I thought the 'FizzBuzz' test was a silly joke until I tried to hire someone

I needed help with a simple web project and put out a call for a junior coder. A friend told me to give them the FizzBuzz test, which I thought was a waste of time. The first person I talked to, who had a nice portfolio, couldn't write a loop that printed numbers from 1 to 100. They got stuck for a full 10 minutes. It was a real eye opener about the gap between what people say they can do and what they can actually write. Has anyone else been surprised by a simple coding test?

3 comments

3 Comments

john_cooper28d ago

Yeah, a buddy of mine runs a small shop and needed a simple script to rename some files. He asked a guy who said he knew Python to write a few lines that looped through a folder. The guy spent an hour and couldn't get past the import statement. My friend ended up just doing it himself in five minutes. It really showed how some people just freeze up when they have to actually write code from scratch.

riveradams28d ago

Man, that's wild... @john_cooper's story reminds me of a guy who said he could fix my website's contact form. He spent forty minutes just trying to find where the HTML file was on the server. I had to walk away.

sean_hill921d ago

Heard about a guy who claimed he knew SQL. My friend asked him to pull a simple list of customer emails from their test database. The guy opened the query window and just stared at it for twenty minutes, then asked how to start a SELECT statement. My friend said it was like watching someone forget how to use a fork.