Hacker News Reader

Comment by johncoltrane | Hacker News Reader

I never ask that kind of question because the candidate's ability to solve silly FizzBuzz-style problems tells nothing about their fitness to the jobs I hire for.

View on HN

But isn’t it a quick way to determine their fitness to not do the job you hire for?

Knowing that they can is useless because a) their job is never going to involve solving FizzBuzz or 99 bottles of beer, and b) it is not indicative of anything useful.

Knowing that they can't is equally useless… and for the same reasons.

It is totally irrelevant.

It tests whether you can write a simple loop with a couple of ifs - not being able to do it is definitely an indicator that you won't be able to complete more advanced programming tasks. And pretty much any other programming task is more advanced.

The technical interview stage is a tiny bit too late for wondering if the candidate can write a simple loop.

Before you do a technical interview, you send them a website and ask them to write that FizzBuzz equivalent for you, or if you want to be seen to be nice, schedule a 30 minute interview with them and ask the FizzBuzz thing.

It doesn't have to be asked during the full technical interview stage.

Again, I see zero value in those silly tests so I won't force them on anyone, at any stage of the process. That would be a waste of everyone's time.

Why would you do fizzbuzz in a technical interview and not have them talk through it in the first 15 minute phone screen?

Not even one minute. Those things are worthless.

Oh sorry, didn’t realize.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com