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Comment by flor1s | Hacker News Reader

I don't think these kind of coding interviews are given to average programmers though, and if they are I'm sure they are taken with a pinch of salt (or with a lot of help from the recruiter, or using simple tasks such as FizzBuzz [1]).

In my experience, having been an average programmer (and maybe still being, I hope that by now I'm at least slightly above average) who worked in The Netherlands at a "system integrator", a web dev "sweat shop" (some projects using 10 year old tech, relatively high staff turnover) and even a startup, such companies don't ask for whiteboard coding, however take home projects are quite common.

I also interviewed at some more "hot" unicorns in Japan, which do have these kind of questions (using a dehumanizing online test in fact).

1: http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest

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FizzBuzz test is actually pretty great interview question, but most interviewers miss one crucial ingredient: time pressure. Original idea was that any competent programmer should be able to solve it in under 1 minute (only limiting factor being your own writing/typing speed). It is a good indicator of familiarity with the basic programming constructs (loops, conditionals, print statements). It's like writing down the alphabet - you should be able to do that without thinking. I have seen many developers who fail to do that.

> I have seen many developers who fail to do that.

How do they happen to be developers then? Doesn't being unable to implement a FizzBuzz quickly imply they can't code anything that is more complex, by definition?

By the way although I do understand programming (OOP, FP, SQL) and can develop a considerably complex app from scratch in an IDE like Visual Studio with ReSharper or IntelliJ Idea that would expand code snippets, offer auto-completion and highlight errors on the fly I doubt I can code anything more complex than a "hello world" using just Notepad and expect it to compile and run without errors immediately - I use to make small typos and miss some syntactical elements all the time thanks to my ADHD (but modern IDEs solve this problem). Also, a person standing behind my shoulder watching me code and counting time would decrease my performance by an order of magnitude at best. Does this count as a failure from your point of view?

I will highlight the most glaring problem I find in your take.

> FizzBuzz test is actually pretty great interview question [...] you should be able to do that without thinking

If you are going to code for me, I'm not interested in what you can do in 1 minute, I'm interested in what you can do in 1 year. I want you to spend more than 1 minute just thinking about any problem that is remotely worth solving. And that's the underlying problem: FizzBuzz is not representative of the problems I hire you to solve, and solving it fast is not representative of the approach I want you to take for solving the problems I hire you to solve.

FizzBuzz can be a reasonable point to start a conversation about approaches and style. But that's true of almost any piece of code - I used strcmp() for a number of years.

If you are not able to write FizBizz without thinking that means that you've probably written no more than a handful of for loops and if statements in your whole programming "career". That's a very bad indicator for someone who applies for a programming job.

This obviously is true (a truism) but doesn't answer any of the questions.

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