Re:For the Love of God, Ask FizzBuzz
by queensnake on Sunday October 27, 2013 @06:44PM
(#6623974)
> even seemingly "senior-level" people (people with years of programming "experience" on their resume) have shown an inability to do basic coding from scratch.
I wouldn't have believed you a few months ago (and your statement is still stronger than my experience), but I've finally seen people who are so maintenance-bound, that even though they're good at _that_, they've never managed to learn the language (the corners, idioms, and semantics) they've been maintaining. It's probably a sign of heroism that they picked up enough to do so on the fly, but, you wouldn't hire them to write new code.
Having done hundreds of interviews, I'm sorry to say that even seemingly "senior-level" people (people with years of programming "experience" on their resume) have shown an inability to do basic coding from scratch. It seems there's a subset of developers who cobble stuff together and code-and-fix to make things work. This is ironically less of a problem with entry-level people.
Yes, if you have a public repo of code, I'll ask you about it, but I want to see you live code something, both to see the code you write and your thinking process about solving the problem. If you feel that's a waste of your time (and if you're truly senior-level, it really won't take very long at all), that's fine, but I will continue to do it.