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Comment by w0rd-driven | Hacker News Reader

"A good resume with a long list of well-known companies and a degree from a top-tier engineering school doesn’t guarantee anything." I'm sorry but a year+ at those companies proves you've provided at least something of worth to them. The real crux of the argument is can they solve the kinds of problems your company faces.

I would certainly hope that the barrier to entry for every job I applied for wasn't something so standardized (and quite frankly, useless). I would eventually point to a github repo with it done already. We wax poetic about DRY yet you're gonna ask me to repeat myself? Seems pretty hypocritical to me.

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You're missing the point. What you are not realizing is how many people actually fail fizzbuzz.

If it seems so simple and useless to you because it's easy, then you are not one of the people who will ever be weeded out by a fizzbuzz style question.

Put it this way... Would you want to work with somebody who was unable to handle fizzbuzz?

I definitely would not want to work with them and yet I have. My problem isn't the failure rate, its the repeated asking of a question I should be able to prove via a public repo. The repo should be more than adequate, I would hope. If it isn't, we would have much bigger problems of trust.

You'd be surprised.

Degrees don't count for much in terms of experience. I've seen people with electrical engineering degrees (from good universities) ask which way the strips are connected on a breadboard. Many, many people go through university and get a good chunk of theory in their minds without any practice.

As for companies - if someone is leaving a well known company, you should ask why. Almost always there is a good reason for it, like moving to warmer climes, family commitments and so on. However, there should always be a fizzbuzz check to make sure the person wasn't let go because they were inept.

As an aside, a long list should also give warning signs if it's in a short period. If I'm hiring a 20-something and they've been through 5 companies I'd be wary. They may be a top notch programmer, but do I want to hire someone who will most likely jump ship in a year or two? Probably not.

> I'm sorry but a year+ at those companies proves you've provided at least something of worth to them. Not sure about that. I think there are lots of "well known companies" where a good bluffer can relabel themselves and bounce around enough that nobody realizes they haven't got anything to offer.

>We wax poetic about DRY yet you're gonna ask me to repeat myself? Some people can wax poetic pretty effectively without being effective at implementation. I've written a 1 line fizzbuzz python generator in less than 2 minutes. If one is too arrogant/uncompromising to take the two minutes to satisfy this (if asked), or unable to turn it into something interesting ("This is done with generators. I might never do it this way in practice, but the question you asked me was so mind-numbingly boring I had to do it this way to entertain myself"), then one probably won't work that well on an effective team.

I forget that in most "well known companies" they are much larger in size and people can easily hide behind others in such a place. That's where my ignorance comes in. I've been only part of smaller shops where if you aren't producing, you absolutely do not last.

Yet I easily forgot the person with a masters degree that could not pass, was hired anyway, and subsequently fired 3 days later for not improving an iota. I think my frustration is that people like this exist, forcing companies to give the same test to weed them out with no way to skip the question if you can faithfully prove you're not that person.

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