I had a wildly different experience interviewing at netflix.
I met with the *Chief talent officer (had to look up this title from my original schedule with them...) for one of my interviews and she spent half the time telling me why the stock price was so low "We were high on a $300 share price and thought we were gods." Then, the other half telling me her favorite firing stories. I don't know what the purpose of all of this was but it gave me the impression that HR/head of HR needed to demonstrate how important they are in the company.
One of my potential colleagues interviewed me and gave me a fizzbuzz question. I successfully answered it. He then asked me to rewrite it with some restrictions. I did this. Then he asked me to do it one more time. I wasn't familiar with the python syntax for if-else shortcut (e.g., x = 100 if y is True else 0) and so couldn't rewrite it to his liking. This lack of familiarity with this python trick resulted in feedback at the end of the interview that I did not have a deep enough understanding of computer science.
I honestly could tell that the interviewer giving me the fizzbuzz questions wasn't clicking with me personally. That's fine, and I completely respect that it's a valid reason not to hire someone. However, because of this feedback, and the fact that the people at netflix generally liked me, they wanted me to work on some sort of data warehouse management team. I'm not sure why they would offer me a job so wildly different from what I was contacted to apply for, or why the syntax from one language would be considered representative of my knowledge of CS.
Overall, I think the experience of one person at a company is nothing more than an anecdote that can be entertaining, perhaps moderately informative, but it's not a complete picture. There are many stories out there about people interviewing with or working for Netflix. If you are seriously interested in the company, read a lot of those stories, discount all of them as biased, and then see for yourself by talking to them.
I also met with this same woman who talked about both the stock price and firing people. She also said something to the effect of "just because you have a job now doesn't mean you will have one in six months" and made a comparison to players being traded in professional sports. I remember feeling very put off by her. I too did not understand what the point in this bit of bravado was. It sounds like it's her standard candidate speech though which is just weird. The other thing that put me out was the first person who interviewed wasn't wearing shoes and insisted on sitting indian style with his feet pointed out to wards me. I am no stranger to a casual work environment but that is just gross. Lastly on the way to a conference room on the second floor I walked a fair amount through the office and what was notable to me was that I didn't see anybody smiling or even anyone who looked like they might be enjoying what they are doing. Ultimately I didn't get an offer because the job turned out to be a different description than the one I had interviewed about on the phone. I think that says it all.
> Lastly on the way to a conference room on the second floor I walked a fair amount through the office and what was notable to me was that I didn't see anybody smiling or even anyone who looked like they might be enjoying what they are doing
Please don't ever make this assumption. I referred an acquaintance from school to my workplace (he was a great project partner, and I was the first of us to get hired after graduation, so why not?), and apparently when he passed through everyone was just... doing work. That was a telltale sign that everyone was grumpy to him.
I had to explain that we basically don't work at all on Friday afternoons because we're too busy drinking, we play pingpong religiously, frequent out of office events on the weekends, and in general it's just an enjoyable crowd. Random conversations happen all the time.
But nope, that one time he came through the office, everyone looked unhappy. Because they were working, I guess.
[...] frequent out of office events on the weekends [...]
That sounds ... very strange. Weekends aren't generally speaking "office hours", and more importantly also not "working hours". Having an "out of office event" in my world is when you're doing work, i.e. it's during normal working hours, but you're not at work.
Having frequent work-related "events" on weekends sounds like a total bummer.
Depending on the work culture, out of hours event is a minefield. At the very least, you should have an opt-out possibility and not looked down upon if you do opted-out.
I had to explain that we basically don't work at all on Friday afternoons because we're too busy drinking,
This also sounds like a major bummer -- aside from the fact that does smacks (way too heavily) of bro culture, it's incredibly off-putting to anyone who doesn't drink (or who does, but thinks drinking in the office -- or drinking heavily in the afternoon on any kind of a regular basis -- is basically pretty stupid).
If people are either happy or working then that's actually a problem. You don't apply to a company to spend Friday afternoon drinking beer, but to work, right?
The point is that it's not either/or. People who are working can be mistaken for people who are unhappy, simply because they're busy. It's an assumption that should be avoided.
First of all don't tell people what the should or shouldn't think. Not only is it condescending but its ridiculous. Also this wasn't an assumption it was an observation. This wasn't people with their head down working, this was eye contact I made with many people in different states of being at work and none of them could muster a friendly smile. That's completely different.
I find the "standard (American) work culture" wildly disrespectful. I mean, expecting people to wear standardized clothes and having them clock in and out? Are we in prison?
Work culture varies hugely from company to company. If that's considered ok at Netflix that's their choice, if the the guy doesn't like it just don't work there.
I would argue that Netflix has it's own culture, a company culture. Perhaps if the commenter was really put off by this he would not be a good fit and it would not work out for either of them. I know there are a lot of protected characteristics you can't use to make hiring decisions but this does not seem like one of them - seems like Netflix hires form all sorts of cultures and only people who are not offended by other cultures choices.
The owner of the company I work for rarely wears anything besides flip flops and his feet are kind of gross. But who cares? It doesn't impede our ability to build cool stuff, make money and have plenty of fun. It sounds like you might be just as stuffy if not more so than the people you observed on your walk through Netflix.
I have a question about your choice of words re the person who insisted on sitting with their feet towards you.
Did you suggest that you would feel more comfortable if they sat differently?
This doesn't make any difference for me personally but I understand why some people would prefer that the person not sit like that. However, if you did not express an objection with regards to how that made you feel, I don't think "insisted" is a fair choice of words there.
A common usage for "insisted" (in American English, at least) is "did so with no apparent consideration of the effect," in a generally passive-aggressive context.
"He insisted on chewing with his mouth open, I mean, ew. Gross."
The offender is generally expected to read non-verbal, and often non-expressed, communication of the offended's opinion.
If so, seems like kind of a BS test to me. Job interviews are stressful enough without that kind of social experiment nonsense. There are a set of expected behaviors in an interview that don't necessarily reflect how a person would act in day to day life.
True. But all kinds of people play little power games. They know you probably won't say anything, unless you don't care and call out the emperor. Tough to say though, but someone selfaware should know this projects some kind of power 'play' and would avoid that manner.
Your suggestion that this is my fault for not objecting to the way my interviewer chose to conduct themselves in a professional setting is a joke. You must either work for them or be the person who was crass enough to behave like that. As another commenter said, that is a correct use of the word "insist." Look it up.
There is no talk of blame or fault. All the poster is doing is presenting an opportunity that you could have taken, and hopefully you may attempt if a future situation occurs, that could have improved your experience. People cannot see inside your head and that is why we communicate
The person conducting an interview is in a position of power. The interviewee shouldn't have to ask him to stop behaving inappropriately. It's the same reason prison guards get arrested for consensual sex with inmates.
Same experience with that chief talent officer. I think it was supposed to be a pure sell interview, but it ended up being super tacky and uncomfortable. She went on and on about how much money they had. She went on and on about firing 51% of the people every year - which is not only unsustainable, but not supported by any kind of evidence of routinely culled NF engineers looking for work in the Bay Area. She was so busy congratulating herself and being smug I don't even know why I was in the room. The rest of the interviewers were great.
In the following days, they followed up with an offer that wasn't an offer - they would make an offer only if I said yes, but otherwise they weren't going to make an offer. They had the hiring manager call me a bunch of times. They tried to get me on a sell call with the ceo. They disparaged the other companies I was talking to. Meh. Also, they were title crazy - everyone in management I spoke to was either a director or a vice-president or a chief of something.
Netflix models employment like a professional sports engagement, where performance is regularly reviewed in context and persons who no longer contribute to the "team dynamic" are "traded", i.e., fired, to go find a "team" in which their contributions are a better fit.
Everyone knows this because Netflix released a big presentation about it a while ago. They keep "top performers" only as long as they are top performance from Netflix's perspective, and then dismiss them with a "generous severance".
It's definitely an interesting way to do employment.
I agree that it sounds like contracting. They're trying to normalize it, I think. Most people won't be contractors because contractors have to pay extra taxes, buy their own benefits, and have no job security. Netflix takes care of these first two and makes the last one softer by giving a "generous severance" while the ex-employee finds a new home (I'm not sure on the specifics of how that works; maybe a NF employee who has been "traded" can offer detail (though he's probably contractually forbidden from doing so)).
What's basically clear is that the candidates complaining here a) didn't do their basic f-ing homework, and b) are seriously misrepresenting Netflix views on letting people go.
Not I agree with that part of Netflix culture (and it would pretty much be illegal in most Western countries), but there is a clear logic behind it, and I seriously doubt they skipped that part in the interview.
What's basically clear is that the candidates complaining here (...) are seriously misrepresenting Netflix views on letting people go.
You can assume the posters here are being malicious, or that they're honestly telling what they understood from the interview. If the latter, then I'd argue it's Netflix fault for failing to leave the right impression.
Wow, I had nearly the exact same interview process. Super aggressive to nearly combative recruiter (felt like I was being argued with the whole time), fizzbuzz question, left in a conference room alone for an hour for lunch, a few more questions then done.
I got an offer but turned them down because their recruiter was so crazy aggressive it made me feel that Netflix would be a very unhappy place to work.
From what I've heard from ex-employees (one a recruiter) the hiring/salary/firing process there is not well organized. People often make more than managers or more senior employees and large layoffs every year for the 'bottom 10%' make for some weird social dynamics.
As much as I respect and admire their technical processes there I'm not convinced it's really a good place to work.
Can you share the name of the recruiter? Just curious if that person is still working at Netflix.
I've been a happy Netflix employee for over 4 years and have never experienced a 'large layoff' event. All the layoffs I've witnessed were not a surprise for the people affected.
Senior engineers usually make more money than their direct managers, but I fail to see how that's an issue.
I'm guessing RayVR met with Patty who left Netflix 2 years ago. My interview with her was different but I guess it would depend on your background and what she was trying to determine. In my case it was mostly to see if I was going to be a good cultural fit since I was at the time working for Yahoo which had a completely different culture. To me that was an entirely reasonable thing to do. Actually the whole interview process was great, and it was one of the major reasons I chose Netflix over other companies.
The day after I took over the team, my director sat me down and said "I don't know if you've looked yet, but most of your engineers make more than you do. That's because they're incredibly valuable. Your number one job is to keep them happy."
In the last two years of managing this team, I've consistently gotten paid less than the top engineers on my team.
By far the best part of being a self-employed contractor is never to have to deal with HR, ever. Ever never.
Also remember that HR are not your friends, they don't work for you, they don't understand your job, or you as a person; they work for the company; their job is to:
- make sure the company doesn't overpay for "resources" (a "talent buyer" if you will)
- make sure said resources, once hired, stay in line and don't make waves of any kind, and terminate them as needed, as silently as possible.
We tend to think of HR as an adult version of the nice and benevolent elementary school teacher who first helped us understand the world; the reality is they are more like cops. Bad cops usually.
> Also remember that HR are not your friends, they don't work for you, they don't understand your job, or you as a person; they work for the company; their job is to:
This part is so important. Our HR department doesn't actually know anyone in the office. It becomes particularly interesting when they organize a company outing and have completely missed that there is a large percent of the workforce that does not speak the native language where I live, but they still have event hosts that will only present things in this language. They've done this 3 years in a row now.
I had a boss that was extremely good to work for, but she didn't have management experience (given the nature of the organization, this would be expected), so she leaned on outsourced HR for advice. Not only did their advice lead to me leaving much less amicably than had been (mutually, I thought) planned, but they also opened themselves up to liability that wouldn't have been there otherwise.
The "bad cop" analogy is spot-on. I've used that exact analogy—my boss (unwittingly) played "good cop", while the HR consultants played "bad cop".
amen. there are downsides to the chaos of consulting that i don't particularly enjoy but the only time i ever spoke to HR was when they handed me my badge, and there is no such thing as a "performance review", reprimands, etc. (lots of annoying memos about corporate policies at this particular client tho). In fact, I talk to my real "boss" about once every few months, in between it is just scrums with PMs
I pretty much just go to work, chill out, and hope I can find a better gig sometime in the near future (I'm on basically an ever-renewing contract but the vendors in our system are horrible about rate increase).
It sucks when you can tell that a personality mismatch is causing the interviewer think you don't know what you're talking about. Or they could just be an arrogant ass, who knows (that if/else thing certainly raises the possibility).
About the offer you got, maybe they thought you were strong in areas that would be important to the DW team even though you didn't fit into their expectations for the position you interviewed for. I've interviewed people who were obviously talented engineers but not quite right for the position in question, and suggested them for other positions they were better-suited for. This has worked well in my experience, but who knows if that's what happened at Netflix.
The official story told often at big companies is that the interview process should be tilted towards false negatives over false positives.
The truth of the matter is you could probably get statistically similar results from a voodoo witch doctor reading chicken entrails.
Ok, maybe not, but I really get the feeling that most hiring systems are arbitrary and are less "tilted toward false negatives" and more just plain random. In the cases such as Google, they also tend to create a monoculture which probably feels right at the moment but I think really hurts the company in the long term.
I think these processes are like that Price is Right game Plinko. You're the round little disk and the interviewers are the pegs.
There are thousands of pegs on the board, and your resume predicts the starting position of your disk.
But once you hit the pegs, it's essentially random. Some pegs bounce you towards the jackpot and other pegs bounce you towards 0.
It all depends on if you have a similar background, if the person likes you, if you've heard of the question before or solved something similar, if your chosen language fits the problem domain, etc.
At the end of the day, your ability to actually do things doesn't matter much in the interview process. I've worked at 2 huge well known companies and failed at several other interviews. Hundreds of millions of people use my code every day. After nearly a decade in tech, I've never gotten a bad performance review. But I still plinko'ed into the 0 spot many times.
As I get older, I find it's easiest just to enter orgs from friend's recommendations, preferably at smaller companies. Playing the plinko game with your livelihood is an exhausting waste of time, and often represents the politicking that goes on at these huge companies when review time comes around.
As someone responsible for observability, I've got a real problem with biasing hiring decisions toward false negatives; what you're basically saying is that you're biasing the system toward the failure mode that you have the least ability to actually measure.
It's a great way to feel good about yourself and your interview process; it's also a great way to not find fault in your interview process as it becomes arbitrarily ... arbitrary.
"In the cases such as Google, they also tend to create a monoculture which probably feels right at the moment but I think really hurts the company in the long term"
I would agree with you about the monoculture aspect where they tend to hire new college grads from mostly the top colleges. I thought it's a little bit too inbred, but they also buy a lot of companies and get a much broader set of employees that way. Although, they might dump a lot of the acquired employees instead of keeping them on permanently once the acquisition goes through.
I'm not a programmer, and had never heard of the fizzbuzz question. After seeing so many people come out in favor of it in the comments, I looked it up. It is just so easy that I have to imagine people who "bomb" it are failing because they're expecting a difficult question and wind up overthinking it.
I mean seriously, this is the question as I found it:
Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.
And here is an answer in bash that took me literally 30 seconds:
for num in {1..100} ; do
out=""
(( $num % 3 == 0 )) && out="Fizz"
(( $num % 5 == 0 )) && out="${out}Buzz"
echo ${out:-$num}
done
If this somehow provides valuable insight into a candidate, it certainly shouldn't be occupying prime 'in person' interview time. Request it before you schedule the on-site interview. Even identifying as a non-programmer, I have been asked much harder programming questions in interviews.
IMHO this kind of questions is asked not to determine if the candidate is good, but if he's bad. Indeed, only someone who is really bad at programming would fail it - modulo small syntax errors due to writing code on paper or white board. If the person fails, you should try to show him politely the door - or better, FizzBuzz should be used in phone screen. However, if the person succeeds, it's pointless to ask him or her a more sophisticated version of it, instead, you can ask more complicated questions (algorithms or architecture), and I think that is what RayVR is pointing: it's ok to ask FizzBuzz once, but don't waste the interviewee time asking it 50 times.
As you say, in a phone screen might be suitable place for it. And I certainly don't think there's any point in iterating on it, the only real optimization available is to eliminate the third check for 3 and 5 simultaneously. Truly rocket science.
My main problem is that, as a candidate, I would interpret being asked this question to mean that the interviewers have already undervalued me (or worse, have no idea how to value me).
One weak question in hours of interviews isn't bad, but now I'm mentally preparing for more weak questions. Making a candidate disengage is a sure way to get a bad interview, or a good interview that results in a "no thanks" to your offer.
> My main problem is that, as a candidate, I would interpret being asked this question to mean that the interviewers have already undervalued me (or worse, have no idea how to value me).
No, your main problem is just how many of your contemporaries with indistinguishable backgrounds and experience totally bombs this question.
Being offended by a simple fizz-buzz style question[1] is roughly as constructive as being offended by "Is this a good time to talk?" even when a good time to talk has been carefully scheduled.
1: I don't think many people use fizz-buzz exactly, it's too well known, but there are tons of other really quite simple questions that exercise two or three basic programming concepts, maybe throw in some basic problem solving for good measure.
But that's the problem that FizzBuzz highlights. A bunch of people just can't do it. This isn't about the (now retracted) Sheep and Goats stuff. Plenty of the people who fail fizzbuzz are computer science graduates or senior programmers.
I don't know of any research about why people who think they can program can't do FizzBuzz. I'd love to see it though.
If you really bomb the entire interview series because you were asked the fizzbuzz question, it sounds like you wouldn't work well anyway. Sometimes you encounter simple problems. If you can't handle being asked to do a task because it's "beneath you", you are probably a terrible hire anyway.
Thinking that something is beneath me (which is not what I said, by the way) and feeling that the interviewers have undervalued my skillset are two different things entirely.
During an interview, I'm interviewing the interviewers as well as being interviewed. Part of that process (for me) is to see if they have correctly identified my skill level (in my opinion), so that hopefully they have the right kind of position in mind for me.
The name of a position is often meaningless, unless you know the inner workings of that organization. "Senior" is meaningless window dressing. It's how the role fits within the team that determines if it's right for me and if I will be able to have the kind of impact I want.
Try to put yourself in the shoes of the interviewer. You got to interview lots of clueless people who call themselves programmers but are unable to do the simplest task. Once you spoke with enough people like that, the first thing you want to do is weed out the people who can't program, hence the FizzBuzz question.
Now, I am sure that you, skuhn are able to do those simple things, but the guy interviewing you doesn't know it. If he asks you a simple question that you can nail in 5 minutes, and answer "sorry dude, your question is so easy I find it offending", the interviewer will think you're an arrogant douche - that's how I would feel at least. Instead, just solve the problem he's asking you and move on.
If after that he keeps asking stupid questions, well, it's a different story and you probably wouldn't fit well in that company.
I feel like you're assigning feelings to me that don't mesh with what my comment described. I don't want to get into a personal thing, but here's my condensed point again one last time, in the hope of clarifying:
I think this question is suitable for phone screening. You should already know if someone can do the work equivalent of tying their shoes before bringing them on-site. If I was asked a question at this level during an on-site interview, I would be a little disappointed. If the entire interview continued in that vein, I wouldn't accept the position.
Questions like this can work in a phone screen if you have a shared virtual whiteboard. Otherwise it is painful for the interviewer to try to transcribe code as the candidate thinks of it and says it alout.
There is also the common problem where candidates google for answers or at least seem to google for answers during phone screens.
The problem with asking truly challenging coding questions during an interview is that they are often too challenging to finish in the time allotted. Frequently challenging coding questions require an ahah moment or domain knowledge. For example if an interviewer asks a candidate to invent an advanced algorithm on the spot what is being measured? If the candidate gets the answer right they might be really smart, they more likely have been previously exposed to the idea, or they got lucky. If they got the answer wrong the interviewer must judge them on their ability to communicate their thought process during their attempt - but from that the interviewer didn't learn if they can code.
You shouldn't be disappointed that interviewers don't know straight away that you aren't a charlatan. You should instead be disappointed by the fact that there is such a high number of successful charlatans in our industry.
I've never asked fizzbuzz, but I have asked people to count the number of upper-case letters in a c-string. I feel like this is of similar difficulty, for people who claim to know C/C++.
When I asked that question, I was looking for fluency. A candidate shouldn't have to think about it. They should write c >= 'A', instead of floundering because they don't remember the ASCII value of 'A'. If asked, they should be able to iterate over the string without taking strlen first.
This is basic stuff, but you might be surprised how many people with years of software development experience on their resumes can't do it. Moreover, I found that a good performance on this easy question was highly predictive of good performance on harder questions. Not that this didn't stop me from asking hard questions. :)
Unrelated: In Unicode that would be a pretty difficult problem. The uppercase version of 'ß' is actually two characters "SS". There are a lot of messed up casing rules in the unicode standard. http://unicode.org/faq/casemap_charprop.html#11
Sure, casing is complicated; but determining whether a codepoint has the uppercase property is easy - just use u_isUUppercase().
Where it does get complicated is determining whether a codepoint or a digraph of multiple codepoints is a letter, and that's culture-dependent; e.g. IJ in Dutch.
If you can write a FizzBuzz solution in bash in 30 seconds, you are definitely a programmer. You don't have to program as a profession to be a programmer.
I mentioned that I'm not a programmer because that's typically the biggest hurdle for me in technical interviews. I don't write code for a living, nor do I want to. Yet I still get asked programming questions, but nothing remotely this simple.
> One of my potential colleagues interviewed me and gave me a fizzbuzz question.
That should have been a big clue right there that it wasn't going to go well. Based on their hiring criterion and culture, that they still do a technical interview like they were hiring junior developers is a bad sigh.
Nope. At my last company I did all the technical interviews.
Now, I have no idea how HR selected them, but I got their CVs on my desk and was asked to schedule a meeting with them.
And so I did. And oh boy, there were a LOT of previous Fortune 500 Senior devs that could not write anything that even resembles a correct fizzbuzz solution in any language they like without time restriction (I had to kick a few people out after I left them alone for 30 minutes and they told me they need more time).
All their CV's looked fine though.
If I interview you, I'll ask you to write code, on any level. Usually I asked interviewees for ~3 code samples on paper starting with fizzbuzz moving up in difficulty to still beeing a relatively easy ~5 minute task.
I've had one interviewee that started to laugh when I asked him for a fizzbuzz sample and he said, "well that's like asking a baker to bake a bun". he proceded to write a fizzbuzz solution down and is apparently one of the top developers at that company now.
I don't care how senior you are. If you're offended by quickly writing down a fizzbuzz solution you're not senior enough to realize how much some people suck at programming.
Obviously the actual only interview only started after they wrote fizzbuzz, fizzbuzz helped me stop wasting my time and I convinced HR to stop sending me CVs of people that played bullshit bingo in their CVs.
Sure you could blame HR on this for not filtering good enough but HR aren't developers. Although I'm not saying HR couldn't have given me better CVs...
I've had very similar experience hiring for information security roles.
The volume of "good" CVs that landed on my desk was consistently high, but when we spoke to the candidates on their first telephone interview it became immediately apparent that they were not nearly as skilled at security as they were at writing CVs.
In the end, we inserted a 10 minute quick-fire Q&A at the beginning of the telephone interview which was as basic as "Define: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability" and other such trivial security knowledge. It was terrifying the number of people applying for mid/senior level jobs, or contracts with high day-rates who couldn't get past this. What was most galling was when people were obviously googling the anwswers whilst we spoke - we countered this with simple "which is better, and why" type questions so that there was too many variables to google and you also needed to defend your answer.
There were only a very small number of candidates who, when confronted with the Q&A responded in a "are you serious?" kind of way and just rattled off the basic knowledge in a couple of minutes. With these we could get down to the detail of the real interview pretty quickly.
Why would you trust HR to forward you the CVs anyway? I had to beg and plead to get HR to send me the unfiltered resume submissions but finally got them to do so. They're completely unqualified to determine which experience is necessary or relevant (which is fine, since they're not programmers; they just shouldn't be filtering resumes).
To be completely honest, I just really didn't care enough and had other things to do.
I did that when we were ~7 people, then the company grew, we got a HR department and I kinda lost interest in the company and was just doing my job. Efficient shouting-trough-the-room to get shit done was replaced by by slow corporate processes, office politics started to happen, somebody decided that our SMB shared folders must have a number in front so they are shown in the order admin though they needed to be shown... So when they decided to optimize folder structures for mouse-heavy non-technical users, taking my ability to quickly nagivate trough the directory structure, I decided it was time to leave :)
Edit: One funny thing I forgot, they built a file-name generator in excel we had to use :)
Fizzbuzz has not been very useful for me while conducting interviews. Nearly all candidates had no problems solving it fairly quickly. But many of these candidates couldn't solve much simpler problems such as "Initialize a list or array of numbers".
For anyone above a jr level developer position, I would assume they'd have code or other artifacts you could review. If you weren't satisfied with their approach or style, don't interview further, or ask for clarification.
If you can not find anyone at all with example code/projects, perhaps then start employing fizzbuzz on folks, but... I can't imagine it's too hard to find developers with at least a minimal portfolio that demonstrates something at least as complex, if not moreso, than fizzbuzz.
The problem with sample code is that I have no idea if you actually wrote it. Maybe you copied it from Google, maybe your friend "helped" you. I have no idea. When I'm first interviewing you, I have no idea how honest you are. The only way I know for sure that you wrote the code is if I watch you write it in front of me.
I really like Fizzbuzz because for someone who is a good programmer, whether they've ever seen it or not, they can do it in about two minutes, and then at least I can believe that their code sample is theirs.
I once skipped the "simple programming exercise" part of the interview process for someone who was senior, and severely regretted it when it turned out he struggled with basic programming tasks.
Yes. I've interviewed "senior software engineers with 10+ years of C++ experience" that could not tell me the difference between a char and a char pointer.
I interviewed a self-declared "biometrics expert" once.
When I see "expert" on a CV I have learned to become cynical.
I asked him about his expertise and he spoke in platitudes about it - at a sort of BBC News kind of level. I'm certainly not an expert but I know sufficient to be able to ask useful questions about it.
He couldn't tell me anything at all about biometrics. I continued to probe.
Turns out that by "biometrics expert" he quite unashamedly meant he had, at the request of a manager, bought a USB fingerprint reader from PC World and installed it so that his manager didn't have to use a password any more.
>When I see "expert" on a CV I have learned to become cynical.
One has to play this game on marketing documents to be considered. For some reason "pretty good, definitely still learning" doesn't click with many HR people. You can't really blame candidates for trying to get hired by presenting themselves in an authoritative context.
I don't consider anyone an actual expert in something unless they have hard, indisputable credentials, like a long history of commits to the core project (for expertise in specific software/languages/frameworks), etc.
I completely agree that it's a sales vs. HR thing, and that the onus is on the candidate to make themselves appear as the best product on the market.
But something about "expert" really grates on me. I think it's that it is a self-anointed title in nearly all cases. There are legitimately experts in lots of different areas - if you happened to invent IDS, for example, you go right ahead and call yourself an expert. If you happen to have run a bunch of Snort rules across a prod environment for a year or two, you might be "experienced", go on, stretch it to "highly experienced" for all I care, but if you stretch it to "expert" then paint me cynical.
How is that even possible? Are you sure they weren't just having (to be crude) a brain fart?
Some of these stories about super experienced ("10+ years") developers not being able to answer the most basic of basic syntax or "algorithm" questions seem far-fetched to me.
Consider that most "valid" implementations of fizzbuzz are wholly dependent on awareness of the target language's modulo operator. Self-taught programmers can easily overlook that, and if a specific language is requested, it's easy to not know the syntax even if the concept is understood.
Really I don't think those sort of on-the-spot tests/trivia questions are representative by themselves. They may be a useful part of a larger investigation.
Two things to stop code sample plagiarism: choose a unique code challenge and, if you're really worried about it, give the client a laptop and tell them to bang something simple out right there and come back in 30-60 minutes to check.
Honestly, though, I've rarely depended on either code samples or code trivia to determine if someone is a good hire. If you sit and talk about dev with a person, you can tell if they're on their game or not 90% of the time. The sample/on-the-spot tests can help weed out that extra 10%.
We're moving towards a code sample as screening method, but then one of the interview sessions is an intensive review of the supplied code including tradeoffs made with other possibilities, etc. If they understand the code well enough to pass that session, personally it doesn't matter to me if they actually wrote it or not - they clearly could have.
In 2002, a company I interviewed with did just that. They tore my code apart, asking me to justify myself, and I felt like I completely bombed it.
In the end they said "Okay, you pass." When I asked why, the answer was "While we don't agree with all the choices, it's basically well-written and does something interesting. We just wanted to know if you were the one who wrote it."
Yeah, we make it clear to reviewers that the point isn't to inject their own opinions as to how it should have been written (and certainly not "your curly brace is in the wrong spot"!) but rather to determine:
- did they likely write the code, for obvious reasons
- are they aware of the various tradeoffs and choices they made, i.e. we might not agree but can they make a reasonable argument for them - this demonstrates breadth of knowledge
- how are their communication skills?
A lot of developers, myself included, do not perform well under a microscope. They almost can't even type when someone is watching them, making stupid mistakes and blanking on simple concepts. Luckily, the vast majority of programmers don't have to code under this kind of pressure on a daily basis. I find the most effective way to get a good sense of how someone can code is to give them homework to do that they can bring to the interview and discuss. That way they can take their time, put their best foot forward, and it won't weed out introverts or people with test or social anxiety.
I think I usually noticed when someone felt uneasy, so I left the room for a few minutes.
Test anxiety might be really bad for some people, I know. But if it's that bad that they can't explain to me how to check if "n mod m == 0" then I think there are usually deeper underlying problems in their programming ability.
And if it was really just anxiety, I'm sorry I'd rather have a false negative than hiring them.
I tried homework, it didn't really work that well for me, people would google and copy paste stuff and invest way too much time, in the end they couldn't explain what they did and it was just a waste of time for both parties.
The other problem is that I usually let people work with whatever language/frameworks their familiar with. I ended up beeing not familiar with some C# stuff they used and couldn't really judge their code.
Fizzbuzz is simple enough that you can see if it looks right in pretty much any language
And it's done in 5 minutes even if that means accepting a few false positives.
Oh and, we had I few people where I noticed that they were really nervous and I thought maybe that's why they failed Fizzbuzz, so I invited them in for half a day and gave them a toy project to implement. Usually something really simple like, fetch this RSS Feed, parse it, save it somewhere, make sure that if you fetch it multiple times it doesn't save duplicate entries, and spit out the titles and URL's to stdout or a webpage or anything. A relatively real world exercise I think, nobody was constantly watching them, it was just a "get it done" job, they had internet, their own IDE, their language of choice and everything (a few people complained that they can't implement FizzBuzz without an IDE).
And all of them failed. Hard.
So I ended up not doing that anymore and treat a failed FizzBuzz as a K.O. criteria.
This is precisely what we do when hiring at our web dev/game/app agency. We have a somewhat casual meeting to first determine if the candidate is the type of person we'd want to work with every day and then we give them a challenge to take home with them. We provide a direct line to one of our developers that fulfills a similar role to what we are hiring for and encourage them to ask questions as they are completing the challenge. It's a very telling process. We are a very collaborative team and expect people to ask questions and grow together. When candidates ask questions that would be really easily answered by a quick Google search, or take far longer to complete the challenge than it should take someone who even sort of knows what they are doing, these are major red flags. At the end we review their code and see if their solutions are well thought out and up to basic standards. I should mention the challenge is typically extremely simple... Some candidates don't make it a priority and make excuses for days or weeks on end why they aren't finished. These don't tend to be the type of people we like to hire.
It's easy to tell if they wrote it. Just start asking them questions about it. How does this work? Why did you make this design decision? What happens in this case?
I would be delighted if an interviewer asked me such questions about my code.
On the other hand, when I need a new job, I am going to simply spend a week with an interview algorithms book and cram on all the little riddles and exercises that people seem to want.
I'd actually have to think for a minute on how to do fizz buzz right now, simply because it is so far remove from the actual engineering workflow.
> simply because it is so far remove from the actual engineering workflow.
Err, what? Fizzbuzz is NOT a riddle. It's intentionally meant to be a stupid simple test, and everyone has written stupid simple code at some point. Even as a "senior engineer" you'll have to write dumb business logic code, even if it's only occasional.
If you really struggle with fizzbuzz it would almost assuredly be a sign that you would really struggle to write quality software in a timely manner. It's also a sign that you really aren't familiar with even the basic control flow of your chosen language, which is similarly worrying.
The only part of fizzbuzz that's "removed from the actual engineering workflow" is MAYBE the modulus operation, which I'm willing to bet most interviewers probably won't give a shit if you goof on the syntax a little and write "%" when you should've written "%%".
And even then, a perfectly acceptable fizzbuzz can be written without using mod if you're not familiar with that basic arithmetic operation.
Fizzbuzz may seem natural to people with an inclination for numbers or formal schooling that forcibly crams lots of math you'll never use down your throat, but some people haven't been taught about modulus operations and some people may not be very good at division and would take a while to try to reinvent mod. Neither of those things are necessarily really big problems if that person is going to be writing business logic (though you might want to have someone check any code they write which involves money).
The idea of "fizzbuzz" is to show basic understanding of language control structures and flow. Better, more universal tests that actually use language constructs that are encountered in daily operation could definitely be devised to demonstrate the same fundamental concepts.
You don't have to leave it at just reviewing online code, but it's generally a 1st level filter. If someone has already written moderately advanced stuff online, have them write something at that level. If they can't do that, they wouldn't be able to do fizz buzz either.
> I would assume they'd have code or other artifacts you could review
90% of the code I've written, and all the clever stuff, is copyright of and property of corporations. There's no way I'd jeopardise my current job by showing someone else that code
Sure, but you ask it or something like that very early on, long before the person even walks in the door. If you're wasting valuable interview time with FizzBuzz on anything other than an entry level position, you're doing it wrong.
I really like Fizzbuzz because for someone who is a good programmer, whether they've ever seen it or not, they can do it in about two minutes. I usually use it as my first question on the phone screen.
And you know what? More than 1/2 the people that claim to be doing a job writing code right now can not do it. If you can't write a simple loop in your preferred language, I have to wonder how you are doing coding right now and being successful.
I think part of the key with giving FizzBuzz is telling the candidate that any working solution is AOK and meaning it, in other words the dumbest brute force loop is a successful answer. My suspicion is that more candidates than one would expect get hung up worrying about giving some sort of clever answer to impress the interviewer that they bobble it up a bit.
That said, for FizzBuzz proper, one should have dozens of solutions memorized for these situations, but for similarly easy questions the candidate might not have come across that might end up being a big deal.
> My suspicion is that more candidates than one would expect get hung up worrying about giving some sort of clever answer to impress the interviewer that they bobble it up a bit.
I've definitely felt that pressure as an interviewee. It's pretty disheartening to write a simple and obviously correct implementation only to have the interviewer express their disappointment that you didn't use a particular optimization.
The most fun technical questions I've had start with making a functional algorithm and then massaging it to meet whatever time/space complexity requirements are asked for. Sometimes it results in a complete rewrite and that's ok, the real world works like that too.
> It's pretty disheartening to write a simple and obviously correct implementation only to have the interviewer express their disappointment that you didn't use a particular optimization.
I almost always preface whiteboard coding sessions with "I'm going to write some dumb, slow code and then we can make it faster if you want. Sound OK?" I've never had anyone disagree with this, but if they tell you they want you to go straight to the clever solution, hey, now you know what they're looking for.
Plus, you can "scale up" the interview to harder questions so you can test the candidate without making them feel bad by bombing a touch problem at the very start of the interview.
Well, that is just it. Certainly 100% of the people I have ever worked with, even the bad ones, can write a for loop and an if statement. I mistrust the process more than I mistrust the people, though I suppose maybe the same bad people and endlessly interviewing.
50% of working programmers can't write a for loop? Does that square with your experience outside of interviewing?
I don't quite buy the whole fizz-buzz story, though I don't have an adequate explanation for what could cause these kinds of failure rates. Something seems very off.
>50% of working programmers can't write a for loop? Does that square with your experience outside of interviewing?
Not 50% of working programmers, but of the programmer applicant pool. The applicants who can find jobs quickly aren't in the pool very long, and so it's dominated by the fakers and those who otherwise shouldn't be there. ... Which should make the reported phenomenon a little more believable.
Fizzbuzz is incredibly useful to quickly smoke out people who have lied or faked or exaggerated their way into the interview.
However, that's all it's good for, which means it should be a single pass/fail question. Asking the candidate increasingly specific iterations of fizzbuzz would be a waste of time.
> I honestly could tell that the interviewer giving me the fizzbuzz questions wasn't clicking with me personally. That's fine, and I completely respect that it's a valid reason not to hire someone.
No, it really isn't. You should have a set of hiring standards that you strive to make as objective and quantifiable as possible. The interviewer should also be doing everything he or she can do to minimize their own personal bias entering into the evaluation of you as a candidate.
Hiring people you get along with, i.e. people like you, is usually a quick path towards a homogeneous team of straight, white males from privileged backgrounds.
I recently redesigned our department's hiring process for software folks and one of the things I did was change our standard 2 person interview panels to be a larger group at once.
The primary reason is so that everyone is seeing the same thing, including these sorts of personality conflicts. If Bob thinks the candidate is horrible due to some weird hangup and they were interviewing solo, the team would have to believe Bob. But if everyone else saw the interaction, they'd know that Bob was just being a cantankerous coot.
A more scalable solution to this is pair interviews.
The first company I worked at for 4 years made use of this, in addition to meeting in person, at the end of the day, to make a decision.
Benefits of the pair interview: Two different opinions on the candidate for the same "experience". If either interviewer had poor tendencies, they'll be curtailed a bit because they know someone else is there to witness them.
If both interviewers are in agreement, that's a pretty strong data point.
When it came time for "review" at the end of the day, we started with an around the room "thumbs up/down". No hiding behind an anonymous email to the recruiter/manager. If it was unanimously up...offer. Unanimously down? Obvious no hire. If it was mixed, we'd go around to all of the thumbs down, and ask, "Are you on the fence, or are you 100% vehemently opposed to this candidate?" If they said, "NO WAY JOSE", we'd ask them to give their reasoning. Then, we'd ask if anyone had a positive enough experience to argue in favor of the candidate. If not? No hire. If yes, we'd then go around the room and ask all of the interviewers to give a full description of the interview. You'll note that this part gives the full data, but takes the most time, but could be avoided (an optimization) if it was going to be ultimately fruitless.
This was by far the best hiring decision making process I've been a part of. No process, is perfect, but I feel this was pretty fair.
Oh - lastly, if a candidate was particularly hard to decide on, and we went around the room, and some people were for them, and some were against, and it ended up in deadlock - we ended the meeting and it was up to the ranking members of the team to decide (i.e. managers.) This meant that after one round of debate, we wouldn't keep wasting the company's dime trying to force consensus, and instead moved the decision to the people who the company had already decided it wanted to make decisions. So, if democracy worked...great, but this was a business, and we had get shit done, so lacking clear consensus, the burden was reduced.
After typing this out, I really, really whole heartedly respect this process - compared to much of what I've seen in the Valley.
We do this at my current company. The tiebreaker stuff is slightly different, and every candidate that gets a vote of confidence actually ends up chatting briefly with our CEO as the very last bit, which is more of a cultural fit thing than anything else. I agree that it's good to have a potential counterpoint to odd personal interactions.
Interviews are clearly stressful situations for a majority of candidates, even if their technical chops are without question. This ends up manifesting in ways that can come off as personality defects / lack of fit. I can think of a few times where the person I went in with came out with a specific point in spacetime that was wrinkled for them - a comment they thought was off, something about their behavior - and more than half of the time I've noticed comments the candidate made, or compensating factors, that reasonably explained these wrinkles. A lot of the time, I'm trying to balance the things I care about asking with paying attention to my co-interviewer so I can provide objectiveness down the line.
I would have been working in a three person team (including me). This results in spending a TON of time with your teammates, usually more time than your family. Not liking someone is a reasonable filter in this case.
I happen to work on a three person team right now and I like my two colleagues. It does not conform at all to your forecast for (straight, white, privileged, men). Sorry. I think this is based on the assumption that people like others that are like themselves, which in fact is not very true. I prefer to be around people that are very different from me.
> I think this is based on the assumption that people like others that are like themselves, which in fact is not very true. I prefer to be around people that are very different from me.
Unfortunately, it is uncontroversial that most people show preferences for people similar to themselves when choosing friends, romantic partners, and employees. Nobody, that I've heard, is saying that this applies to every single person, so there's no reason to say that it can't be true because you don't follow it.
After my interview with Netflix, I felt smarter. Didn't end up working there, but met new people & we shared strategies for achieving higher performance.
Then he asked me to do it one more time. I wasn't familiar with the python syntax for if-else shortcut (e.g., x = 100 if y is True else 0) and so couldn't rewrite it to his liking. This lack of familiarity with this python trick resulted in feedback at the end of the interview that I did not have a deep enough understanding of computer science.
Precious.
And of course, an entirely different take could be made from your response -- precisely because you do have a solid grounding in CS, you've probably chosen to spend your time with languages with (for want of a better term) more "powerful", and arguably more standard constructions than what Python affords for this kind of a logical switch -- namely, a ternary operator -- which if Python had it, would probably look a lot like this:
x = y ? 100 : 0
and that you were consequently flummoxed by Python's quirky lack of this useful (and arguably much more readable) construct.
So if you were interviewing for a senior-level, Python-specific position I can see why they'd expect you to know the if-then-else trick. But if it's a secondary language for you, then the feedback that interviewer gave you definitely seems more than a bit off-base.
(DISCLAIMER: No, I don't think Python is a flawed language because it doesn't have a ternary op, or that it should have "stronger CS fundamentals" or any of that. It's just a side aspect or a different, larger point I was making).
is pythons form of ternary expression and semantically equivalent other then pythons truthiness boolean testing of objects(empty collections, 0, empty strings, False, None, 0 timedelta evaluate to False, also objects where obj.__nonzero__() returns False (in python3 __nonzero__ is renamed to __bool__)).
I'd like to bring up that while it's a matter of opinion the older ugly ?: syntax is much less readable even when you memorize it. I never use ?: syntax ternary expressions in languages that have them because I always have to look it up. That's why a number of languages prefer python-like versions or forms which emphasize to an even larger degree the fact that its just an if-else as an expression to an even larger degree(so I'd question that it's standard, I'm not 100% it's older either as I think the LISP version is closer to the python version).
When first learning python (Shaw's The Hard Way maybe), it suggested this idiom as python's ternary operator:
boolean and true_branch or false_branch
and explained that boolean=true would make it check and return true_branch, while false makes it check the other side of the or.
This is parallel to the standard C one. I'm surprised no one has mentioned it, but I guess that makes sense because it's not very explicit about what it's doing, which goes agains the spirit of python. Probably not very common for python programmers to use.
if cond1:
if cond2:
x = 12
else:
x = 11
else:
x = 13
That way you can debug it more easily (because you can trace execution rather than printing out the values that cond1 and cond2 depend on and figuring out in your head which way the ternary will go).
This also removes ambiguity in the case where you might want to assign to x some falsey thing like None or [] or zero:
>>> y = None
>>> x = False or ( y or False )
>>> x
False
The above code depends on the value of y for control flow. Clearer is to use syntax for control flow and not abuse falsey-ness or truthiness.
>>> print [bool(f) for f in [None, 0, 0.0, [], ()]]
[False, False, False, False, False]
If you really do want to test the falsey behavior, IMHO it's much, much clearer to branch on bool(the_maybe_falsey_thing) rather than just the_maybe_falsey_thing.
>If you really do want to test the falsey behavior, IMHO it's much, much clearer to branch on bool(the_maybe_falsey_thing) rather than just the_maybe_falsey_thing.
Maybe if you never program in python. Otherwise it makes absolutely no sense to do so because its obvious that every value is evaluated for its boolean value.
I met with the *Chief talent officer (had to look up this title from my original schedule with them...) for one of my interviews and she spent half the time telling me why the stock price was so low "We were high on a $300 share price and thought we were gods." Then, the other half telling me her favorite firing stories. I don't know what the purpose of all of this was but it gave me the impression that HR/head of HR needed to demonstrate how important they are in the company.
One of my potential colleagues interviewed me and gave me a fizzbuzz question. I successfully answered it. He then asked me to rewrite it with some restrictions. I did this. Then he asked me to do it one more time. I wasn't familiar with the python syntax for if-else shortcut (e.g., x = 100 if y is True else 0) and so couldn't rewrite it to his liking. This lack of familiarity with this python trick resulted in feedback at the end of the interview that I did not have a deep enough understanding of computer science.
I honestly could tell that the interviewer giving me the fizzbuzz questions wasn't clicking with me personally. That's fine, and I completely respect that it's a valid reason not to hire someone. However, because of this feedback, and the fact that the people at netflix generally liked me, they wanted me to work on some sort of data warehouse management team. I'm not sure why they would offer me a job so wildly different from what I was contacted to apply for, or why the syntax from one language would be considered representative of my knowledge of CS.
Overall, I think the experience of one person at a company is nothing more than an anecdote that can be entertaining, perhaps moderately informative, but it's not a complete picture. There are many stories out there about people interviewing with or working for Netflix. If you are seriously interested in the company, read a lot of those stories, discount all of them as biased, and then see for yourself by talking to them.