I can glue jQuery together, I don't need to know FizzBuzz!
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That's the first iteration in HTML
Sure, if you want to completely avoid the spirit of what I said.
Quick, I changed my mind. Instead of "multples of 3 -> 'Fizz'", change it to "multiples of 4 -> 'xyzzy'". It's trivial as a program in any language, but in HTML, you have to manually change all those things.
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Maybe someone should email this topic to him...
I tried sending him an email invite to the topic. Let's see what happens...
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but in HTML, you have to manually change all those things.
Or use a global find and replace, and do it all at once. Have you never HTML'd?<Yeah, I know, the multiples don't work :P/>
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Maybe this could be an opportunity to introduce that one badge I proposed ...
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Eh...which one?
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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.
Exactly. Like I said above, I always read "preferred qualifications" as "shit we expect you to learn on the job if you don't already know it". That means the expect her to learn JS if she doesn't already know it. It's actually OK if she didn't already realize that about job listings: it's good to learn that shit young! IIRC she said she'd only been working for like 3 years at that point.
I'm going to make a rambling analogy right after I tie an onion on my belt. About 11 years ago I discovered I had what I was pretty sure was an inguinal hernia. So I found a doctor and went to see him, he recommended I have the surgery to correct it right away, and I did so. A few days later, when I no longer felt miserable enough just sitting up that I felt able to take a shower (if you've never had abdominal-area surgery, all those muscles are used in shit like sitting up. It feels literally like being stabbed at the incision site when you sit, until you learn how to lever your body up solely with your arms.) I discovered I had a completely numb spot below the surgery about the size of the palm of my hand. I was all "what the fuck?" and so I started googling it, and when I went to see my doctor a week or so later for a followup, I asked him about it, and he started smirking and said (more or less) "oh, yeah, we don't tell you about that beforehand because people might skip the surgery otherwise." In one way that's reasonable because while you can go ten years or more, sooner or later you're probably going to cause serious problems for yourself. When you ask about it, you'll find out you may never actually regain sensation everywhere (I still have a patch about the size of a quarter where I have no sensation) or you might have pain or the other weird thing I have: improper sensation; sort of a synaesthesia where you can sense pressure but it doesn't feel quite "right". The doc said that some other doctors just kill the nerve completely on the off chance you might have problems.
Now to the point. When I said I googled it, one of the first things I read was about some girl about 25 years old who had the same surgery, and discovered the numbness the same way I did, only she said she almost blacked out, and I was immediately struck by the thought "what a hothouse flower this poor girl is."
That's what this Lisa chick reminds me of, a hothouse flower who is in for a rude shock when she enters the real, adult world.
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BizzFuzz - Output Bizz for every number that's evenly divisible by 4 and Fuzz for every number that's evenly divisible by 7.
Damnit. As I haven't taken abstract algebra recently am I totally at a loss for how to solve that.
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Even if her programming experience wasn't being evaluated
I think you can safely bet it was, in face, being evaluated, and was found to be wanting.
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Markup isn't code, you goofball, no matter how much design weenies want to pretend it is.
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Like I said above, I always read "preferred qualifications" as "shit we expect you to learn on the job if you don't already know it". That means the expect her to learn JS if she doesn't already know it.
Yep. But if you find someone who already knows...BONUS! Guess who's getting hired, ceteris paribus.
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Or use a global find and replace, and do it all at once. Have you never HTML'd?
Quick, tell me how you'll global find and replace all the fizzes in a list of numbers from 1 to 100 with the proper number. I'm not going to hold my breath.
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I've read through the post twice now, and I stand by my opinion.
She's right... for the most part.
If technical coding expertise was required, it should have been more pronounced.
I would love to see what they have the applicant doing, because if it fits within her skillset, then we've taken a step backwards to "every company needs a programmer" that got us the programmer-job-market bust of the 200Xs.
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Yep. But if you find someone who already knows...BONUS! Guess who's getting hired, ceteris paribus.
Oh, absolutely! But it wasn't relevant to the point I was trying to make.
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She's right... for the most part.
If technical coding expertise was required, it should have been more pronounced.
I won't disagree she's somewhat right, but I wouldn't go so far as to say "for the most part" for reasons I've enumerated.
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But it wasn't relevant to the point I was trying to make.
I know. But it was my point. There are many like it...
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I understand the frustration of employers, but the qualification that had anything to do with programming was absolute bottom on the list.
It was so far down it was put in preferred and not required.
I would expect at this interview:
"Do you have any algorithmic programming experience?"
"No."
"Ok, next question."And the programming problem never comes up.
If the company can't be bothered to prioritize their requirements, then they deserve this kind of reaction.
Why does the company hold no accountability for their sucky advert?
If I look at a qualifications list and I match more than half of them, I'm applying.
She held almost all the qualifications, in the most important order.
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It was so far down it was put in preferred and not required.
Javascript was in the actual required ones.
But it's a minor thing overall. As plenty of people have said, if that's all your skillset is, you'd better not expect a career out of it.
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you'd better not expect a career out of it.
She DIDN'T.
I've been feeling like, wait, how can I be telling people how to work on teams if I've never really worked on one?
And besides, her list of recommendations are perfectly reasonable.
Audit your process and identify the gaps. Either hire a consultant or do it internally, but please look at the big picture, talk to a range of employees (junior and senior), and figure out where the pain points are. Don't just interpret the opinions of dev/design leads and managers and lump their needs together.List tangible, example tasks that are relevant to the position. Particularly if JavaScript is listed in the role (can you tell I'm a little sore about this?). Something like:
Implement image sliders and smooth scrollingMigrating our CSS pipeline to SassMake quick design decisions about interactive elements, such as button hover states and form styles.Create a registration form using AngularJS.Use regular expressions to detect any date within text content.Recommend improvements to our Rails deployment workflow.
Hell, put code examples in the description. Why not? Seriously. If I saw that I would be expected to sanitize data with pure JavaScript, I wouldn't have bothered.I wish more companies would follow her recommendations.
And she's admitting that it's not the expectation to be able to code that's a problem. It's the weak indicator of that expectation.
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I would expect at this interview:
"Do you have any algorithmic programming experience?"
"No."
"Ok, next question."And the programming problem never comes up.
I think it went about this way, except the interviewer omitted the word "algorithmic", and the interviewee answered "yes".
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Then came the coding portion. I was anticipating questions about nitty-gritty positioning, semantics, maybe some UI based JS stuff, and development workflow. The first question was:
Translation:
I was expecting some problems about DOM parsing. Because I'm a FRONTEND designer.
Not a business logic programmer.
My conclusion:
There's a girl who complains about a job requiring back-end programming logic thinking for a job that's 90% design.And a bunch of programmers who under-appreciate design work, are assuming that since design isn't a real job, everyone should be expected to know how to code.
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Except the question wasn't about business logic, it was FUCKING FIZZBUZZ FOR GOD'S SAKE!!!!!
Asking a programmer to do FizzBuzz is like asking a business analyst what is the current EUR/USD exchange rate, rounded to nearest integer.
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Except the question wasn't about business logic, it was FUCKING FIZZBUZZ FOR GOD'S SAKE!!!!!
She didn't know there was a modulus operator.
Look, you're taking this from experience in programming logic that vastly outranks her.
And I don't think she's trying to compare with that.
You just don't value design work, and you don't see it as a separate discipline.
I do.
I don't know how many times I've sighed, when the strongest logic programmer I know, thought that implicit updating of fields was a good idea for a GUI interface.
I can give you plenty examples of programmers that can't design.
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I can give you plenty examples of programmers that can't design.
And if they went for a design role and moaned about having to design, we'd slam them too
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That's been my point all along.
She thought this was a design role. The overwhelming qualifications was for design tasks, a rather comprehensive list.
She assumed the mention of JS was only for tasks related to design.
All reasonable assumptions.
She didn't apply for .NET developer.
I think this whole debate is a bit one-sided and unfair.
And all the recommendations she's given to help clear up the confusion she experienced, are all reasonable too.
You're acting like she's bemoaning not getting the job, and they should have hired her despite her lack of understanding logic coding. But that's not the point of the article.
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a hothouse flower who is in for a rude shock when she enters the real, adult world.
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@blakeyrat said:
In HTML, "hello world" is literally just typing "hello world".
Yes, but we're talking about JS. You can't fizzbuzz in HTML.
But you can in CSS
:nth-childshould do it.She assumed the mention of JS was only for tasks related to design.
And? Tasks related to design using Javascript don't require an understanding of algorithms?
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You're acting like she's bemoaning not getting the job, and they should have hired her despite her lack of understanding logic coding.
No I'm not; I'm bemoaning the fact she didn't read the job description properly, then typed up a massive online rant about it.
@xaade said:She assumed the mention of JS was only for tasks related to design.
And? Doesn't make the JS work any less development.
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:nth-child should do it.
That was actually mentioned in a comment in the article.
Tasks related to design using Javascript don't require an understanding of algorithms?
Fair enough, if she either thought of the modulus operator, or if they allowed her to use a javascript dom environment.
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Doesn't make the JS work any less development.
Which may not ever require you to solve problems like FizzBuzz.
I can't think of one time in the four months I did website design frontend that I ever had to think like a programmer. Period.
You don't think in loops because you have panels and flow layouts that do that for you.
We had marketers that worked on CSS, and they never touched code.
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But you can in CSS
My knowledge of CSS is out of date. I just learned about :nth-child yesterday or today.
So we can avoid silly excursions into things that clearly aren't programming, can you write a recursive fibonacci function in just HTML/CSS?
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DOM works well with recursion.
I'm sure there's some way you can build a document heirarchically, then use DOM parsing to output a result.
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@Rhywden said:
But you can in CSS
My knowledge of CSS is out of date. I just learned about :nth-child yesterday or today.
So we can avoid silly excursions into things that clearly aren't programming, can you write a recursive fibonacci function in just HTML/CSS?
I'm pretty sure that such an abomination will exist somewhere.
Called it: http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menu/spiral.html
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Which may not ever require you to solve problems like FizzBuzz.
I can't think of one time in the four months I did website design frontend that I ever had to think like a programmer. Period.
So you never did any form field validation that used even trivial math?
Picture this: you have a form for PTO requests. It will have an arbitrary number of "hours requested" boxes. How will you ensure that the employee cannot request more hours in a day than he actually works?
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I'm sure there's some way you can build a document heirarchically, then use DOM parsing to output a result.
I would be fascinated to see that done without using any scripting.
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@xaade said:
Which may not ever require you to solve problems like FizzBuzz.
I can't think of one time in the four months I did website design frontend that I ever had to think like a programmer. Period.
So you never did any form field validation that used even trivial math?
Picture this: you have a form for PTO requests. It will have an arbitrary number of "hours requested" boxes. How will you ensure that the employee cannot request more hours in a day than he actually works?
Silly: Validation will be offloaded to the backend, of course!
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You don't think in loops because you have panels and flow layouts that do that for you.
Console.WriteLine(String.Join(";", Enumerable.Range(1, 100).Select(x => x % 15 == 0 ? "FizzBuzz" : x % 3 == 0 ? "Fizz" : x % 5 == 0 ? "Buzz" : x.ToString())));How many loops?
ZERO?!?!?!?!??!!
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@FrostCat said:
@xaade said:
Which may not ever require you to solve problems like FizzBuzz.
I can't think of one time in the four months I did website design frontend that I ever had to think like a programmer. Period.
So you never did any form field validation that used even trivial math?
Picture this: you have a form for PTO requests. It will have an arbitrary number of "hours requested" boxes. How will you ensure that the employee cannot request more hours in a day than he actually works?
Silly: Validation will be offloaded to the backend, of course!
You can load JS from a different source.
Backend, doesn't necessarily mean server side.
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Lots of implicit loops in there.
Just ask Boomzilla.
But this is more like what I'd expect from someone who primarily works with CSS, if they knew LINQ.
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I'm pretty sure that such an abomination will exist somewhere.
Called it: http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menu/spiral.html
My bad. I'd like to see someone calculate and display the nth value of the Fibonacci sequence without scripting.
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Silly: Validation will be offloaded to the backend, of course!
That's ridiculous and you know it.
I mean, I suppose there's still sites out there that do that but the people who didn't update them should be ashamed.
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Backend, doesn't necessarily mean server side.
Well, sure. But would those other meanings make any sense in this context?
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@Rhywden said:
Silly: Validation will be offloaded to the backend, of course!
That's ridiculous and you know it.
I mean, I suppose there's still sites out there that do that but the people who didn't update them should be ashamed.
Next time I'll include a
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You can load JS from a different source.
Someone still has to write that, though. ISTM expecting to require two different front-end people for that job is its own
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But they don't have to be embedded in the design.
Look, separation of concerns is nothing new.
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Maybe, but you'll have to expect a lot more out of programmers in the design department.
From what I've seen, it's fucking embarrassing.
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Look, separation of concerns is nothing new.
Fat, dumb, and stupidI do the layout and Bob writes the client-side validation script is no way to go through life, son.I know I messed up the quote but I CBA to look it up.
