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by lolatu54
4057 days ago
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We give fizzbuzz style tests to all our candidates. Most fail, but it's not an indicator of experience at all. Some of the quickest to pass just got out of GA and never worked in the industry before. It really tests aptitude at a specific type of problem. Because of this it does not make or break the interview. We also look at their portfolio/code samples as well. After interviewing many candidates I've found the one's who pass our fizzbuzz tests also have much better code. Because of this I'm convinced that aptitude and passion are significantly important to the ability to program. Just grinding your way through CS classes will not a programmer make. I should add we let the candidates use google, so even if they don't know modulus or whatever, they still can prove their ability to look up things. |
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You mean that you continue the interview process for a coding position with someone who failed FizzBuzz algorithmically/structurally (not for a trivial syntax error)?
At a prior game company we gave what I felt was a FizzBuzz-level task on paper: in C, given a string of characters representing a hex number, return the long it represents. (basically, write strtol(input, NULL, 16); without using strtol)
I was appalled at the number of people who couldn't come close (not subtle bugs or mis-handling case issues, but rather: show someone else their code and have that person guess what function the person was trying to write).
When the Fizzbuzz blog post(s) came out, representing a much simpler problem, I couldn't believe that someone would bother to shower and leave the house to interview for a programming position and be unable to do Fizzbuzz. So I gave Fizzbuzz to a few candidates, often in a joking sort of way (so as to not offend any qualified candidates). Results were predictably shocking and dismaying. It's a problem simple enough that you either can do it or not; there's precious little middle ground. (As other posters mention, these are the people that interview over and over, so hopefully the actual employed population of programmers is overwhelmingly able to do it.)