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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Programming isn't about knowing syntax, it's about understanding abstraction. Some people can solve FizzBuzz, some people can't. If you can't abstract then you can't program, regardless of the tools. That's the problem we need to solve, not simplifying the interface.

I've seen secretaries build beautifully elegant systems with Excel Macros and I've seen CS graduates from good schools fail to build even the simplest of programs. I expect most people here have seen similar extremes. A large proportion of CS majors never learn to program. Until we figure out why, and how to change that, 'programmerless programming' is doomed.

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The place I work recently encountered someone who couldn't solve FizzBuzz, for the first time. I think a little bit of them died that day - they were looking around with a shocked expression for quite a while.

"A large proportion of CS majors never learn to program."

My first reaction was deep scepticism, but in college I did some tutoring of English and CS (no, not together).

I had one CS student who just could not grasp arrays. I tried as many different ways to convey the essential concepts as I could, but I never got through to her.

Maybe I was a bad tutor, but I'm usually pretty good at explaining things, and did well with my other students. (Note to current students: If you can, try to do some tutoring. It helps you develop communication skills, and the feeling you get when you see another student's eyes light up with understanding after you've explained something they were stumbling over is priceless.)

In this case I really felt this poor woman had just picked the wrong major. I finally asked to have someone else take over as her tutor because I clearly wasn't helping her, but maybe she should have been changing majors instead.

I hadn't heard of FizzBuzz, but tried it out a moment ago.

How is possible for someone with a rudimentary understanding of programming to be unable to solve this in a couple of minutes?

It's not.

The problem with the world of professional programming is that there are a lot of people claiming to be programmers that aren't.

The reason why people can code-monkey their PHP scripts but not solve FizzBuzz is because of an iterative process. When you are hacking some web page, you just change stuff until it works. You try again and again and again and eventually you're right.

With FizzBuzz, you have to think about a couple things before you answer. It's so simple that you have to get it right the first time; you're supposed to think, then program. But most people are not in the habit of thinking, and just skip right to the press buttons while staring at the blinky cursor stage. Then they fail the FizzBuzz interview.

Thank you, this is very insightful, this idea that some problems are amenable to just trying things and some problems require thought before starting.

The one I was referring to (and apparently others, though they 'solved' it) didn't know about modulo. Which would certainly make it harder, though it's ridiculously fundamental. They worked for about 20 minutes writing out something to do with a 101-element array and decimal arithmetic to initialize it (without using ceil / floor to compare, thus mimicking a mod function) before they admitted they were stuck.

This applicant was a graduate of some fairly high ranked university, though I don't know which one. They can come from anywhere.

That's even worse than the CS student (she had a bachelor's degree in CS, and was in the final year of her master's degree program in CS)... she actually attempted to delete an object in C++ by calling its destructor directly.

Needless to say, my company didn't try to keep her when Booz Allen Hamilton recruited her away from us.

Wow. Well, thanks for the FizzBuzz discussion. This self-taught programmer feels just a little less like a bozo. There's hope for me yet!

To be fair, for some people solving cognitive tasks under pressure is absolutely impossible.

I just wrote a FizzBuzz solving script in python in about two minutes sitting on the couch drinking wine, while the tv is running in the background. But I guarantee you that I would mess it up in an interview situation. Under extreme stress, I do not have the ability to think straight. It's almost as if my mind goes into survival mode, allowing only basic operations in order to ensure a fast reaction time.

Ha you're right about that.

I heard that our brain can only hold a certain amount of blood, and that blood carries the sugar that fuels it. So when you're scared, and blood is pumping to your amygdala, your frontal lobes have less fuel to make decisions.

Do you program for your day job? I do and I've found I'm under that sort of stress consistently, and with harder problems to solve. I guess it does affect me but I've been working on my 'not caring' skills to compensate.

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