The previous candidate to me at a job a few years ago left the room in tears after not being able to write Fizzbuzz. On a laptop with Visual Studio installed, on their own in a an empty room with nobody looking over their shoulders. The same company said they'd had so many candidate, including university graduates, who simply couldn't code, that they were almost giving up on it.
Suddenly I feel like a fucking accomplished programmer, despite only doing some questionable stuff on Godot lately, but never messing up my loops... Not too badly anymore, anyway.
A fizzbuzz type of question I know I would mess up on the modulo operator. I know the logic is if the division of the current_number by 3 has a remainder of zero, write fizz, but I always look up the operator
Yeah it always feels like "negative logic" to me. If it's not this and not that then don't do the other... Does my head in. Next time I'm going to use a lookup table "x..f.bf..fb.f.." then mod15 the index. f=Fizz, b=Buzz, x=both. Nice thing about this is that it's easier to change with the requirements. Want to shift the second fizz right one? No problem "x..f.b.f.fb.f..". Good luck doing that with the standard approach. Add Gronk which collides with Fizz, Buzz or both at various times? Also no problem - just extend and modify the LUT accordingly and change the mod.
I can already hear people asking why x is at the start. Arrays are indexed from 0. FizzBuzz starts at 1. 15 mod 15 is zero. Loop N from 1-100, switch on lookup[N%15], case 'f' print Fizz, case 'g' print Gronk, case 'p' print FizzGronk and so on. The only "nice" original feature you lose is when both %3 and %5 fire at the same time and it prints FizzBuzz without any extra code.
Same, fizzbuzz was one of our tests. Nearly everyone messed it up. The telling part was how. We had a guy with 20 years of experience who demanded ample compensation write code that not only didn't compile, but it made little sense. A lot of people were pretty good bullshitters - then after the test they went "Yeah, well... That went bad huh?". We had a different, more difficult test that people could choose. We had one guy who did somewhat poorly on that... But asked to take the assignment home for his own sake. He was a very god hire. Not because he worked overtime or anything but because he cared.
I knew a dude who got a job for a programming language he never wrote. Not only that, the guy was hired to be the experienced / lead programmer to give guidance on how to use the language. In fact, I knew multiple people like this. Some were actual programmers and good at other programming languages, but some had decided it was time to switch from another field (geology, marketing, database engineer, ...).
Sometimes, aptitude and an ability to learn and grow is more valuable than having specific technology knowledge. It suggests a more generalist take on one's career, which means they are always going to be useful. There's also something to be said for "soft skills" and a person's overall attitude. All this can make the balance for a lack of technical experience, provided they have demonstrated talent an ability to close such gaps.
Other times, the whole hiring process is just completely broken. Your friend may have had to contend with co-workers that were utterly incapable at their jobs.
Sure! I'll hire you without even answering the questions. Of course I'm not the op, I dont work in the it field (any more) and none of my open positions involve programming... But you have a job with my company whenever you need one.
The last interviews I wrote the job posting for and conducted, I made it clear we give you a GPT4 subscription for the job so I expect you to demonstrate your ability to use it as a tool during the interview
Maybe next time, though, OP should read what OP posts before OO writes a title, as the content has nothing to do with PHP, its all sorts of languages (none of which PHP) and mostly javascript.
The content is pretty on point in general though, I've had the unfortunate luck of having dozens of developer candidates like that.
And oohh yeah, PHP sucks because everyone else says so and a blog post of 20 years ago said so too? That literally was the last argument I heard against PHP.
