Debate over the formation of said standards in 3…2…1…(but at least it abstracts the problem from the CS domain.)

Most of what a developer DOES is listen to business problems and deal with pressure and discuss and deliver solutions to said problems. If you can’t do a simple iteration with substitution on the fly, well, you’re probably better off going into academia. I kid, but professional development may not be for you.

I think geeks suffer from an idealism that probably stems from the natural tendency to seek rigor. So when they interview, if a candidate fails to meet their parameters they get tossed in the 99% pile. What a waste.

In a job-hunting situation people are forced into self-aggrandizement. You’re trying to sell yourself and trade your time and experience for money. With all the competition out there and the positions that companies take when hiring people (an aggressive, “we only hire the top 1%” position), it’s no surprise to me that most applicants I’ve interviewed have padded their resumes. To me it seems perfectly natural.

I try and make a real connection with each person I interview. I like to disarm them and put it out on the table — a few questions about pointer arithmetic and I know they don’t actually know C. That’s fine if I’m hiring for a web developer position. I skip algorithms and most theory; web development is not brain surgery and all the positions I’ve hired for it are entry level anyway. So I just focus on what’s important and try to get a feel for whether they would get along with the other co-workers and be capable of contributing something other than headaches to the company.

It’s unreasonable to expect applicants to entry-level jobs to be top-class engineers and know everything you do. Even if it’s “just fizzbuzz.” Maybe they’ve just read up on the latest and greatest web framework and made a few websites on their own. How would they even be exposed to a simple program like fizzbuzz? Does it even matter if your business is building websites?

You just have to be realistic. Top-class engineers don’t build web sites. They build air-traffic control systems, industrial robots, and send satellites into orbit. Building dynamic web sites is easy and getting easier all the time.

Now I’m not discounting the problem all together: people are prone to self-aggrandizement in the job-seeking atmosphere companies are creating. After all, if you are just starting out, how cool would it be to work at some of the most visible companies on the web? The signal-to-noise ratio is undoubtedly high but I don’t see how adjusting your approach wouldn’t remove the problem all together.

My tip? If they sound like they’re younger than thirty and list more than two or three languages, take a look at the pile of resumes you still have to go through. If it’s a lot, you might want to skip past them. I value honesty highly and tend to prefer resumes that fit on one page and list only the attributes and experience relevant directly to the position I’m hiring for. This usually eliminates 99% of the pile before I even make interviews.

My problem w/ the Fizz Buzz example is that half the time I can’t remember that % is the mod operator since I rarely use it. I could see people getting nervous and choking if they can’t remember %. As an interviewer, I’d at least like to be able to separate out syntactic knowledge (not very important, especially for rarely used things) from ability to craft a simple algorithm (very important).

And yes, I’ve been programming for 30+ years and I still either need to look up what the mod operator is or rely on semi-magical muscle memory to produce it. If I think too hard about the syntax, I don’t know what it is but if I am working away at the algorithmic level it sometimes just comes out of my fingers.