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Comment by weego | Hacker News Reader

If so many well paid people at big companies can't do it, maybe that's an indicator that it's absolutely not a good screen at all, that there are far better screens that can be used to weigh developer worth, and you're just so far down the rabbit hole that you can't see what's clearly obvious: once you get past the arbitrary tech hoops most developers only need about 30% of their entire skillset to be programming skill to be of great value to a business.

No one screens for understanding complex business domains, breaking risky big scope tasks down into iterative low risk steps, leading meetings / conversations where you have to rethink complex tech requirements into non-technical speak.

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> No one screens for understanding complex business domains, breaking risky big scope tasks down into iterative low risk steps, leading meetings / conversations where you have to rethink complex tech requirements into non-technical speak.

Some of these are or can be included in the system design interview.

For the rest, is there an objective way to ask the same question of each candidate that won't eventually be gamed with pre-canned answers on leetcode?

Agreed, but you can still find fairly simple questions related to the domain they should know to weed out a lot of people. For applications that will use a lot of SQL back end, I will ask the person to describe what a Left Outer Join does (what will it produce). That question lets me know if you have done any SQL beyond a basic query or basic inner join.

Not knowing about a rarely used operator isn't that big of a deal, but the "hard" part of fizzBuzz is trivial in the couple of languages I am proficient in.

In JS:

const isEvenlyDivisible = (num, denominator) => Math.floor(num / denominator) === (num / denominator)

If so many well paid people at big companies can't do it, maybe that's an indicator that it's absolutely not a good screen at al

The history of FizzBuzz was that it was a screening question for webdevs to work on a bugtracking tool. Maybe it is relevant for that, I don’t know. But like most of the rest of its inventor’s advice, it is not as generally applicable as he claims.

I agree, but the test is also dreadfully easy. Literally it's hard to see why anyone would fail.

The more interesting question is why did they fail? Why is this a bad barometer or what is making this a bad barometer despite it being so easy?

If you took a career software engineer that would otherwise fail a fizzbuzz interview and put him alone in a room with a computer for an unlimited amount of available time and made it known that he's just solving a fizzbuzz question for fun and not being judged for a future career... I'm willing to bet that he will could walk out of that room in reasonable time with a working fizzbuzz.

If you did this for 100 individuals with the exact same credentials as the person above I'm pretty sure you could get 99 people who walk out of that room with a working fizz buzz in reasonable time.

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