Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

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As the article says, this is fizz buzz. The purpose of it is to decide if you can program, not if you're a good programmer and not if you're a good engineer. Also, it's not an algorithm question. Actually, I'm not sure why I'm writing this up, he's specifically addressing your point in the article.

> I think it’s far more interesting to set aside a real world problem that you have encountered at your company

I would too. But the domain space of (things that aren't dreadfully trivial) intersect (things I can explain to an outsider in <10 minutes, including the relevant domain and context) intersect (things that an outsider can make reasonable progress on in the remaining 35 minutes) intersect (things I didn't just bloody fix when I came across them) is very, very small. I'm not even sure all those circles even overlaps, ever.

If this is just Fizz Buzz (ie, a very low-level filter to see if you can program at all), why is he testing for elegance? For cleanliness? For speed of writing on a whiteboard, for god sake? He may claim it's Fizz Buzz, but he gives it and treats it like a normal programming test, with all the problems associated with it.

I agree. This is the most important point in this discussion.

The whole concept of fizz buzz for an in-person whiteboard interview is absurd. The type of candidate who would fail that test should have been filtered out way earlier in the process and the type of candidate who hasn't been filtered out by that point (i.e., a 'top candidate') would be extremely insulted.

I think the people who ask asinine questions like this haven't done their due diligence going in. They haven't looked at the candidate's online presence (including GitHub) nor even read her resume.

Why are you requiring 'things you didn't fix when you came across them' ? It'd seem to me those'd be ideal - and they should be sitting around in source control.

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