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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Just to be clear I have no problem passing these interviews, I just spent a few weeks cramming leetcode and got a job at Google. Leetcode wasn’t the main reason I was hired, but it was a filter that I had to get through (I’ve never been given fizzbuzz before, but I assume that is just because it’s no longer in style and hasn’t been for more than a decade). You just don’t throw yourself into on the fly coding, you practice them because your competition has and you will look bad if you don’t. Let’s not pretend that any of us are ready to do alien dictionary at the spur of a moment, or thats a useful skill for our role.

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I'd agree with you 100% if these were Leetcode mediums and hards. They were not, these were quite literally the easiest LC easies I could find.

While my career involves writing code, I am not a SWE, I have never done any formal leetcode prep, and I have no formal education in technology beyond a high school CS class. I have no college degree whatsoever, not even an associate's degree.

I had a rule I stuck to when doing these interviews (which were for a SWE role) that felt very fair to me - I would not give these candidates any problem I couldn't solve in the same circumstances.

For reference, in the allotted time, one such candidate spent a good chunk of their time reading up on JS if/then syntax on w3schools. As I watched, I reminded them they could use any language they wanted, if they were more comfortable or familiar with others, and this Harvard CS grad declined, stating JS was their "strongest" language.

My best guess about these cases were rich kids / legacy admissions that weren't allowed to be failed for political reasons.

I don’t know much about Harvard except like Stanford computer science became the biggest major by far in the last couple of decades. It could be a lot of rich kids are choosing it’s a major without much of a passion for it. It could have also become the default major for people who are planning to got into politics, business, management, or even law (Harvard’s traditional strengths).

Don’t get me wrong, we don’t have much of a choice in evaluating especially junior hires. Even for senior hires you want to make sure they haven’t drifted through their last jobs without actually coding. But on the spot performances are different even for the simple stuff, they should practice coding questions on the fly regardless, and even the worst possible SWE candidate should be able to pass these with a bit of prep. With a lot of prep they could do leetcode, a still suck at the job when they get it.

This is FizzBuzz:

1. Output the numbers from 1 to 100

2. If the number is a multiple of 3, write Fizz instead of the number

3. If the number is a multiple of 5, write Buzz instead of the number

4. If the number is a multiple of 3 and 5, write FizzBuzz instead of the number

Does that really sound like something requiring special practice and preparation? Assuming a decent interviewer would help out with the modulo operator if that was unfamiliar

Is it provided as you described or is it more like “please do FizzBuzz”? If it’s the latter, that would explain why some people may have trouble with this task… I think we both agree it’s ridiculous to test if the interviewee knows what FizzBuzz stands for, and yet… let’s just say i know a few people who treat interviews as a jargon recall context.

I don’t know what kind of psychopath would provide a problem with the expectation that you already know the problem by heart

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