[arethuza]

I once froze in an interview when asked a simple technical question - I'd been giving a presentation for an hour on how to launch a new product and I was asked by the CEO how to do something technically trivial - my brain could not do it. So he probably thought I was some marketeer pretending to be technical - which isn't really true.

I suspect quite a lot of people who are labelled as "can't code" are freezing like I did.

[sjaak]

When I ask people to code FizzBuzz I:

  - give them ~30 minutes on their own machine
  - they get to pick the language they code in
  - I leave the room for large parts of it
  - I bring them a drink
  - I tell them I want to see what they can do and that I don't care if they complete it
  - permit them to search on the internet (as long as they don't copy/paste a solution)

I see this usually:

  - they finish in a few minutes
  - they just can't do it, even with hints

[arethuza]

Yes that sounds pretty sensible.

Do you ever have a conversation with these people as to why they think they couldn't do it?

[johnnyanmac]

> permit them to search on the internet

really? they get 30 minutes + internet and they couldn't google "javascript how to get divisible by 3"? That's just bad research at that point.

[ownagefool]

I suspect some do, and some will be a lot when you bunch them all together.

However, counter point, I've had people forced on me through much of my career who just can't code for the most part, and despite being pretty reasonable about it ( it's part of the nature of the work I do ), I'm very rarely surprised by competency.