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Comment by eterm | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I hope you never interview me.

FizzBuzz was a filter to filter out people who cannot code.

At all.

It was never designed as a competency measure, it was designed as a filter, to remove people who are mistaken into believing they can do something they cannot do at all.

What you have is a very precise measure, which would not even filter out the BSers who could probably happily talk for five minutes on the merits of a codebase they've never looked at (or perhaps even they have) but cannot despite this write a loop counting from 1 to 10.

Any blank stare after this question would not be me not understanding that libraries have code bases but would be me losing track wondering where my next interview would be.

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So what would you do if you were unclear on how to do something based on the docs and googling? Have you genuinely never done anything even slightly out of spec with library author's expectations? Do you never need just part of the functionality of a library and wonder what the right way to get it is? Do you always just decide "it's not documented in a way I understand it, time to roll my own"?

So you'd be unwilling to discuss a major library that you've used in your career (say Spring, or Rails) with a potential employer?

The "filter" I'm looking for is to weed out people who cannot crack open the source to something that is standing between them solving a problem. I'm not asking them to be an expert on the internals of everything they use. Apologies if my comment was unclear.

Generally major libraries have actual documentation that's good enough to make it counter-productive to look at the source. If you simply asked if there was ever a time where you needed to look at the source for a library, I could probably come up with something. However, I've never had to look at the source for anything that I would consider a "major" library because everything that I've used that I would consider a "major" library has decent documentation.

My most valuable two questions have always been "What part of the stack you're working with do you understand best? Can you explain to me how it works?" and "What is the most complex modification/extension of the stack you've ever done? Can you explain to me how you did it?"

That will show you exactly how well they know their tools, how and how far they bent them to their will, how passionate they are about them and how well they can communicate on difficult technical topics.

I'd be hard-pressed to find other questions that consistently give me that much information about a candidate.

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