Thanks for posting. I'm always very interested in hearing form people who mention how ostensibly senior people fail fizz buzz.
My question is: what happens after people pass fizz buzz? Failing fizz buzz is how you filter people out, but it's unlikely that coding up fizz buzz passes the technical screen. What kind of questions do you use to establish this, once you're past fizz buzz?
I've failed far more tech screenings than I've passed. I could easily do fizz buzz, and when I've prepped for an interview, I could some tree and set permutation stuff. But the questions get so much more difficult than this. Since difficulty varies, an example of a difficult question for me is "find all matching subtrees in a binary tree" (at the whiteboard, in 45 minutes). When I got feedback about the no-hire, the explanation was that I had a good grasp of algorithms and made some progress, I didn't solve enough of the problem in code (tight pseudocode would have been ok) in time allotted (again, this was ~45 min at the whiteboard, one in a series of 5 one-hour technical exam style interviews during a day of interviewing).
I can't claim to be a great coder. I have understood how to code merge sort and quick sort and more complicated tree structures, and I could do them again if I studied and loaded it all back into short term working memory, but I'm content to know how the algorithms work generally and get back into the details when I need... but when anyone mentioned "Fizz buzz", I do insist on stating that my impression, based on quite a few interviews, is that fizz buzz isn't what is screening out software engineers. Lots and lots of people who can write fizz buzz (and build and print a binary tree pre order and post order, and do dfs and bfs, and solve problems with them) are still frequently screened out.
I'm at the point where I just won't do tech interviews anymore (or take home tests). I won't study for exams or do mini capstone projects for an interview that may or may not work out. I would do these things for a degree or licensing exam, but not for a job interviews. It's just too much of a time sink.
I accept that this may cost me good opportunities (in fact, it has), though of course I don't know if the interview would have gone anywhere, other than costing me another long prep session with "cracking the coding interview".
I'll finish the way I usually do, by 1) acknowledging that you are free to interview how you like, and that nobody owes me a job, and 2) mentioning that many companies complain incessantly about hiring difficulties without realizing that their own interview processes may be filtering out talented people and that nobody owes them an employee either.
> My question is: what happens after people pass fizz buzz?
We tune up a little bit the difficulty. The point is to start a conversation and see what the candidate knows about, ¿does he knows about time complexity?¿differences between passing by reference/value?. Afterwards we talk about the technology that they use, what they like, and what they will like to use in the future. Just to see if they read about their field and are able to talk without saying something egregious.
And if they do fine we bit the bullet and hire them.
> nobody owes them an employee either
Now that I am "in the other side", I can see a lot of things that will definitively would improve the problem at micro/team level, like posting salary or increasing the WFH days. But ¿would they improve at macro/company level? The things is, companies, including tech companies, from small startups to big corps, usually have much more problems than the quality or quantity of their software.
(signed, someone that has been rejected, and will be rejected, to more interviews that he has passed)
My question is: what happens after people pass fizz buzz? Failing fizz buzz is how you filter people out, but it's unlikely that coding up fizz buzz passes the technical screen. What kind of questions do you use to establish this, once you're past fizz buzz?
I've failed far more tech screenings than I've passed. I could easily do fizz buzz, and when I've prepped for an interview, I could some tree and set permutation stuff. But the questions get so much more difficult than this. Since difficulty varies, an example of a difficult question for me is "find all matching subtrees in a binary tree" (at the whiteboard, in 45 minutes). When I got feedback about the no-hire, the explanation was that I had a good grasp of algorithms and made some progress, I didn't solve enough of the problem in code (tight pseudocode would have been ok) in time allotted (again, this was ~45 min at the whiteboard, one in a series of 5 one-hour technical exam style interviews during a day of interviewing).
I can't claim to be a great coder. I have understood how to code merge sort and quick sort and more complicated tree structures, and I could do them again if I studied and loaded it all back into short term working memory, but I'm content to know how the algorithms work generally and get back into the details when I need... but when anyone mentioned "Fizz buzz", I do insist on stating that my impression, based on quite a few interviews, is that fizz buzz isn't what is screening out software engineers. Lots and lots of people who can write fizz buzz (and build and print a binary tree pre order and post order, and do dfs and bfs, and solve problems with them) are still frequently screened out.
I'm at the point where I just won't do tech interviews anymore (or take home tests). I won't study for exams or do mini capstone projects for an interview that may or may not work out. I would do these things for a degree or licensing exam, but not for a job interviews. It's just too much of a time sink.
I accept that this may cost me good opportunities (in fact, it has), though of course I don't know if the interview would have gone anywhere, other than costing me another long prep session with "cracking the coding interview".
I'll finish the way I usually do, by 1) acknowledging that you are free to interview how you like, and that nobody owes me a job, and 2) mentioning that many companies complain incessantly about hiring difficulties without realizing that their own interview processes may be filtering out talented people and that nobody owes them an employee either.