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This is a tired topic at this point. The mistakes people make are:

1. An interview proces exists to fill a position. It doesn't exist to fairly assess an individual candidate. Candidates would like that. That's not the point. If there are 10 candidates and the employer fills the role successfully, they've achieved their goal even if someone great was filtered out;

2. FizzBuzz came about because many people talked a great game but couldn't code a flor loop. Giving a simple coding problem is an excellent negative filter. Doing great at the problem means nothing; and

3. Interviewers make the mistake of thinking FizzBuzz is too easy so they give harder problems. This is a mistake that defeats the entire purpose of the filter. Stop doing this.

These points remain constant in every such engineering hiring or interviewing thread.



And even FizzBuzz could end up challenging if you happen to have no familiarity with the modulus operator -- which isn't that implausible for junior programmers.


A simple problem with constraints can be really fun. For example, implement FizzBuzz without using any looping constructs.


The variant of fizzbuzz that I use is "read and categorize a line at a time from stdin."

You'd be amazed how this one small change makes the discussion quite different.


In your variant do the integers increase in order?

Also is the input always integers or is there some “junk” mixed in?


It doesn't even matter, but sometimes I ask them to do a sliding window de-dupe.

A surprising number of people have a lot of trouble with the reading loop/termination condition.


>An interview proces exists to fill a position

That's really not how it works in Big Tech. The company is ravenous for anyone and everyone in the world who clears "the bar." Requisitions and headcount quotas are a way of apportioning bar-clearing candidates among teams/EMs, but the company never reaches some state of having filled the open positions and being done with hiring. And as an individual engineer, you're expected to help interview for sister teams (sometimes quite distantly related) so you never do either.

Even when hiring for my own team I have never seen a discussion like "okay we've seen 7 candidates for this role, let's pick the best one." It is always just take it or leave it for each candidate as they come. The goal is to get as many people as possible in the door. Making the interview easier would fit our goals quite well, it's just a social taboo, so instead we do things like cast a wider net and spend more hours interviewing.




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