Hacker News Reader

Comment by kidintech | Hacker News Reader

Am I misunderstanding your problem, or would this be a valid solution: https://pastebin.com/GWKr4AQ8

If so, then the company you're interviewing for must not be attractive to first-class CS grads (top 10-20% I think) from any non-online university.

As a comparison, any FAANG + Palantir/Jane Street/Two Sigma in the UK have tougher questions as their FIRST phone interview for INTERNSHIPS. (Palantir requires you to go through 6-8? interviews before getting an offer)

If this is a job that requires actual software engineers, I think rejecting everyone that failed this question would be perfectly reasonable.

View on HN

Yes, that looks like a valid solution to me.

If you’re saying only the top 10-20% of CS grads can answer such questions then that would make sense. I’d guess I was getting a random selection of candidates.

> you’re saying only the top 10-20% of CS grad

I'm saying that ALL top 10-20% of CS grads will be able to answer questions at this difficulty level in an interview scenario (accounting for nerves and so on). I'm not limiting it to them (i.e. the "only" quantifier).

I know people in the bottom of CS grads (judging by GPA) that worked remote jobs or worked on personal projects during uni that are very talented and would be able to solve this in less than five minutes. But there are also people that merely "got by".

> I’d guess I was getting a random selection of candidates.

I stand by my opinion that if you were recruiting for a software eng role (and not some random front-end position), then blacklisting anyone who failed this problem would be reasonable.

+1. Anyone who is a programmer can solve that problem. If they can't solve it, they aren't a programmer, end of story.

So the weird thing is, that people who can’t solve these kinds of fizzbuzz type problems are often employed as programmers.

And, in my experience there are definitely situations where the majority of candidates can’t solve these problems.

Right! I can think of two explanations for this.

One, these non-programmers are somehow not actually doing their jobs, but getting away with it. I've worked with people like that, but only a tiny number. Maybe i've been lucky.

Two, you don't have to be a programmer to be a developer. In this day and age, our tools, frameworks, and resources (ie Stack Overflow) are developed enough that you can actually get some useful things done without having to think mechnically. Knowing some obscure boilerplate (eg Spring annotations), how to use your IDE's autocomplete, and where to go for copy-and-pastable code for various kinds of problem actually makes you a useful team member! Even if you can't write a simple loop to save your life!

Good to know, I would tend to agree. I’m interested in any contrary opinions (because I may not sufficiently account for anxiety, or other issues).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com