I can glue jQuery together, I don't need to know FizzBuzz!
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She didn't know there was a modulus operator.
You don't need a modulus operator for FizzBuzz. And even then, she could have asked for appropriate function that checks if something is divisible by given number. That would definitely let her score much higher. What she did makes her look bad at problem solving in general - something you don't want in any employee.You just don't value design work, and you don't see it as a separate discipline.
Where did I state any opinion about design work, or designers? Anyway, the job was clearly a cross between a designer and a programmer, at about 10-to-1 ratio. Basic problem solving would be great for this position.Fair enough, if she either thought of the modulus operator, or if they allowed her to use a javascript dom environment.
She could have asked. Asking questions during interviews is perfectly okay.
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You don't expect a programmer to know javascript and C#?
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She could have asked.
Now that's a legitimate criticism.
I'm not saying she should expect to get the job.
I'm saying both parties are responsible for this mess.
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You don't expect a programmer to know javascript and C#?
If it's listed in either the requirements or the optionals*), sure.
*) As in: Has at least a rough idea what those languages are about.
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What if the C# was a preferred skill, listed all the way at the bottom, underneath a large list of well-defined javascript tasks.
And then you showed up and they asked you if you knew MVC.
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And you said 'yes', and they asked you to write fizzbuzz, and you couldn't.
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Look, this whole thing could be moot.
The interviewer could be sitting there saying,
"Not a big deal, she doesn't need to know how to code like that, but this other candidate is better".
And we'd never know.
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What if the C# was a preferred skill, listed all the way at the bottom, underneath a large list of well-defined javascript tasks.
And then you showed up and they asked you if you knew MVC.
It's not as if MVC was a C# exclusive concept - a developer in Webserver-land should know that regardless of language
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You don't expect a programmer to know javascript and C#?
Depends what they're going for.ASP.NET MVC? Fuck yes I am!
Linux kernel development? Couldn't give a shit.
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You don't expect a programmer to know javascript and C#?
Not necessarily, unless the job calls for it.
Of course I guess I need to walk my position back a little: given that programmers so often make shitty UI it does make some sense, if necessary, for a separate designer and coder.
It's just that, going back to the original person we were discussing, it still reads to me like she interviewed for a "designer/coder" job when she is only a designer. Everybody goofed here, her in not reading the job reqs close enough, them in not making it more obvious they needed the coder part. I do tend to try to read all the reqs/skills/nice-to-haves when reading job postings, because I'm trying to guess what they actually want you to do.
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Everybody goofed here, her in not reading the job reqs close enough, them in not making it more obvious they needed the coder part.
And there we go.
That's been my point the whole time.
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I do tend to try to read all the reqs/skills/nice-to-haves when reading job postings, because I'm trying to guess what they actually want you to do.
Indeed. The optionals are also important because they give a hint as to what the job may also be about - and which you may be required to do (after training).
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Aside: if you go back to OP and click someone's avatar to filter on their posts, how do you turn it off? I did that so I could find a post of mine, then saw a notification of a reply, and when I clicked it, I got showed a gray bar with [3 posts filtered] or whatever it says. Discurse should probably unfilter the block of posts that has the reply in that case.
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It's just that, going back to the original person we were discussing, it still reads to me like she interviewed for a "designer/coder" job when she is only a designer. Everybody goofed here, her in not reading the job reqs close enough, them in not making it more obvious they needed the coder part. I do tend to try to read all the reqs/skills/nice-to-haves when reading job postings, because I'm trying to guess what they actually want you to do.
I don't even see how it's a mistake. Maybe she could have saved them some time if she didn't tell them she knew javascript, but going to an interview and then finding out that you aren't a good fit is what interviews are for.
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I don't even see how it's a mistake. Maybe she could have saved them some time if she didn't tell them she knew javascript, but going to an interview and then finding out that you aren't a good fit is what interviews are for.
Sure. But she even said if she realized they wanted a somewhat coder, she wouldn't have applied. I'm saying her failure--which, in the specific context of figuring out "should I apply for this job"--was in not figuring out they didn't want a pure designer, and I'm saying it's a minor failure because they de-emphasized the coder aspect. But they did have it there, so I still count it a minor point against her.
A much bigger fail on her part, of course, was her tantrum in the interview. That's where my hothouse flower analogy above comes in.
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was her tantrum in the interview
Do we know if she threw a fit in the interview. Or did she ask to take the exercise home and vent online?
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She probably went home to rant about it on a site made of white knights. I'm sure she chose that particular site for the 'support'.
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Is she claiming sexism?
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No, I am. I don't think she'd get as many people defending her if she ranted about something so simple and was male. Plus, there are the words of the mod there, who declared that anyone who says anything insulting is not part of his community.
And by insulting, I mean, 'FizzBuzz is one of the simplest possible tests of whether or not someone can really write code to accomplish a goal'
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asking a business analyst what is the current EUR/USD exchange rate, rounded to nearest integer.
I doubt any of the BAs at my company could answer.
Accountants, maybe.
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@Gaska said:
asking a business analyst what is the current EUR/USD exchange rate, rounded to nearest integer.
I doubt any of the BAs at my company could answer.
I wouldn't expect them to either, unless knowing that rate is actually useful to what they do
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Asking a programmer to do FizzBuzz is like asking a business analyst what is the current EUR/USD exchange rate, rounded to nearest integer.
Your analogy doesn't quite hold -- my team's BAs never have any reason to touch exchange rates, so they wouldn't know that sort of thing offhand. OTOH -- they can teach you how to give a track warrant over the radio...
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.
Thank you! She sounds like her head would explode if she ever touched anything conceptually new in her life -- and that's a bad place to be. It certainly wouldn't win her any points over where I work...
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She sounds like her head would explode if she ever touched anything conceptually new in her life
Don't worry, the moderators there will keep that from happening. She has found a nice, padded safe-space to rant in.
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I wonder if she could solve this totally unrelated problem:
We run a report on the day's production at the end of each business day. Sometimes we produce very little, sometimes we produce hundreds of thousands of things.
Our Wisconsin division head @ben_lubar is quite eccentric. In addition to speaking in a weird language he calls "Losh bun", he has particular requirements regarding how things are colored on reports.
Every third row should be red. Every fifth row should be green. If a row would be both red and green, instead it should be yellow. The remaining rows should be white.
We don't know why he would request this, but as he has major influence with the CEO, we must do as he says. Describe how you would accomplish this, and demonstrate it if possible.
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so they wouldn't know that sort of thing offhand
Of course, that particular example has generally hovered around unity for it's entire lifetime.
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She sounds like her head would explode if she ever touched anything conceptually new in her life
Hence my hothouse flower comment. I really do feel sorry for people like that, up to a point.
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What if the C# was a preferred skill, listed all the way at the bottom, underneath a large list of well-defined javascript tasks.
Then I'd think I'd be working on some interop layer.And then you showed up and they asked you if you knew MVC.
I'd be worried. Not because of MVC, because it's very expected of GUI/web application programmer to know MVC, but because of buzzwording.I doubt any of the BAs at my company could answer.
Okay, I might have misused the title "business analyst". I don't really know what job such person has, but I believe they're there to help in making large scale business decisions like where to sell stuff and what products would be most profitable. As in, they have to have some knowledge about the world. And everyone who has ever heard of Euro currency (which means basically everyone in the developed world except Americans, including homeless drunkards you can see in Polish buses in some cities) knows it's roughly 1:1 with dollars.
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That's a great restatement, but given :nth-child, I think it loses the meaning of the original test.
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Okay, I might have misused the title "business analyst". I don't really know what job such person has, but I believe they're there to help in making large scale business decisions like where to sell stuff and what products would be most profitable. As in, they have to have some knowledge about the world. And everyone who has ever heard of Euro currency (which means basically everyone in the developed world except Americans) knows it's roughly 1:1 with dollars.
You indeed did misuse the title, at least from the perspective of a software developer -- "business analyst" is usually used to refer to someone who takes a specific subset of business operations and practices and turns them into software requirements + manages those requirements documents. What you're talking about is more of a strategic planner, in the business sense...
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Then I'd think I'd be working on some interop layer.
Probably because I switched to mobile mid-thread, I messed @xaade's post you quoted that I can't bear to requote on mobile. But I'd like to think I would not have missed it. If I did, and I didn't know C#, if be too embarrassed to continue the interview unless it was made clear it would be acceptable to learn it in the job.
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You indeed did misuse the title
But this wouldn't be more evidence of how confusing job descriptions and requirements are.
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Maybe so, but she'd have to know about
:nth-child, figure out the significance of 15, and determine where things go in the cascade. And since neither Fizz nor Buzz are present, she couldn't go directly to Stack Exchange and copypasta. And, like FizzBuzz, the interviewer can start posing derivative questions, ask for justification, et cetera.
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But this wouldn't be more evidence of how confusing job descriptions and requirements are.
No one has a reason to expect more of job descriptions. They're almost always put together or edited by HR, so the most that you can expect is that a thorough analysis of them may allow you to find strange inconsistencies, such as URGENT NEED IMMEDIATE INTERVIEW ORACLE MSSQL SERVER JAVA C# DEVELOPER IN [some place hundreds of miles away]
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The designers in my company do far more complex things than fizzbuzz every day, they like learning the challenging programming stuff. This girl is just straight up lazy.
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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.
I was one of those people, however instead of sitting on that niche forever I decided to learn new skills. Apparently, a lot of people decided that was as much about the internet as they needed to know and gave up. Evolve or die.
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I just want to point out that this is someone who said this about Ember/Backbone/Angular:
I've played around with these and understand the concepts. I wouldn't say I'm proficient, but I definitely have 'experience with'.
That's the red flag for me. Excuse me, you mean to say you're comfortable touching an MVVM framework but can't convert a date to seconds without SO? Really?
That is a mark of someone who doesn't understand what they are doing in my book. You skipped the object oriented part completely (do you know what that even means?) and proceeded to say "yeah, I poked around EmberBoneGular". Really? You did? Did you copy that blindly off of SO too?
I wouldn't let her touch any of my frontend code with that attitude either. She expected a different scope of job, ok. But that bit off attitude towards what she's comfortable to work with without having the most basic of programming knowledge... nope, thank you, good bye.
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Evolve or die.
My problem (from a potential employer's POV) is that I tend to leapfrog around what's popular, instead of embracing it, because I often find "popular" and "technically terrible" in the same bin, sitting next to each other. And approaching Java-land at the Port of Clojure generally weirds out the residents there. ;P
That's the red flag for me. Excuse me, you mean to say you're comfortable touching an MVVM framework but can't convert a date to seconds without SO? Really?
Yeah, that's a gigantic red flag for me as well -- I'm more of the type to say "hrm, how do we want to handle leap seconds?" when someone asks me to convert a date to seconds. (and if they can't give me a good answer, I'm going to be reaching for a known-good date/time lib as my answer, because time isUNGODLY HARD!
Seriously, some level 20 wizard would look at our time system and go "what sort of adolescent pit fiend invented this?!"
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time is UNGODLY HARD!
QFT. Even if you're happy just dealing with civil time (which ignores leap seconds) it's still ungodly hard.
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Oh fuck! This is too funny.
FizzBuzz tests being able to write a loop and that a dev can apply the most simplest of logic. It tests whether a dev can do something trivial! In my bad old daze when I was in active addiction, high on crystal meth, and had already been awake for several days, I could still solve such a problem quite easily. I regard anybody who can't as an absolute fucking idiot.
I think I must go troll their blog to tell them so...
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I think this whole debate is a bit one-sided and unfair.
Hey, she was the one focusing on the js test. It was part of the interview. This is like applying to an ivy league and not knowing much on some subject when you go to the alumni interview and assuming that sunk you. But you don't know specifically that it sunk you. And you don't know what the competition knows.
However, she had total control over posting a whiny rant on her blog that makes her look silly.
But that's not the point of the article.
It's one point of the article.
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Oh, the comment thread is closed. Too bad.
But seriously, FizzBuzz is > JavaScript "engineering" and anything related to algorithms?
A few hours coming up with something that semi-worked???
No. This is an immediate fail even for a junior dev.
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I'm saying both parties are responsible for this mess.
Yes, it's just terrible for an employer to put javascript on the list and then actually verify what the candidate knows.
This is the equivalent of saying you "know" Linux and just being able to use
cdandls. Fuck, just admit that her js knowledge is superficial and she has never used it to do much of anything and move on.
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Aside: if you go back to OP and click someone's avatar to filter on their posts, how do you turn it off?
Click on your avatar again up top or bring up your usercard somewhere in the topic. There should be a Remove Filter button on the usercard.
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> I mean – I would be suspicious of someone who could solve fizzbuzz off the cuff. They are likely to:
- have too much time on their hands
- had too many interviews asking that question
- be unsufferably arrogant
- or all of the above.
[code]
for( int i = 1; i <= 100; i++ )
{
bool divisible_by_3 = ( ( i % 3 ) == 0 );
bool divisible_by_5 = ( ( i % 5 ) == 0 );if( !( divisible_by_3 || divisible_by_5 ) ) { Console.WriteLine( i.ToString() ); } else { if( divisible_by_3 ) { Console.Write( "Fizz" ); } if( divisible_by_5 ) { Console.Write( "Buzz" ); Console.WriteLine(); } }}
[/code]OK, that took me about 30 seconds to code from scratch. Now, which one from the list will I pick? I think I'll go with "unsufferably arrogant", that one sounds good. It's misspelled too - bonus!
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Discourse has totally fucked up your formatting, to the point it's unreadable to me. Fucking newlines, how do they work? @discoursebot
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Discourse has totally fucked up your formatting, to the point it's unreadable to me. Fucking newlines, how do they work? @discoursebot
It's almost readable on my end, except for the random lack of spaces on some lines because why not.
