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Comment by workingandtired | Hacker News Reader

Like I mentioned below, as a self taught web programmer, it was years before I came across a modulus in a real-world situation. I feel like it's understandable to not have a 100% grasp on all the basics and still produce stuff.

I think the more damning thing in her case is her questioning the question and seemingly not giving it a thorough effort.

Again, just listing "HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript." by itself as a minimum qualification doesn't specify what level of knowledge is expected of you. Familiarity? Proficiency? Master? Do you need to know how v8 interprets Javascript?

I'm not making the case that the job was right for her or that she was competent enough to handle it. I'm arguing that ambiguities in descriptions wasted both her time and the company's time.

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> Like I mentioned below, as a self taught web programmer, it was years before I came across a modulus in a real-world situation.

So? Like I mentioned in response to that, modulus isn't necessary for FizzBuzz.

> Again, just listing "HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript." by itself as a minimum qualification doesn't specify what level of knowledge is expected of you.

FizzBuzz doesn't require much depth of knowledge in the target programming language. If you are can handle assignment, addition, conditional logic, and any one of iteration, jumping, or recursion (note that some language may not support all three of those, so which are available depends on language), you can do FizzBuzz.

What FizzBuzz does require (assuming you haven't already studied it and memorized a solution in the language given) is being able to think through a dirt simple problem and apply a programming language to it. It identifies people with minimal programming skills as distinct from those who are limited to cargo cult copypasta (well, again, except that memorization means it can produce false positives.)

Yeah, you're right. FizzBuzz does test a programmers mindset and it's pretty clear she didn't meet those expectations. I was focusing on a tiny aspect of it.

The main point I was trying to get at is that it doesn't seem to me like she identifies as a programmer. She's a UI/UX designer with a little bit of code experience. IMO, the whole point of it wasn't that she was upset that she didn't get the job or what they asked her. It was simply that based on the description, she went in thinking the primary focus was mockups, design and user testing rather than programming. Had the post been more clear about their expectations for the position, she wouldn't have tried for it.

>doesn't specify what level of knowledge is expected of you. Familiarity? Proficiency? Master? Do you need to know how v8 interprets Javascript?

It says "experienced with OO JS". That's vague, but not so vague that it can mean "I don't even know the basic operators of the language".

And that from someone who claims they can "teach others to code". (http://notlaura.com/services/teach-me-to-fish/)

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