I can glue jQuery together, I don't need to know FizzBuzz!
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And the preferred qualifications
Experienced with Object Oriented JavaScript and modern JavaScript libraries such as Ember, Backbone, or Angular.
I admit this one is about programming, but it's in "preferred", not "required".
"Preferred" as in
- "we don't mind too much if you don't have any experience, but you'll be expected to learn & use some while here"
not
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"here's some optional/random things irrelevant to the job, have you used them anyway"
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You don't even need to know javascript to do FizzBuzz! some simple CSS will do!
I also recently interviewed someone who pulled in jQuery to do FizzBuzz. It was for a PHP position, but we let him use any language he chose. I asked him why he pulled in jQuery, since he said he was a node-aficionado, his response was "Well, I don't know!"
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Preferred
And maybe they were fine with her level of javascript, but they found someone else who was a better fit. We'll never know. There are tons of potential reasons why someone doesn't get a particular job.
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My bet is she would be hired if she answered "my whole experience with JS is c&p'ing from SO; I can't solve this" instead of "what kind of question is that!? Fuck you and your company".
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that's way too complicated for my little testing brain
One of the trainers here is like that. "I won't help out with 'technical' problems like 'what does this error mean and how can I fix the problem it represents' because the solution might not be something I can just read off my notes and fix."
Specific example: she refused to learn how to solve file permissions issues (as in, user can't write a report to a particular directory) because it MIGHT be something unusual like "user doesn't have delete permissions on the directory and thus can't overwrite the file, because a different user already ran that report yesterday" instead of "user just doesn't have write perms on the directory." So since I might have to get involved on such a problem, she won't work with a customer on anything like that because it would involve having two people tied up on the same problem.
Of course I recently found out that she spends a couple of days prepping for each product demo she does. And she's been here ten years.
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It seems so fucking simple. Want to remain non-technical? Don't apply for jobs asking for javascript. What's that, they pay less money? THEN FUCKING LEARN SOMETHING NEW. jesus fucking christ.
Help, I'm being triggered! I need a safe space!
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I really hope that this moron "physics/math grad" crashes and burns.
Even if you don't know about the existance of the modulo operator a simple Javascript
Math.floor(x/3)!=x/3should do the trick. And if that is "abstract algebra", how the hell does he think he'll cope with Quantum Physics or Statistical Mechanics? I still have nightmares about the bra-ket-notation...
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The one that first occurred to me, in case you don't know any
Mathstuff:(String(x / 3)).indexOf('.') < 0You can also just count it out
count3 = 3; for (var i = 1; i < 100; i++) { count3--; if (count3 === 0) { console.log('Fizz'); count3 = 3; } //.... }
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```
(String(x / 3)).indexOf('.') < 0Now that one is genius. It's also grounds to be stood against the wall and shot.
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I admit this one is about programming, but it's in "preferred", not "required".
If a skill is preferred but not required, it means they expect you to learn it on the job. At least, that's always how I've read something like that.
That means they want someone who can do a modicum of programming. Yes, that probably should have been more prominent.
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Now that one is genius. It's also grounds to be stood against the wall and shot.
I dunno, that might be the basis for the best front-page story in months.
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Learn enough Python to script a simple test case?
To be fair, you've complained quite a bit about programmers not implemented unit tests, and expecting you to do it. :P
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It's as if I grabbed a stack of books, started picking sentences, changed the character names to Alice and Bob and called the result a novel.
Call them Anastasia and Christian and you've got yourself a career as a bestselling novelist.
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The time of an html/css oriented "frontend developer" is ending.
As long as you can still make money doing it (and you will be able to for a long long time), people will do it, with the minimal level of understand required.
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This is the same argument. This time, the claim is you don't need to understand maths.
FizzBuzz isn't about math. It's simple logic. Replace "multiples of 3 and 5" with "conditions a and b". Then it becomes "given a list of elements, for elements that meet condition a, call function A. For elements that meet condition b, call function B. For elements that meet both, call A followed by B. For all other elements, call function C." There's no math involved*.
* For the purposes of this post, I'm ignoring that "all programming is math" and such nonsense.
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* For the purposes of this post, I'm ignoring that "all programming is math" and such nonsense.
Ah, so you're being a pedantic dickweed while defending yourself against pedantic dickweedery with disclaimers?
7/10, needs work.
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As long as you can still make money doing it (and you will be able to for a long long time), people will do it, with the minimal level of understand required.
That was actually a bit too extreme statement. People will still need "landing pages" and similar "web presentation" stuff. But actual web apps will increasingly need to be programmed on the frontend as well as backend. Actually programmed, not enriched with jQuery snippets taken off Stack Overflow.
I am sad for the frontend guys we have here. They aren't really following the trends. There used to be a lot of value in having an "html/css specialist". The kind of guys who knew all the quirks of the old browsers. Who could optimize the page to look pixel-perfect on IE5 / IE6, using obscure tricks and hacks you never even heard of. But that kind of skill is really falling out of fashion.
You don't need much special knowledge to make the modern browsers behave. And pixel perfect is slowly giving way to responsive, which is actually not that hard to pick up. If you are sitting in between the development, design and UX worlds, your area of expertise is becoming increasingly narrow. At the same time, the market is filling up with noobs, their 3 week old Code Academy badges still fresh off the presses, looking for the lowest bar to entry into the IT and deciding Frontend Development fits the bill.
Pretty soon, your job will be relegated to quietly designing corporate emails in some dusty corner, waiting for retirement.
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At the same time, the market is filling up with noobs, their 3 week old Code Academy badges still fresh off the presses, looking for the lowest bar to entry into the IT and deciding Frontend Development fits the bill.
This is true with most things in life. Stuff changes, and you can keep changing with it, retaining / increasing your value to others or writing whiny blogs.
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I think my point was that, as long as that skillset is useful, it is nothing more than pride and arrogance to suggest that the skillset useless because they don't know X.
How do I say this?
The market has grown accustom to supporting people that design pages but do not know how to code. That's not the applicant's fault. The market supported it, and you get what you pay for. You can't really fault these people for applying to a frontend design position, and then the company hiring says "you don't know how to code?"
If you're hiring someone for a grill position for a steak restaurant, can you fault them for not knowing how to saute or cook spaghetti? Those skills are certainly useful. And you may ask how they got their skill without having a general knowledge of cooking. But it simply isn't related to the job they've been led to believe they are applying for.
Remember, we come from a background where they thought we'd be just gluing .dll together by now. That software would be just combining features.
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It is impossible to know if they rejected her because she was so bad at programming, or because they found another guy that was overall better candidate (not necessarily in programming) - and without it, you can't judge the recruiters. Using a car analogy - yes, the last person who drove the car last night, and it doesn't start now, but it doesn't mean I did something bad to it.
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Not really judging the recruiters.
Just saying that, while the criticism is valid, her position is valid too.
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yes, the last person who drove the car last night, and it doesn't start now, but it doesn't mean I did something bad to it.
Did you accidentally the?
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Obviously he accidentally the car. He was the last person to drive it, after all.
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Well even if they were considering hiring her, hopefully she's not going to be allowed anywhere near a website after yhis blog post.
For 15 years, at least. Then finally maybe she will have enough experience to tackle the dreaded FizzBuzz.
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There used to be a lot of value in having an "html/css specialist". The kind of guys who knew all the quirks of the old browsers. Who could optimize the page to look pixel-perfect on IE5 / IE6, using obscure tricks and hacks you never even heard of. But that kind of skill is really falling out of fashion.
Also, this is getting pushed to the wayside now by things like Bootstrap. Now, the guys you are talking about are better at that shit than me for sure, but I did spend hours aligning shit so it works in IE6 for hours on end before. I know some tricks and gotchas (although many of them are now a thing of the past, as you said).
These days, it doesn't even cross my mind to try and do that shit. I just pull Bootstrap, hell, I only take the grid system if that's all I need, and I let it screw around with all the padding voodoo. Why would I spend hours messing with how something is aligned when I have a tool that will do that for me? Sure, I tweak stuff here and there, but that's nowhere near the level of doing it all by hand like I used to.
Pure HTML/CSS wizardry is now a small niche. There's just no reason to waste hours on it, regardless of your skill level. This, unfortunately, means that HTML/CSS specialists are now nearly obsolete because nowdays a good CSS framework, knowing enough about the standard and a bit of googling will get you where you need to be without specializing in it.
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It's as if I grabbed a stack of books, started picking sentences, changed the character names to Alice and Bob and called the result a novel.
Sounds more like an art project to me.
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The market has grown accustom to supporting people that design pages but do not know how to code. That's not the applicant's fault. The market supported it, and you get what you pay for. You can't really fault these people for applying to a frontend design position, and then the company hiring says "you don't know how to code?"
I can fault her for how she reacted. She could have realized she's behind the curve in terms of programming and taken a few afternoons to brush up. Or she could have decided modern frontend development is becoming too programming heavy, and retreated more towards ux / design side of things.
Instead she's whining on her blog about how unfair the test was.
Also, this is getting pushed to the wayside now by things like Bootstrap. Now, the guys you are talking about are better at that shit than me for sure, but I did spend hours aligning shit so it works in IE6 for hours on end before. I know some tricks and gotchas (although many of them are now a thing of the past, as you said).
These days, it doesn't even cross my mind to try and do that shit. I just pull Bootstrap, hell, I only take the grid system if that's all I need, and I let it screw around with all the padding voodoo. Why would I spend hours messing with how something is aligned when I have a tool that will do that for me? Sure, I tweak stuff here and there, but that's nowhere near the level of doing it all by hand like I used to.
Pure HTML/CSS wizardry is now a small niche. There's just no reason to waste hours on it, regardless of your skill level. This, unfortunately, means that HTML/CSS specialists are now nearly obsolete because nowdays a good CSS framework, knowing enough about the standard and a bit of googling will get you where you need to be without specializing in it.
Yup. If you're a frontend dev and your only edge is the speed with which you can churn through PSD-s, you better hope you're faster than a bunch of noob interns, willing to work for free lunch as they build up those magical 2 years of work experience in IT.
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I can fault her for how she reacted.
Yeah, it sounds about the same as the number of interviewing companies lamenting the fact that their interviews come out so bad, when all they put was frontend design on their advert.
I'm waiting for the time where people begin to realize that relationships are two-sided and both sides share responsibility...
but in the age of no accountability, I guess I'm asking for too much.willing to work for free lunch as they build up those magical 2 years of work experience in IT.
Man, the cake is a lie isn't it. They just keep rotating the free intern crop.
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This guy tries to use his street cred to make her sound less terrible. His claim to fame is, basically, knowing jQuery and CSS. Big fucking deal, guy. Curious to know what she would be able to teach anyone if she can't even nail an interview for a front end developer position.
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This guy tries to use his street cred to make her sound less terrible.
Fully admit to deleting a bunch of comments here. That’s what I do.
Huzzah! Community!
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Ah, so you're being a pedantic dickweed while defending yourself against pedantic dickweedery with disclaimers?
7/10, needs work.
I wouldn't rank it that high. Simply using the word "nonsense" where it's not true isn't very dickweedy at all.
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That was quick.
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Maybe someone should email this topic to him...
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she's a fisher - not a coder.
Look at her website.
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I wanted to point out that her image of fizz buzz dying in a fire [img]https://css-tricks.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/fizz-buzz-dying-in-a-fire.jpg[/img]
was wrong. It doesn't fizz for multiples of 3, just buzzes. It only fizzed in multiples of 15, when doing "fizzbuzz". But the comments were already closed :(
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Professional designer and developer, going on 10 years. Learned FizzBuzz two weeks ago.
Those two facts are entirely unrelated.
Besides, you don't learn FizzBuzz, you solve FizzBuzz. And, as a problem, it's one step up from 'Hello World!'.
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her image of fizz buzz dying in a fire
fizz-buzz-dying-in-a-fire.jpg1000x930
was wrong.First, OMG Discourse, what have you done?
Second: yeah, so she would've failed the interview even if she could have programmed it.
Also, that's really shitty fire. She should've stolen something off a GIS.
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In HTML, "hello world" is literally just typing "hello world".
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In HTML, "hello world" is literally just typing "hello world".
Yes, but we're talking about JS. You can't fizzbuzz in HTML.
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I like the thing they use at my company for testing potential new employees:
Various spins on enumerating files in a folder structure and displaying stuff about them in a window.
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Besides, you don't learn FizzBuzz, you solve FizzBuzz. And, as a problem, it's one step up from 'Hello World!'.
Conditionals inside a loop? Oh no! Where will it all end?
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Learned FizzBuzz
I know how to glue tables together
That's the attitude of this level of competency.
Learning and reproducing.
No understanding required.
Which is fine if you're just building quick marketing websites.
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You can't fizzbuzz in HTML.
1 2 fizz 4 buzz fizz 7 8 fizz buzz 11 fizz 13 14 fizzbuzz
That's the first iteration in HTML
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Yeah, it sounds about the same as the number of interviewing companies lamenting the fact that their interviews come out so bad, when all they put was frontend design on their advert.
Well, that and this little bit:
Preferred qualifications Experienced with Object Oriented JavaScript and modern JavaScript libraries such as Ember, Backbone, or Angular.Which is what she replied to, despite having only once shared an elevator with someone carrying a copy of some Angular.js code. She didn't think it was too important and walked into the interview prepared to showcase her HTML, CSS and Photoshop portfolio, and was surprised when she had some fairly basic programming questions thrown at her instead. I wasn't there so I don't know how well she handled that, but her response to the first question was to attack it as being irrelevant and for the second one, which she described as a simple time and date manipulation, she begged off of it and then spent several hours searching before sending the interviewer some code she found on Stack Overflow.
Even if her programming experience wasn't being evaluated, it looks like her "adapts to new situations" and "will fit in well with the team" skills were.
It happens. Hopefully everybody learned something more than "FizzBuzz should die in a fire", and can move on to better things next time.
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1 2 fizz 4 buzz fizz 7 8 fizz buzz 11 12 13 14 fizzbuzz
That's the first iteration in HTML
Spotted an error
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"FizzBuzz should die in a fire"
Fine with me. I already have a replacement ready:
BizzFuzz - Output Bizz for every number that's evenly divisible by 4 and Fuzz for every number that's evenly divisible by 7.
Tales of a Non-Unicorn: A Story About The Trouble with Job Titles and Descriptions | CSS-Tricks
![https://css-tricks.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/fizz-buzz-dying-in-a-fire.jpg[/img]](https://css-tricks.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/fizz-buzz-dying-in-a-fire.jpg%5B/img%5D){kind=link}