Re:Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews
by ciceryadam on Thursday September 17, 2020 @07:22AM
(#24503262)
In my case I failed at fizzbuzz because I was interviewing after spending a full day merging 2 versions of dbdumps into one, while getting rid of duplicate entries/foreign keys, etc. I could still do a pseudo code version of it, but I couldn't remember modulo function. At all.
From that page:
> We can't understand why so many people "fail" the Fizz-Buzz test unless we understand why it is "hard" (for them).
But the article doesn't even talk about the environment, which is what it's all about.
It's hard "for them" because they're being asked to write the code on a whiteboard, with a job/income on the line, with stress and anxiety dialed up to 11, with someone breathing down their neck watching, while expected to simultaneously provide cheerful ongoing commentary to "show how they think".
Under those conditions, I totally believe close to 100% perfectly competent developers will fail at it. But of course it has nothing to do with the programming part.
Most of us have heard of FizzBuzz while chillin at home reading articles and immediately thought "that can't be hard" and tried it and indeed it is laughably easy. So we can't understand how "they" could fail at it because we didn't experience it under interview hazing conditions.
So the "them" is actually all of us.
To me that is the key takeaway of FizzBuzz.