Is FizzBuzz cargo cult? I had my own company in 1995. We tried to hire programmers. The candidate would come in and we'd spend an hour interviewing. 9 out of 10 could not program at all and effectively wasted our time.
So, we switched to "here's a short test, go in this room and do the test". Then we'd look at their answers. If the answers were wrong/poor we'd thank them for their time and excuse them. This way, less of our time was wasted. That test included an extremely small task like FizzBuzz. If you can't answer it you can't program, period! It filtered out the 9 out of 10 applicants who should never have applied in the first place and saved us a bunch of time.
At a big company the phone screen is supposed to do that but phone screens still take a hour or more of some engineer's time.
> So, we switched to "here's a short test, go in this room and do the test". Then we'd look at their answers. If the answers were wrong/poor we'd thank them for their time and excuse them.
I remember about a dozen years ago taking one of these tests at an interview. Interviewer takes me to a room and says "We've got this little test, I'll be back in 2 hours.". I take the test. Guy comes back in and says ok, we'll look this over and let you know... Crickets. Didn't hear back so I figure I must've bombed the test. 2 years later that guy calls me up and asks if I want to come in for an interview. I say "I never heard back so I figured I bombed your test" He says "No, you did great, we just got kind of busy". I politely declined to interview with them again.
I had a similar experience in the late 90s. We had people who couldn’t program but represented that they could.
We would give them a quick screen of “write in one of the languages this position requires a program that takes in a string, reverses it and prints it out.” And we changed it to any language once we started working with novel stuff like JavaScript that any programmer could pick up.
It was so weird how many people would fail this test.
I always wondered how other industries dealt with people just flat out lying on resumes and applying for positions they shouldn’t. Programming is lucky that we have some litmus tests.
I feel bad for people who freeze up and can’t even write a three line program on paper.
People who complain about software interviews being a high barrier to entry have never dealt with any other high-skilled high-paying profession.
Want to become a doctor? Study for 12-15 years. Lawyers, accountants, pilots, actuaries all have similar multi-year licensing requirements. Places like investment banks and consulting firms will put candidates through a multi-week interview process involving stuff like case studies which make a 1 hour technical interview seem like a joke. And on top of it all you still have to "make an impression" which involves networking and ass kissing the right people in the chain.
Being able to walk into any company with just a 4-5 hour mostly objective interview is one of the best parts of the software industry.
Yeah, and all of those years are filled with constant punishment. In my experience it was common for medical students to have depression, severe anxiety, panic attacks before and after tests and exams. Binge drinking was extremely common after. At least two students committed suicide.
Investment banks might not have been the greatest example here, many of them hire whoever under the auspices that while during incodtrination they work a play portfolio for free and those in the cohort who profit above a certain deviation and who can justify the strategy behind it get hired, the rest don't.
Investment bankers don't manage portfolios. They do paperwork for companies which want to sell stocks and bonds. What you're describing is a trading operation and a crappy one at that.
> I feel bad for people who freeze up and can’t even write a three line program on paper.
I do the same kind of interview, and after figure this issue happens, also LEFT the room.
Then eventually add: You can do it any language (even different to any we was hiring), then add: You can do whatever you want to succeed (hinting to the fact the machine used has the docs, internet, YouTube influencers, whatever at their fingerprints).
It STILL have huge casualty rates.
What all of this left me to wonder: How the heck this industry absorb they?
e.g:
I challenge you to give an answer to my question?
it's such a simple question, how could anyone not give the right answer. but it's as badly communicated as your comment, subject to interpretation and perplexing.
now imaging being in a position of inferiority, in total fear to be asked about things you've never hear about before. like it happens not so rarely when sitting University in exams. you studied 90% of the curriculum for a year, but, bad luck, the exam concentrates on that 10% you've overlooked.
you haven't prepared for a year for that interview, but it does feel like it while waiting in that soulless waiting room. The secretary bored to death nearby doesn't help gain any courage: she mastered the art of pretence, she isn't building some complex excel queries, she plays the solitaire. but you don't know that. and you haven't even entered the interview room yet.
if you don't picture that scenario, just try to give a speech on a very large audience. you will see how emotions can very well take full control over you.
that part was because the parent comment was barely understandable.
this interview question is crystal clear and anyone applying for a software dev position should be able to provide a valid answer.
it doesn't remove the fear factor problem. but agreed.
that's also why we got screening calls, in 10 mins even a tech recruiter can filter out wanna be engineers who can't answer super basic tech questions.
Not in my opinion no, and I don't mind people asking me simple questions either. There are quite a few people who simply don't understand basic concepts and cannot actually write code. Higher qualifications are usually weakly positively correlated with competence, but there are plenty of outliers and exceptions.
I do generally agree with the cargo cult sentiment, but not in this case.
The main thing I dislike about the 7+ interviews is that I dislike interviews and there are 7 of them to get through. I once did four in one day, back to back, and I was extremely tired afterwards. So my big fear as a candidate is that either 7 interviews will happen over 1-2 days and I'll be absolutely fried after the first 2, or they'll be so hard to schedule it'll take 6 months just to have them all. I'm also a bit afraid they'll cargo cult some of the interview questions and I get a bit sick of "please recite 1st year CS algorithm" questions (I never ask these personally) but otherwise 7 interviews is fine, if they accept I am a human candidate and I'm not really comfortable in the process anyway.
Agreed, a team I worked with added a very short (few minutes) screener quiz because we had about 10-20% of candidates make it past phone screen who struggled to write a simple function.
So, we switched to "here's a short test, go in this room and do the test". Then we'd look at their answers. If the answers were wrong/poor we'd thank them for their time and excuse them. This way, less of our time was wasted. That test included an extremely small task like FizzBuzz. If you can't answer it you can't program, period! It filtered out the 9 out of 10 applicants who should never have applied in the first place and saved us a bunch of time.
At a big company the phone screen is supposed to do that but phone screens still take a hour or more of some engineer's time.