I don't mind being asked "Hello World" or fizz-buzz, so long as things ramp up quickly from there.

If I'm interviewing for a senior position, and the interviewer insists on slogging through a bunch of trivia questions about algorithms and data structures, or, $DIETY forbid, trick questions, then that's usually an indication I'm wasting my time.

But I won't ever blame somebody for starting with the assumption that I might be a complete idiot, because I've seen too many people that could talk a good talk, but somehow couldn't code anything to save their life.

Aye, I'll do a FizzBuzz style question, but it totally changes the dynamic of the interview. Now the onus is on them to sell me the role. And it's going to be uphill.

Despite what I said up above, I have to admit it sometimes has that effect on me as well--although in almost all those cases FizzBuzz is followed up with more questions that aren't much more difficult.

I have to disagree with you. This isn't supposed to insult you and it can be prior to the in person interview.

I did an interview once and asked them to interchange the value of two variables in any language they wanted. In the end maybe 2 out of the 20 applicants that past our HR dept checks got through this.

This one only one question, I there was much harder questions on my test but none that I or another person on the team couldn't answer in less than 1 minute. It was a disaster and I ended getting forced to hire someone from that pool anyway. That hire didn't mesh well at all.

>I did an interview once and asked them to interchange the value of two variables in any language they wanted. In the end maybe 2 out of the 20 applicants that past our HR dept checks got through this.

That sounds insane!?! What kind of background did these guys have that let them througt the HR process?

Not all companies have an HR department, and those that do don't necessarily populate it with people who know code when they see it.

At my current job, I have six coworkers. At my previous one, I had three. What HR?

No, but the post I refered to specifically mentioned a HR department and the coding problem was very simple leading me to believe they had absolutely no coding experience.

I guess my point is that there has to be something wrong with the hiring process if 2 out of 20 applicants can't swap the values of two variables.

Either that or there's something very seriously wrong with CS programs. How can someone walk into an interview with a degree and fail something like that?

If the quality of candidates is that bad, then, OK, maybe I'm wrong about the "hello world" test. In my reality someone wouldn't even get an interview without evidence of prior non-trivial work. Hence my rejection of the "hello world" test.

I also recognize that if you are hiring massive numbers of people you need to mechanize things a bit. I couldn't see sitting down with someone, their laptop and a projector for an hour under those circumstances.

Thankfully that is not my world...at the moment.

I posit that some of it is just people lying. I had someone send in a huge perl script he claimed to be his own work yet failed that variable swapping test. Basically our setup was HR gets a bunch of resumes and scans for minimum requirements (degree, prior experience) then we get them. You get really good looking resumes that you need to prove somehow. That's where that basic litmus test comes in.

Things like Github improve this a bit although I'm not even a huge user of public github repos (something I'm working on fixing since I realize my online profile is a bit sparse at the moment). I don't it's perfect either as a lot of very good candidates don't have time or are shy to show they work in public. Heck I love working on my professional project in my spare time and can't show that code publicly most of the time.

> Either that or there's something very seriously wrong with CS programs

I've been involved in hiring. I've seen top uni CS grads fail (not borderline - train wreck) a programming exercise not much more complicated than fizzbuzz. And a variation: cheat on the exercise. I've interviewed people who clearly were not the authors of the code sample they'd submitted.

We administer the test online and the candidate can take it on their own time. A decent programmer can easily complete it in less than 20 minutes, a good one in five, and judging from the proportion of people who get it wrong, I'd argue it's a good filter to make sure we're not wasting each others time. And I think it goes both ways: It costs us very little to evaluate a response, so we can filter very lightly at the top of the funnel. The first round of interviews are much more costly, so if they were the first point of contact, we'd have to filter much harder on CVs, which isn't always fair to candidates who didn't take the beaten path (and excessively fair to candidate with good degrees).

It should be mentioned that we skip the programming exercise if a candidate come through a personal recommendation.

The way I read that, 2 out of 20 succeeded rather than failed. This doesn't greatly surprise me. Rockstar salaries have attracted so many idiots and frauds that we have to sift a massive number of candidates to find any that aren't useless. And the only evidence I could accept is someone I know and trust saying they personally saw you get through non-trivial work. Anyone else needs to show me they can solve a toy problem they didn't come in prepared for.

I once interviewed a CS graduate who couldn't even tell me what an integer was. I was tempted to write a letter of complain to the university in question.

I'll add to that. I am far more interested in how a programmer thinks and how they might attack and evolve a problem. For example, let's say that they wrote some GA code. Show me the first version. Explain it. Then show me the evolution of the code and how (and why) you optimized it and what results you got. Tell me where you made mistakes and why. Tell me what you'd do differently next time.

That sort of thing would tell me a lot more about someone than the procedure delineated in the article.

I see what you're saying, but if it helps filter out that much cruft from the interview pool then I think its harmless, as long as the stupid questions end there.

However, if someone sought me out on linkedin or Stack overflow careers and put this in front of me ... I'd facepalm them

> If someone asked me to write a "Hello world" program in an interview I'd get up and leave (or hang up the phone). It's an insult.

Yep. "Programmer" is a low-prestige job. Nobody would ask a plumber to connect two pipes.