Sure. They really are super simple. FizzBuzz is simple, but my min bar is a question that no one should miss. Even someone with anxiety should get them right. In theory I could see a good dev getting FizzBuzz wrong or getting flustered. Since I use this as an absolute "no hire" bar it has to be pretty low.
Count the number of occurrances of the letter 'a' in a string. And I'm upfront that this isn't meant to be a trick question having to do with locales or some odd corner of the Unicode world. If there's something funny about the question, let me know, I might learn something, is what I'd tell them.
I'd say 1 in 10 struggle with this question. The other 9 kick it out in 1 minutes. Very little time is lost in the interview.
Another example is to code the nth Fib number with recursion. I give them the recurrence relationship, in case they don't know it, and write some examples. I'm not throwing out Fib and asking for a solution, and secretly ready to pounce and say, "There's a closed form solution!" or what happens on integer overflow or anything. I want them to convert the recurrence relation to code as a recursive function. But I don't mind hearing valid concerns along the way, although really its just a mininmum bar test.
This eliminates about 15% who often don't get it working at all. (I'm really winging these numbers... i should have kept better track of this).
Doing well on these questions means nothing. It just gets you a ticket to the rest of the interview. But not being able to do them is an indication that I don't think I can listen to the rest of what you have to say (for a dev role) and be convinced that you can do the job -- no matter how versed you seem to be with the latest buzzwords.
In java:
public int nth_fibbonacci(int n)
{
if (n == 0 || n == 1) return 1;
return nth_fibbonacci(n-1) + nth_fibbonacci(n-2);
}
//Would you accept that as a valid response even though it is terribly inefficient? It's what I came up with in 5 minutes.
Count the number of occurrances of the letter 'a' in a string. And I'm upfront that this isn't meant to be a trick question having to do with locales or some odd corner of the Unicode world. If there's something funny about the question, let me know, I might learn something, is what I'd tell them.
I'd say 1 in 10 struggle with this question. The other 9 kick it out in 1 minutes. Very little time is lost in the interview.
Another example is to code the nth Fib number with recursion. I give them the recurrence relationship, in case they don't know it, and write some examples. I'm not throwing out Fib and asking for a solution, and secretly ready to pounce and say, "There's a closed form solution!" or what happens on integer overflow or anything. I want them to convert the recurrence relation to code as a recursive function. But I don't mind hearing valid concerns along the way, although really its just a mininmum bar test.
This eliminates about 15% who often don't get it working at all. (I'm really winging these numbers... i should have kept better track of this).
Doing well on these questions means nothing. It just gets you a ticket to the rest of the interview. But not being able to do them is an indication that I don't think I can listen to the rest of what you have to say (for a dev role) and be convinced that you can do the job -- no matter how versed you seem to be with the latest buzzwords.