Re:AI Detectors Falsely Accuse Students of Cheating–With Big...
by QuercusMax on Monday October 21, 2024 @12:54PM
(#41906027)
Back when I was at a small company doing a lot of new-grad interviews, it was really shocking how many people couldn't solve fizzbuzz or something equally trivial, like reversing an array in-place.
When I was at Google, most of these were filtered out before I got to see them, but for a while I was doing iOS development interviews and a lot of the candidates applying to Google clearly didn't know anything.
Re:AI Detectors Falsely Accuse Students of Cheating–With Big...
by Syonyk on Monday October 21, 2024 @01:03PM
(#41906087)
The first time I saw FizzBuzz, I immediately assumed it was some sort of "trap" or "trick" interview question - that there's some deviously subtle little thing in it that you'll miss at first or second glance, as a "gotcha." It literally never occurred to me that it was, in fact, a basic "Can you code your way out of a paper bag given a map?" sort of question to check for basic code competence in languages.
Then I started interviewing, and... yeah. I get it now. It really is that simple, should take a competent coder a few minutes, and 80% of people interviewing will take 45 minutes to muddle their way through it.
They aren't 'fair' in avoiding every false negative, but they at least tell me that the passing candidates know and can do something.
If I ask someone who claims to know Python or Java whether or not you can have a memory leak in them, and their answer is 'no' or 'Maybe, but I don't know how', I get a pretty good idea of whether or not they know anything about this topic.
If you can't do fizzbuzz, you probably aren't a good fit for a SWE position either, you should be aiming for something more director-level. Given how much people struggle with coding, I sometimes feel like I may as well ditch my regular question, and just ask them to write that.