This is one of those moments where citing a source (that experiment) would be incredibly useful...

I wish my Googling skills were stronger, but alas, they are not.

I remember one of the other key takeaways was that the manager role was treated more favorably--specifically that they apologized they could only offer some (reasonable) amount of relocation assistance while none was even offered in the developer role. It was theorized that managers were seen as an "in group" among other managers, but that was obviously just speculation.

I wasn't on HN at the time, so I can't confirm it was here. It was one of those blog posts / write-ups that made the rounds.

I think it was a blog post by Michael O Church, though I don't have the reference to hand.

I managed to dig it from archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20160113210613/https://michaeloc...

That's the one! Thank you so much.

I would think it isn't that managers are an in-group but are peers, even if a manager helps hire another manager that hire can be a potential problem for them if they feel slighted, but if the developer feels slighted - well the developer is subservient, not a peer.

> and there's more genuine fear of hiring someone who can't fizzbuzz.

I always hear this fear proclaimed but have never heard an actual story of a candidate failing to fizzbuzz, would love to hear an anecdote or two from anyone who has one.

I have both once failed fizzbuzz in an interview and gotten offers from FAANG companies (different interviews, obviously). At the time I failed the fizzbuzz, I even knew it was a fizzbuzz question i.e. I'd read Jeff Atwood or Joel Spolsky's blogpost introducing the concept. I just got very very nervous. I work at Google now.

There's not much to say really. I think people for like me who get very nervous at live coding interviews, the variation between best and worst performance can be massive.

I've never asked anyone fizzbuzz, but I have seen people badly flub very easy algorithm questions that are basically at the same level.

In every case it was because they over-complicated things. They came up with elaborate logic that they didn't need and then got lost and didn't quite get to a working implementation. Picture, say, starting to implement fizzbuzz using two tries and an associative array.

I would guess that a lot of the people I've seen bomb these kind of interview questions are actually good, capable programmers, but they just got overwhelmed by interview nerves and got lost.

Not a candidate, someone we had already hired through an agency. Two someone’s actually. Never again.

They were great people, but couldn’t distinguish a string from an int.

That's pretty crazy, how do these people exist and get jobs? What kind of development were they supposed to be doing?

And what's the reason they were asked to do the fizzbugz test?

They weren’t asked until we had some internal hackathon where we were trying to implement tested fizz buzz in new languages we were working with.

Full stack Webdevelopment. Had 2 years of experience.

Yes it happens. I’ve interviewed people who couldn’t psuedocode an isOdd function after making sure they knew what an odd number is.