I’m also a self-taught programmer, and have never worked in the field (I spent ten years as a piano teacher, and now am earning an MS degree in wet lab biomedical engineering). I’m curious—I looked at the fizz buzz test, and it says it filters out the “99.5%” of programming applicants who “can’t program their way out of a wet paper bag.”
I was expecting something challenging, but it’s a ludicrously simple problem. Is the “99.5%” figure massively hyperbolic, or are a pretty large fraction of programming applicants really that incompetent? It would be nice to gauge the competition if I ever wanted to get a job in the area.
One thing to keep in mind: If you sample by interview rather than by candidate—which is how an interviewer sees the world—the worst candidates will be massively overrepresented, because they have to do way more interviews to get a job (and then again when they fail to keep it.)
(This isn’t an original insight—it was pointed out to me by an essay, probably by Joel Spolsky or one of the similar bloggers of his era.)
It may be entirely a myth, or may have been true only long ago, or may be applicable to specific sub-industries. It doesn’t have anything to do with my experience of interviewing applicants for random Silicon Valley startups over the last decade.
There is a grain of truth to it, which is that some people who can muddle through accomplishing things given unlimited tries, unlimited Googling, unlimited help, unlimited time, and no particular quality bar, do not have a clear enough understanding of programming or computing to accomplish almost anything, even a simple thing, by themselves, on the first try, in an interview, quickly.
I’m also a self-taught programmer, and have never worked in the field (I spent ten years as a piano teacher, and now am earning an MS degree in wet lab biomedical engineering). I’m curious—I looked at the fizz buzz test, and it says it filters out the “99.5%” of programming applicants who “can’t program their way out of a wet paper bag.”
I was expecting something challenging, but it’s a ludicrously simple problem. Is the “99.5%” figure massively hyperbolic, or are a pretty large fraction of programming applicants really that incompetent? It would be nice to gauge the competition if I ever wanted to get a job in the area.
One thing to keep in mind: If you sample by interview rather than by candidate—which is how an interviewer sees the world—the worst candidates will be massively overrepresented, because they have to do way more interviews to get a job (and then again when they fail to keep it.)
(This isn’t an original insight—it was pointed out to me by an essay, probably by Joel Spolsky or one of the similar bloggers of his era.)
(EDIT: found it. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/27/news-58/ )
That’s an interesting insight, thanks!
It may be entirely a myth, or may have been true only long ago, or may be applicable to specific sub-industries. It doesn’t have anything to do with my experience of interviewing applicants for random Silicon Valley startups over the last decade.
There is a grain of truth to it, which is that some people who can muddle through accomplishing things given unlimited tries, unlimited Googling, unlimited help, unlimited time, and no particular quality bar, do not have a clear enough understanding of programming or computing to accomplish almost anything, even a simple thing, by themselves, on the first try, in an interview, quickly.