This would concern me that you don't validate your input. Just because the contract says something doesn't mean that's what you are getting. Trust, but verify. I trust that your CV is accurate, so I'm giving you a test that won't take up too much of either of our time to verify that you can code. Why? Because I've seen enough CVs better than yours where people can't do FizzBuzz.
Not wanting to FizzBuzz is also concerning because if it's a proven method of validation, why spend extra time and resources on something more that will only tell you the same thing?
So, to me at least, your antagonism here is really you wanting to waste resources and/or not validate input. Neither are good signs.
> Did you get 5th grader questions on your university exams as well?
If a 5th grader question is good enough to answer something, why bother with a 3-hour exam?
No, I want you to give me properly challenging questions to prove you deserve to be my employer (as I will be doing the hard work to make you a gazillionaire). FizzBuzz tells me you read one article a few years ago, didn't think about it at all (why could that be a problem?), and now give it left and right to anyone that has the bad luck of interviewing with you. You are telling me you are arrogant, prideful and lazy.
The interviewer has multiple responsibilities, one of them is candidate experience. If I start with the "challenging" question and the candidate isn't ready, then I learn nothing other than they can't do it and the candidate suffers, completely lost.
But, if I start with a middle-to-low bar question, then I can always get data and easily extend or follow-up the question with something more challenging appropriate to your skill & experience.
Except for the autoscaling group, all of this is basically networking 101. Their “resume” said they were “certified” and had experience. If you can’t get through the easy questions, no need to waste time on the hard questions.
If they didn't lie, then they wouldn't have gotten as far as they did. Everybody wants self-starters and people who can learn new things, but the person who already has experience in a laundry list of X, Y, and Z is always going to be preferred before you find out if they are a fraud.
What I did, in order to start doing something new that I didn't have experience in, was (although I didn't exactly plan it this way) to get a job that was explicitly administrative and did not involve programming and start automating it.
I don't think it's right or wrong that some people find IT culture (including interviews) intolerable, but the flow of people out of it shapes it. The more you rely (even unwittingly) on getting and keeping people who are ignorant there's something better out there, the more the ignorant (and/or incurious) shape your organization.
Putting my developer hat on. I interview a “senior developer”
They say on their resume that they have “used AWS”. Come to find out that all they have done was remoted into some EC2 instances.
They say they have used a certain CI/CD platform. I ask them have they set a pipeline up from scratch. They say no - someone else did it, we are expected to “own the whole stack” including setting up our own pipeline for our microservice. Not a deal breaker. That can be learned in a day. We have plenty of samples they can copy from existing pipelines for almost every scenario.
They put down databases they are experienced with. I give them a scenario and I ask them to model a table schema with it. They can’t do it. They are usually handed a table schema by the “database developers” [sic].
So finally I start working my way up to the actual development and I realize that because they were just a cog in the wheel at BigCorp, they never got a chance to design or write anything from scratch. They never had the joy of creating a brand new repo and doing a git commit with the message “initial commit”. Not horrible, but at a small company, you don’t get any handholding. You’re expected to work directly with the semi-technical product owner or even the end user if you’re senior enough. You are the Directly Responsible Individual.
So now, it’s demo day. The “senior developer” is demoing his code to management who is asking him questions and he melts under pressure or he gets defensible about “his code” and interrupts the CxO.
I want to know his temperament before I hire him.
I know people are going to say it’s not “fair” to expect that from a developer. I’ve had to learn every level of the stack. At some point you can’t call yourself a “senior developer” if you don’t know anything about the underlying infrastructure for your code or how to deploy it.
The next pushback I get is that J don’t remember what’s its like being a junior developer. Six months into my first job I was told to write a distributed data entry system that was going to be used to create a new department in the company. I had to sink or swim by myself - this was over two decades ago.
This seems to not jibe with the rest of your comment. You were defending not giving someone a chance to dive in, and then you say you had to learn to swim on your own.
Now, perhaps your point is that such a person should have the humility to classify themselves as something less than a senior developer, and then get that experience similar to you.
However, I wonder if the issue is that anybody with more than a couple years of experience is considered to be a pariah if they aren't a senior developer, which goes hand in hand with everybody inflating their experience in a vicious cycle.
I was the only one that knew how to program on staff.
So yeah, taking a job as a computer operator took a lot of humility. But, it was either that or be stuck in a small city doing COBOL programming.
Even today, it took a little humility to go from being the dev lead at one company, turning down a dev lead position at another company to become an IC who is officially under less experience team leads. But, I needed to fill in some gaps in my resume.
Off Topic: I think you are one of the few people on the internet that knows the word is “jibe” not “jive”.
- if when you looked at the job req and it said we were looking for C#/Java/Python/JavaScript developers and you wrote it in Haskell, that’s one signal that you probably won’t produce solutions that meet the customer’s need.
- if we are hiring Haskell developers and I can’t understand the code that means you write unmaintainable, over architected code and that you would still be a net negative for the company.