That should have been a big clue right there that it wasn't going to go well. Based on their hiring criterion and culture, that they still do a technical interview like they were hiring junior developers is a bad sigh.
And so I did. And oh boy, there were a LOT of previous Fortune 500 Senior devs that could not write anything that even resembles a correct fizzbuzz solution in any language they like without time restriction (I had to kick a few people out after I left them alone for 30 minutes and they told me they need more time).
All their CV's looked fine though. If I interview you, I'll ask you to write code, on any level. Usually I asked interviewees for ~3 code samples on paper starting with fizzbuzz moving up in difficulty to still beeing a relatively easy ~5 minute task.
I've had one interviewee that started to laugh when I asked him for a fizzbuzz sample and he said, "well that's like asking a baker to bake a bun". he proceded to write a fizzbuzz solution down and is apparently one of the top developers at that company now.
I don't care how senior you are. If you're offended by quickly writing down a fizzbuzz solution you're not senior enough to realize how much some people suck at programming.
Obviously the actual only interview only started after they wrote fizzbuzz, fizzbuzz helped me stop wasting my time and I convinced HR to stop sending me CVs of people that played bullshit bingo in their CVs.
Sure you could blame HR on this for not filtering good enough but HR aren't developers. Although I'm not saying HR couldn't have given me better CVs...
The volume of "good" CVs that landed on my desk was consistently high, but when we spoke to the candidates on their first telephone interview it became immediately apparent that they were not nearly as skilled at security as they were at writing CVs.
In the end, we inserted a 10 minute quick-fire Q&A at the beginning of the telephone interview which was as basic as "Define: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability" and other such trivial security knowledge. It was terrifying the number of people applying for mid/senior level jobs, or contracts with high day-rates who couldn't get past this. What was most galling was when people were obviously googling the anwswers whilst we spoke - we countered this with simple "which is better, and why" type questions so that there was too many variables to google and you also needed to defend your answer.
There were only a very small number of candidates who, when confronted with the Q&A responded in a "are you serious?" kind of way and just rattled off the basic knowledge in a couple of minutes. With these we could get down to the detail of the real interview pretty quickly.
I did that when we were ~7 people, then the company grew, we got a HR department and I kinda lost interest in the company and was just doing my job. Efficient shouting-trough-the-room to get shit done was replaced by by slow corporate processes, office politics started to happen, somebody decided that our SMB shared folders must have a number in front so they are shown in the order admin though they needed to be shown... So when they decided to optimize folder structures for mouse-heavy non-technical users, taking my ability to quickly nagivate trough the directory structure, I decided it was time to leave :)
Edit: One funny thing I forgot, they built a file-name generator in excel we had to use :)
[1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
If you can not find anyone at all with example code/projects, perhaps then start employing fizzbuzz on folks, but... I can't imagine it's too hard to find developers with at least a minimal portfolio that demonstrates something at least as complex, if not moreso, than fizzbuzz.
I really like Fizzbuzz because for someone who is a good programmer, whether they've ever seen it or not, they can do it in about two minutes, and then at least I can believe that their code sample is theirs.
He had a nice code sample (pre-github era).
When I see "expert" on a CV I have learned to become cynical.
I asked him about his expertise and he spoke in platitudes about it - at a sort of BBC News kind of level. I'm certainly not an expert but I know sufficient to be able to ask useful questions about it.
He couldn't tell me anything at all about biometrics. I continued to probe.
Turns out that by "biometrics expert" he quite unashamedly meant he had, at the request of a manager, bought a USB fingerprint reader from PC World and installed it so that his manager didn't have to use a password any more.
One has to play this game on marketing documents to be considered. For some reason "pretty good, definitely still learning" doesn't click with many HR people. You can't really blame candidates for trying to get hired by presenting themselves in an authoritative context.
I don't consider anyone an actual expert in something unless they have hard, indisputable credentials, like a long history of commits to the core project (for expertise in specific software/languages/frameworks), etc.
But something about "expert" really grates on me. I think it's that it is a self-anointed title in nearly all cases. There are legitimately experts in lots of different areas - if you happened to invent IDS, for example, you go right ahead and call yourself an expert. If you happen to have run a bunch of Snort rules across a prod environment for a year or two, you might be "experienced", go on, stretch it to "highly experienced" for all I care, but if you stretch it to "expert" then paint me cynical.
Some of these stories about super experienced ("10+ years") developers not being able to answer the most basic of basic syntax or "algorithm" questions seem far-fetched to me.
Really I don't think those sort of on-the-spot tests/trivia questions are representative by themselves. They may be a useful part of a larger investigation.
Two things to stop code sample plagiarism: choose a unique code challenge and, if you're really worried about it, give the client a laptop and tell them to bang something simple out right there and come back in 30-60 minutes to check.
Honestly, though, I've rarely depended on either code samples or code trivia to determine if someone is a good hire. If you sit and talk about dev with a person, you can tell if they're on their game or not 90% of the time. The sample/on-the-spot tests can help weed out that extra 10%.
I'm not sure how this is possible either, but the world works in mysterious ways.
In the end they said "Okay, you pass." When I asked why, the answer was "While we don't agree with all the choices, it's basically well-written and does something interesting. We just wanted to know if you were the one who wrote it."
- did they likely write the code, for obvious reasons - are they aware of the various tradeoffs and choices they made, i.e. we might not agree but can they make a reasonable argument for them - this demonstrates breadth of knowledge - how are their communication skills?
I tried homework, it didn't really work that well for me, people would google and copy paste stuff and invest way too much time, in the end they couldn't explain what they did and it was just a waste of time for both parties. The other problem is that I usually let people work with whatever language/frameworks their familiar with. I ended up beeing not familiar with some C# stuff they used and couldn't really judge their code. Fizzbuzz is simple enough that you can see if it looks right in pretty much any language And it's done in 5 minutes even if that means accepting a few false positives.
Oh and, we had I few people where I noticed that they were really nervous and I thought maybe that's why they failed Fizzbuzz, so I invited them in for half a day and gave them a toy project to implement. Usually something really simple like, fetch this RSS Feed, parse it, save it somewhere, make sure that if you fetch it multiple times it doesn't save duplicate entries, and spit out the titles and URL's to stdout or a webpage or anything. A relatively real world exercise I think, nobody was constantly watching them, it was just a "get it done" job, they had internet, their own IDE, their language of choice and everything (a few people complained that they can't implement FizzBuzz without an IDE). And all of them failed. Hard. So I ended up not doing that anymore and treat a failed FizzBuzz as a K.O. criteria.
I would be delighted if an interviewer asked me such questions about my code.
Fizz buzz you can't skate around. Either you know how to implement something, or you don't.
I'd actually have to think for a minute on how to do fizz buzz right now, simply because it is so far remove from the actual engineering workflow.
Err, what? Fizzbuzz is NOT a riddle. It's intentionally meant to be a stupid simple test, and everyone has written stupid simple code at some point. Even as a "senior engineer" you'll have to write dumb business logic code, even if it's only occasional.
If you really struggle with fizzbuzz it would almost assuredly be a sign that you would really struggle to write quality software in a timely manner. It's also a sign that you really aren't familiar with even the basic control flow of your chosen language, which is similarly worrying.
The only part of fizzbuzz that's "removed from the actual engineering workflow" is MAYBE the modulus operation, which I'm willing to bet most interviewers probably won't give a shit if you goof on the syntax a little and write "%" when you should've written "%%".
And even then, a perfectly acceptable fizzbuzz can be written without using mod if you're not familiar with that basic arithmetic operation.
This type of attitude is highly suspicious.
If you're not the kind of person who thinks fizz buzz is trivial, then there are actual red flags.
The idea of "fizzbuzz" is to show basic understanding of language control structures and flow. Better, more universal tests that actually use language constructs that are encountered in daily operation could definitely be devised to demonstrate the same fundamental concepts.
90% of the code I've written, and all the clever stuff, is copyright of and property of corporations. There's no way I'd jeopardise my current job by showing someone else that code
I would love to exist in a world where everyone could fizz buzz flawlessly.
I'll stop asking fizzbuzz when people stop failing it.
And you know what? More than 1/2 the people that claim to be doing a job writing code right now can not do it. If you can't write a simple loop in your preferred language, I have to wonder how you are doing coding right now and being successful.
That said, for FizzBuzz proper, one should have dozens of solutions memorized for these situations, but for similarly easy questions the candidate might not have come across that might end up being a big deal.
I've definitely felt that pressure as an interviewee. It's pretty disheartening to write a simple and obviously correct implementation only to have the interviewer express their disappointment that you didn't use a particular optimization.
The most fun technical questions I've had start with making a functional algorithm and then massaging it to meet whatever time/space complexity requirements are asked for. Sometimes it results in a complete rewrite and that's ok, the real world works like that too.
I almost always preface whiteboard coding sessions with "I'm going to write some dumb, slow code and then we can make it faster if you want. Sound OK?" I've never had anyone disagree with this, but if they tell you they want you to go straight to the clever solution, hey, now you know what they're looking for.
50% of working programmers can't write a for loop? Does that square with your experience outside of interviewing?
I don't quite buy the whole fizz-buzz story, though I don't have an adequate explanation for what could cause these kinds of failure rates. Something seems very off.
Not 50% of working programmers, but of the programmer applicant pool. The applicants who can find jobs quickly aren't in the pool very long, and so it's dominated by the fakers and those who otherwise shouldn't be there. ... Which should make the reported phenomenon a little more believable.
However, that's all it's good for, which means it should be a single pass/fail question. Asking the candidate increasingly specific iterations of fizzbuzz would be a waste of time.