to “work”.
As an interviewer who is going to have to work with the candidate in case they get hired, I would worry that this kind of code would be what I'd need to review on a daily basis.
The requirements were weird, but when are they ever not? and read-ability and maintain-ability were clearly stated as priorities at the start..
Still, props for the cleverness.
Like sure the API itself may have string input/output, but under the hood there’s no way it’s not doing integer divisions and modulos.
"The input array must contain a string representations of the numbers. The programmer can use whatever representation they see fit"
Allowing arbitrary string based representation of numbers also means that whole task becomes a bit silly. Why stop at base 15, when you could use what I call the "FizzBuzz" number system. In fizzbuzz number system the divisibility by 3 and 5 is encoded in first symbols of number. Something like 1="1", 3="F", 5="B", 10="B2", 30="FB2", 1000="B200". Digits represent rest of the number you get after dividing it by 3 and 5 if possible.
I guarantee it’s due to you not living in the Netherlands and not being fluent in English.
No matter if the job offers says they accept remote people, in the Netherlands they really value face to face contact and good and open communication.
It frequently implies to some degree that face to face meetings can be held and that languages and cultures mesh.
I once was given an interview question for a position at a company. Wanted me to create build scheduler in any language. It was a build engineer position. I started to do their at home exercise but ended up telling the recruiter I won’t do the exercise. It was pointless since Bamboo, Jenkins, or GitLab is what they should be using. Not some home grown build system.
> Max of 30 lines.
> Max width of 100 characters.
Putting arbitrary rules where none are really required is actually quite informative. It shows how the company culture is set up and it's probably gonna be lots of long days working on things that make no sense because some manager is power tripping over pointless arbitrary decisions. You must be truly desperate to come to them for work.
I've recently completed half a dozen 2-4 hour coding challenges, gotten a perfect score according to the tests provided, and after a couple of weeks, gotten a boilerplate rejection email.
What's the point?
this interview tells me that the candidate is smart and knows typescript well, but it doesn't tell me if they can write code that is clear enough so that a junior can understand and modify it. because the latter is the reality of work. a year from now, a junior will be asked to adapt this code to say replace 3 with 7 or something like that, and they will probably not be able to it without having to rewrite all of it from scratch.
While there a solution is clever, it’s not terribly maintainable and likely didn’t fit the bill.
Beyond that, things like soft skills matter for senior roles. The author can write, there’s no denying that, but we don’t know how well they can explain the why of their solution. It’s very likely the interviewers wanted more traditional functions that were unit-testable.
Why invite him then?
>Beyond that, things like soft skills matter for senior roles.
Then talk. Ask him. Psychoanalysis of the solution of a stupid brain teaser will not answer your questions.
If you don’t mind me asking, are you a senior level engineer?
Hope the author finds a good job somewhere that recognises and appreciates their skill.
https://www.richard-towers.com/2023/03/11/typescripting-the-...
I'm not drawing any conclusions, just pointing out the odd coincidence.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35120084
If they're hiring for some hyper unique role where they have to deal with some contrived AI in a dark room and they have to do it because someone's got a gun to their heads and they have to invent calculus to solve FizzBuzz in under 14.5 minutes otherwise the memory is corrupted and the world explodes, then sure they can ask such a contrived interview question.
Until then, this company is either crazy, bored, not looking to hire a candidate, or simply fictional and made up by the author to tell a feel-good story that makes them look like the Einstein-equivalent for programmers.
(/s)
My only complaint about your code: in a company you probably want them to approve your PRs, sometimes your peers will code worse than you, so better if the code is less stilted and maybe objectively “worse”, but easy to understand at a glance. but that part also depends on the interviewer.... better to ask first, it's part of working in a team.
I'm sure you'll soon be hired for 50k+.
Suerte.
Courses won't matter that much if you don't implement something (might give you a point or two on an interview but don't overinvest) and upwork would be absolutely exploitative work and you probably would not gain as much as working with others who can share a thing or two. Having a shared codebase is critical for growing as a software developer and not being too clever.
OP should just work and learn. Bring his enthusiasm but also humbleness and grow. He can keep his options open and move companies rapidly if he is already there but getting stable work and improving his communication should probably be his first goals to achieve.
Solving a problem like this with the type system is setting off all kinds of “too clever for their own good” alarm bells. The goal of a coding interview is to showcase as concisely as possible that you know the craft of software engineering. Fizzbuzz should not be considered an IQ test.
The progressive requirements in the interview, while clunky, are getting at the reality of software development: there rarely exists a spec for what you are building. You need to be flexible to future requirements, and you need to write maintainable code that others on your team can understand.
Sometimes it is possible to be too clever.
By rule 7: "Numeric types, number literals and their associated methods and operations are forbidden. The input array must contain a string representations of the numbers. The programmer can use whatever representation they see fit with the only restriction being that it could only contain letters, numbers and symbols that could be typed with a single stroke (they didn’t specify which keyboard layout, in mine, ñ and ç can be typed with a single stroke but I assumed it was an US keyboard). The max length of a string representing a number is 6 characters."
The numbers they care about are 1 - 1000 and the max length is 6 that leaves two spare digits, so decide that the input format is "tf0000" where the first two characters indicate if the number is a multiple of three, or five, respectively.
Is there any other field where applicants are subjected to this?
Nepalese Ghhurkas perhaps ?
I once backed out of an interview when they sent me an 85 page manual on how to prepare for the interview with them. It was not even a FAANG company, just a small IT solution with mediocre benefits.
In that case, a list of 1000 strings should work just fine. Fast lookup and can accommodate any new rule that comes in.
If they wanted clarity, they would allow for fucking numbers and modulo operator.
They wanted a solution and the candidate produced one.
Or did they just want to know if he knows how to program? Because he also did demonstrate that.
The solution was impressive and fascinating, regardless.
As has already been mentioned in other comments, these are clearly red flags and grounds for not taking the application process further.
Seeing this being used in the backend is really questionable. In fact, I then question the overall skillset of the team as to why they need to use Node.js or JS-related technologies in the backend.
As soon as I see any recruiter or company mentioning any usage of Node.js or JavaScript or TypeScript in the backend in the job description, I just laugh and delete the email and never reply back.
Introducing such unsound technologies into a production system responsible for maintaining a critical service is a recipe for complete chaos and disorder and tells me that your company is a joke that exists to prepare their developers for failure.
... that's not a "technicality", that's a crucial distinction that's as important as salary range or other benefits. This would be a huge red flag for me.
These say that you will have to play a lawyering game.
The OP didn't have the time to immediately see that.
His solution is clever, but if that's indicative of how he's going to do engineering work at my company, I guess that means I can expect clever solutions for everything, which usually leads to esoteric, architect astronaut code bases that will be difficult for his non-clever colleagues to grok/maintain.
"Now the easy part! I just have to encode the numbers in base 15 and I could apply the 2 and 5 rule to 3 and 5!" Encoding things in base 15 is too clever for me.
Back to the original statement I made: TS types are a terrible choice because TS types are not debuggable. If you get too fancy with them, you need a god in TypeScript to debug because you cannot set breakpoints inside of types and step through to see how generics and constraints propagate (as would be required by a mere mortal in order to debug).
"Hey, there's a bug in Joe's fizzbuzz function, but he's out on PTO, can you fix?"
"Sure, I'll step through with a debugger real quick... Oh wait, it's 100% typescript types, I can't step through with a debugger. I took a look but it looks like it's encoding numbers into base 15 for some reason... I don't want to break anything further, let's just wait for Joe to get back"
"Actually, can you just re-write it using normal conditional flow logic? We want more than just Joe to be able to touch the code."
He went to a solution he knew well, and the interviewer didn't ask to change.
If you solve this problem and use strings to do fizzbuzz instead of modulo, would you accept me saying that you're a doofus that doesn't know coding simply because you didn't do it the normal way?
I think this is uncharitable. The interviewer's demands to not use numeric types or any mathematical operations is inherently preposterous, and at that point the author can't be judged negatively for whatever contortions they needed to perform in order to comply with them.
But even still, let's assume there is a problem out there with unreasonable requirements. And let's say an engineer architects a solution to that problem in 100% TS. How's that going to solve anything? When the inputs and outputs are types... how do you interface with such a solution? You can't because types only exist at compile time so there's no way to dynamically send in inputs and retrieve outputs (at least not without even more hacks/cleverness).
That wasn’t part of the criteria. If that’s something they wanted to assess, they should have told him “no” when he asked if it would be alright to encode the rules in the types.
Maybe you have an issue with the interview, rather than the interviewee?
...which is hosted on a different domain (notion.so), so if you didn't notice and temporarily allow that domain in NoScript, the actual page (hosted on kranga.notion.site) will still redirect you to the "Please Enable JavaScript" text on notion.so
I get that smaller companies can't afford to mis-hire, but they are also not a FAANG - when I read this, I doubt I would have passed.
A small company hiring a programmer isn't looking for super clever type system hacks, they're looking for someone to crank out code to solve problems fast. It's not readable or efficient to use the type checking system as a general purpose computation system. If this is the code that your teammate wrote and now you have to debug it, good luck...
The candidate is certainly smarter than the average code monkey, just not "housebroken". Once they've worked at a team where they mostly get to fix and improve long-gone coworkers' code all day is when they gain more of an understanding of what programming is about...
They WERE expecting a clever solution.
Great job OP, but my eyes bleed.
The easiest tell is the adversarial nature of it, but the moment the "max of 30 lines" slide was revealed I'd be out. Scratch that - I'd be out when I saw there were slides. The point of a technical interview isn't to repeatedly try and throw caltrops in front of someone, and a company that doesn't know that is unlikely to be a great place to work.
I would have walked out.
FML.
Hazing-style technical tests are just dumb and this absolutely qualifies. On top of that, I hate technical interviews that tell you that you can’t search the internet or use toolsets that you would use daily in your job. Why do companies waste everyone’s time on exercises that are not representative of the work/working conditions?
When I ran a hiring round last year I spent a good chunk of time putting together a test/process that tried to closely mirror the type of code/problems you would be solving as an IC. I had almost every candidate (even the ones we passed on) commented on the process and how it was no-nonsense and letting them use whatever tool/resource/etc they wanted to solve it made it less stressful.
I even told people they were free to use LLM/AIs. After competing the base test (which they did without us watching, it’s an easy base problem) we asked candidates to modify the code to handle one more use-case (very simple, nothing like the silly rules the OP was given) and it was very clear which people understood the code they/the AI had written vs the ones that could prompt for a solution but didn’t understand it and thus failed to modify it to account for the new use-case (or struggled heavily for something that was a 1-3 line fix depending on how you implemented the original code).
I truly despise the hiring process from both sides. Both parties are asked to make life-altering decisions on very little data. We had a 4-step interview process:
* Introduction, ask basic questions, get to know you
* Technical test and problem solving test (the problem solving test was talking through a real issue we had run into, asking you to talk through possible ways to solve it. There is no "right" answer or rather there are multiple right answers)
* Debugging test, we produce code with bugs in it, you find/fix all the bugs
* Final interview with owners of the company
Last time I talked about this in HN I had at least 1 person complain about how long the process was. Normally we'd get through it in 2 weeks or less with a candidate (depending on scheduling) and it was a total of about 5-6hr (depending on how long the tests took). I'm not a fan of long and drawn out interview processes, but this was the bare minimum process I could come up with that would test candidates in the areas that we cared about. Also, I wanted to give ourselves multiple chances to interact with the interviewee as some people came across great in the first few rounds, and by the later rounds issues had started to surface.
Is 6hr really a crazy amount of time to spend deciding if you want to commit to 40hrs a week to a company for potentially years of your life? Yes, yes, yes, I know you can leave after a week if you are unhappy and I know the company can let you go after a week if they are unhappy but it's never that easy and switching jobs is hard/painful/stressful (as is firing someone). I am strong opposed to the "just hire them and fire them quickly if it doesn't work out", in fact I find it morally repugnant to play with people's lives in that way. Also, I assume the people who suggest such a corse of action are not the ones that have to onboard new hires (a process that is very involved and takes a lot of time, for me at least).
This was an interesting post for how to solve FizzBuzz in an unorthodox and just "cool" way but this test tells you nothing. In fact, if a developer wrote code trying to be this clever, I would reject it at PR time. It's cool for code-golfing but LoC is always a stupid measurement when it comes to maintainable code.
I wish the OP the best of luck finding a job that doesn't make them jump through hoops like this again.
https://github.com/TZubiri/fizzbuzz2.0
Apologies to the employers that I uploaded it to Github, but I was trying to keep my green squares thingy streak. I didn't upload the requirements so that it's harder to google/scrape into an LLM.
My first note is that, the quality of the code was very high, evidently the code worked and it did so in a manner that introducing changes either required little or no effort. It is unfortunate that the interviewers were annoyed by this rather than satisfied, it reads as if the interview process was written by one person and the interview was executed by someone else and was trying to check some boxes and get to his lunch.
My second note is that, while not incorrect, the approach was a bit academic and certainly harder for others to read. The functional approach is not the most common and definitely not as easy to read as the procedural approach. The interviewer, potentially a coworker, would be reading this and thinking that he would have to read this as part of their job. I don't see any upside to a functional approach here, perhaps in cases with more complexity if I were keen to this approach the pros and cons would be weighted more closely, but it feels overkill.
In a sense it reminds me of the satirical https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris... . Where it takes the POV of someone overengineering the fizzbuzz with javalike GO4 patterns.
Third, yes, the requirements are very weird and don't correlate very well with real problems, in some scenarios it forces the developer to do some weird things to the point where you are not sure how someone will evaluate you. If I were an employer I wouldn't be able to distinguish between someone that does 10 ifs in a row because he doesn't know how to use more expressive language constructs, or because he is trying to avoid an array or whatever fucky condition was placed.
Finally, requirement 7, to not use numerical literals and functions, indeed does require to reimplement some basic math, but it was not necessary to implement all of the math. You implemented base 10 addition. My solution just implemented signle digit base 3 addition with overflow. I think overimplementing is a common trap in programming, where you find a solution in 1 minute, and then spend 60 minutes implementing that solution, whereas if you spend some time looking for more efficient solutions, you might cut that implementation and debugging time in the long run.
I wouldn't say that the approach was wrong, it certainly would have bode well with more academic types that value functional approaches, perhaps if they use functional languages like F#, haskell, Scala, Clojure, etc.. But a javascript shop just screams pragmatism and lack of love for the programming language, I don't think you read the room here.
Oh and also, definitely make an AWS account and play with the free tier, just launch a vm (ec2). AWS was hugely influential in terms of design and pricing in the SaaS industry. Remember that AWS was the first big Cloud provider Google and Azure followed, so it's not as important to make an account with the other big cloud providers.
Best of lucks! I'm sure you'll find something.
Well, there you go. Typescript can only get you so far. Unless you want to be a low-paid code monkey, time to learn natural languages.
ps. I have many Spanish colleagues, and I have a hard time understanding them in general (when they speak English). Only one other nation is worse, the French...
As a Spaniard I'm curious, why's this?
I think I'm pretty well understood (worked remote for US and NL for years) but maybe just in case I can make life easier for my interlocutors.
I only know a few French, but I had a colleague who (although not of the French nationality) was born and raised there, and apparently was taught English literature through reading Les Hauts de Hurlevent. Yes, Wuthering Heights, in French.
- the requirements being weird might very well be modeling how weird things often get in reality. Rules are often not recorded and not repeated, and very often they seem arbitrary from the POV of the developers.
- the interviewers hinted that the direction was not what they were looking for
- a senior dev needs to apply his own common sense to understand what the truly appropriate solution is given the stated priorities (readability and maintainability were stated)
- not to mention the fact that if the interviewers don't understand your code, things won't go smoothly for you either way
The fact that they said, paraphrasing "..pick any esoteric language.." might investigate whether, given technical freedom (EG: to pick your own stack) you will build an incomprehensible codebase that will be hard for the company to deal with in the future
I think the author is indeed very clever and I learned a few things from reading this write up (thanks for sharing!) but I think the interviewers were right not be impressed.
If I were you, I'd try to dumb it down for your colleagues.
No, they said they couldn’t see the utility in what he was doing, which is very different than being told that his solution is unsatisfactory.
I have had countless interviews where I’ve been told that they don’t see where I’m going with something, and when I’m finished they admit (after some time processing) that they are impressed that I came up with such an elegant, simple solution. When asked what they had in mind, it turns out they (initially) thought the optimal solution was some contrived, overly complicated thing. If I let everyone’s interjections derail me, I’d never get through most interviews.
Think: have you ever seen a candidate give a crazy, overly complicated solution in an interview? Yes? Well, such interviewees (the ones that write 100+ line Fibonacci functions that look like they might be doing some memoization, but if you squint it turns out they aren’t even using the memo table they constructed) go on to be become interviewers — it shouldn’t be a surprise that many interviewers unintentionally throw candidates curveballs by expressing incredulity in the face of a non-shitty solution. If something is truly a hard “no”, then a “no” must be said — expecting the candidate to guess what’s going through the interviewers head is ridiculous.