5 ms·

How many interviews have you conducted? If the answer is more than 0, I feel you have gotten lucky in the candidates you interview or are far more selective on

by nmjohn 12y ago

How many interviews have you conducted? If the answer is more than 0, I feel you have gotten lucky in the candidates you interview or are far more selective on who you actually interview. If the answer is 0, then you would be incredibly surprised. It isn't quite as simple as this dialog is making it sound, but essentially, yes, a not-insignificant number of candidates cannot solve problems with a fizzbuzz level of difficulty. It is something that surprised the hell out of me as well. From what I have seen, there are many people with CS degrees who have written virtually no code outside of class and never have come up with an original program on their own. It is incredibly clear that programming is just not something they are passionate about.

wmkn 12y ago
I have done about a dozen or so interviews. I can totally imagine some people not being able to do a simple fizz buzz from scratch. But when they have full internet access and no one is watching them. "Solving" fizz buzz is then as simple as performing a search and copying the results. I'll probably get down voted because it seems people on HN are incredibly attached to the FizzBuzz story. Possibly I am totally wrong and I am too positive about the skills of people with a CS degree. But it seems the crazier the anecdote (full internet access, coding at home, etc.) the more eager people are to believe it.
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  Some people don't even know how to do Google searches. This suggests a productive interview question: ask your candidate a question that they could not possibly answer on their own, then provide them with an internet-connected box, and see whether it even occurs to them to use web search. It's not just programmers; I devoted twenty years to asking medical professionals why I have a constant, raging, unquenchable thirst. That's a symptom of the very worst kind of diabetes, so of course they'd order a fasting blood sugar test. "No doctor, it could not possibly be diabetes. If I had diabetes, I would have been dead twenty years ago." When the tests came back normal, the doctor would lose all interest in talking to me, then refuse to investigate further. Just a few years ago an emergency room resident who I never personally met, but was a member of one of the other websites I frequent, diagnosed it as Psychogenic Polydipsia - "Thirst of the Mind" - which is an uncommon side effect of the medicine I take for my schizoaffective disorder.
- nolok 12y ago
  I'm the parent who said the story (although parent I answered to was also using fizzbuzz it seems, which shows just how real it is) . And I totally understand what you mean, in that before I ran interviews I would probably never have believed it myself. Truth is, I think a lot of people in this field are not "bad" or "stupid", they simply don't care. That's what struck me the first couple of times, not that they failed fizzbuzz or to understand how simple of a problem it's supposed to be, but that they don't even copy it. At first you think it's a couple of bad apples, then you think you're really bad at choosing interviewee, then you get that no matter what, almost half of the people you see shouldn't even be working in that field. Frankly, it might not be politically correct to say that but running interviews had to be one of the best thing of my career for my self esteem.
- nolok 12y ago
  I'm the parent who said the story (although parent I answered to was also using fizzbuzz it seems, which shows just how real it is) . And I totally understand what you mean, in that before I ran interviews I would probably never have believed it myself. Truth is, I think a lot of people in this field are not "bad" or "stupid", they simply don't care. That's what struck me the first couple of times, not that they failed fizzbuzz or to understand how simple of a problem it's supposed to be, but that they don't even copy it. At first you think it's a couple of bad apples, then you think you're really bad at choosing interviewee, then you get that no matter what, almost half of the people you see shouldn't even be working in that field. Frankly, it might not be politically correct to say that but running interviews had to be one of the best thing of my career for my self esteem.
MichaelCrawford 12y ago
Caltech didn't offer any programming language courses at all when I majored in Physics there in the early eighties. One was expected to learn any required languages completely on one's own. I have only taken one CS class in my entire life, Caltech's CS 10, which is commonly taken by first year CS majors; I took it my second year. I found it quite puzzling that the CS majors were often stymied by the final project, which required us to write a full-featured GUI vector graphic editor. That was a tough project but I aced it. Many of the CS majors would go totally out of their minds trying to get their editors to work, but were unable to. When I entered the workforce after dropping out of school, I was quite concerned that the folks with CS degrees would eat my lunch, so I worked very, very hard to perfect my craft. However it was not long at all that I found that recent CS grads often knew very little about writing the kind of code that was required of coders in private industry. Consider that an algorithms class would teach all the common ways of sorting - quicksort, mergesort and so on. One is then expected to write a program that sorts an array of integers using quicksort, a second program that sorts the same array using mergesort, a third that uses insertion sort. None of these programs are very large. They're easy to debug. You're not expected to handle edge cases, like what would happen if someone unplugged the network cable while your program was running. In the kind of code that's sold for retail sale, or for eCommerce websites or what have you, you wouldn't be expected to implement quicksort, someone else would already have done that so you'd call a library function like the standard C library's qsort(). However what your code WOULD have to do, is handle all that nastiness like unplugged network cables. It's not that Computer Science schools could not teach that stuff. It's that they don't. Also, it's quite uncommon for CS students to collaborate on large projects. While I do know of it being done, it's uncommon. It would be very helpful, were CS students - at least occasionally - required to collaborate. Finally, many of the technologies which are of crucial importance to private industry, are of very, very little interest to CS professors. I learned all about what most refer to as "Game Physics" in my upper-division physics studies, but I can't imagine a CS instructor wanting to teach her class about how to do, say, ad syndication.
- wallflower 12y ago
  > It's not that Computer Science schools could not teach that stuff. It's that they don't. Yes, this is the classic Academics v. Industry gap you see everywhere. Teachers in an accredited program that leads to certification spend most of their time studying theory on psychology, child development, learning, and (now more than often) special education. When they get to the point where they actually have to go student teach, they have lots of knowledge but lack practical experience. As someone who has tried teaching and knows lots of teachers, classroom management is the foundation for everything that happens in a classroom. In the whole 'teaching more people to code' momentum, the problem is usually that there is some perverse incentive to give the impression that coding is 'easy'. Coding, as most of us know, is by far, 'not easy'. In fact, for many of us, that fractal difficulty is the draw. The whole movement of teaching CS in high schools baffles me because, again, CS does not teach one how to code. I would much rather see AP CS go away and be replaced by something that teaches Scratch and other tools as a stepping stone to teaching youth to think computationally.

by nmjohn 12y ago

wmkn 12y ago

I have done about a dozen or so interviews. I can totally imagine some people not being able to do a simple fizz buzz from scratch. But when they have full internet access and no one is watching them. "Solving" fizz buzz is then as simple as performing a search and copying the results. I'll probably get down voted because it seems people on HN are incredibly attached to the FizzBuzz story. Possibly I am totally wrong and I am too positive about the skills of people with a CS degree. But it seems the crazier the anecdote (full internet access, coding at home, etc.) the more eager people are to believe it.

MichaelCrawford 12y ago
Some people don't even know how to do Google searches. This suggests a productive interview question: ask your candidate a question that they could not possibly answer on their own, then provide them with an internet-connected box, and see whether it even occurs to them to use web search. It's not just programmers; I devoted twenty years to asking medical professionals why I have a constant, raging, unquenchable thirst. That's a symptom of the very worst kind of diabetes, so of course they'd order a fasting blood sugar test. "No doctor, it could not possibly be diabetes. If I had diabetes, I would have been dead twenty years ago." When the tests came back normal, the doctor would lose all interest in talking to me, then refuse to investigate further. Just a few years ago an emergency room resident who I never personally met, but was a member of one of the other websites I frequent, diagnosed it as Psychogenic Polydipsia - "Thirst of the Mind" - which is an uncommon side effect of the medicine I take for my schizoaffective disorder.
nolok 12y ago
I'm the parent who said the story (although parent I answered to was also using fizzbuzz it seems, which shows just how real it is) . And I totally understand what you mean, in that before I ran interviews I would probably never have believed it myself. Truth is, I think a lot of people in this field are not "bad" or "stupid", they simply don't care. That's what struck me the first couple of times, not that they failed fizzbuzz or to understand how simple of a problem it's supposed to be, but that they don't even copy it. At first you think it's a couple of bad apples, then you think you're really bad at choosing interviewee, then you get that no matter what, almost half of the people you see shouldn't even be working in that field. Frankly, it might not be politically correct to say that but running interviews had to be one of the best thing of my career for my self esteem.
nolok 12y ago
I'm the parent who said the story (although parent I answered to was also using fizzbuzz it seems, which shows just how real it is) . And I totally understand what you mean, in that before I ran interviews I would probably never have believed it myself. Truth is, I think a lot of people in this field are not "bad" or "stupid", they simply don't care. That's what struck me the first couple of times, not that they failed fizzbuzz or to understand how simple of a problem it's supposed to be, but that they don't even copy it. At first you think it's a couple of bad apples, then you think you're really bad at choosing interviewee, then you get that no matter what, almost half of the people you see shouldn't even be working in that field. Frankly, it might not be politically correct to say that but running interviews had to be one of the best thing of my career for my self esteem.

MichaelCrawford 12y ago

Caltech didn't offer any programming language courses at all when I majored in Physics there in the early eighties. One was expected to learn any required languages completely on one's own. I have only taken one CS class in my entire life, Caltech's CS 10, which is commonly taken by first year CS majors; I took it my second year. I found it quite puzzling that the CS majors were often stymied by the final project, which required us to write a full-featured GUI vector graphic editor. That was a tough project but I aced it. Many of the CS majors would go totally out of their minds trying to get their editors to work, but were unable to. When I entered the workforce after dropping out of school, I was quite concerned that the folks with CS degrees would eat my lunch, so I worked very, very hard to perfect my craft. However it was not long at all that I found that recent CS grads often knew very little about writing the kind of code that was required of coders in private industry. Consider that an algorithms class would teach all the common ways of sorting - quicksort, mergesort and so on. One is then expected to write a program that sorts an array of integers using quicksort, a second program that sorts the same array using mergesort, a third that uses insertion sort. None of these programs are very large. They're easy to debug. You're not expected to handle edge cases, like what would happen if someone unplugged the network cable while your program was running. In the kind of code that's sold for retail sale, or for eCommerce websites or what have you, you wouldn't be expected to implement quicksort, someone else would already have done that so you'd call a library function like the standard C library's qsort(). However what your code WOULD have to do, is handle all that nastiness like unplugged network cables. It's not that Computer Science schools could not teach that stuff. It's that they don't. Also, it's quite uncommon for CS students to collaborate on large projects. While I do know of it being done, it's uncommon. It would be very helpful, were CS students - at least occasionally - required to collaborate. Finally, many of the technologies which are of crucial importance to private industry, are of very, very little interest to CS professors. I learned all about what most refer to as "Game Physics" in my upper-division physics studies, but I can't imagine a CS instructor wanting to teach her class about how to do, say, ad syndication.

wallflower 12y ago
> It's not that Computer Science schools could not teach that stuff. It's that they don't. Yes, this is the classic Academics v. Industry gap you see everywhere. Teachers in an accredited program that leads to certification spend most of their time studying theory on psychology, child development, learning, and (now more than often) special education. When they get to the point where they actually have to go student teach, they have lots of knowledge but lack practical experience. As someone who has tried teaching and knows lots of teachers, classroom management is the foundation for everything that happens in a classroom. In the whole 'teaching more people to code' momentum, the problem is usually that there is some perverse incentive to give the impression that coding is 'easy'. Coding, as most of us know, is by far, 'not easy'. In fact, for many of us, that fractal difficulty is the draw. The whole movement of teaching CS in high schools baffles me because, again, CS does not teach one how to code. I would much rather see AP CS go away and be replaced by something that teaches Scratch and other tools as a stepping stone to teaching youth to think computationally.