My last post sparked some controversy in the comments on Reddit. Whilst the majority seemed on board, there was a sizeable minority who took umbrage. Two objections, in particular, caught my eye, because I think they both relate to the same underlying issue – adversarial interviews. In this (short) post, I’d like to explore this and explain my approach. Finally – unrelated to the bulk of this post, but too fun to ignore – let’s look at some of the wacky FizzBuzz implementations shared in the Reddit comments.
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FizzBuzz is FizzBuzz years old (and still a powerful tool)
This year marks 15 years since FizzBuzz was popularised as an interview tool for developers. I’m a big fan and have watched over 100 candidates try their hand at my version of the task. In today’s blog post I’d like to take a moment to celebrate what makes FizzBuzz so helpful, discuss some common patterns I’ve observed in the many attempts I’ve witnessed, and finally explore some tweaks that can be deployed to keep the challenge fresh.
Continue readingOnly the great die at 11 (RIP Stack Overflow Jobs)
Stack Overflow have announced they are going to kill off sunset their popular Jobs product. In this post, I talk about what Jobs was, why it was great, and why so many (myself included) will be sad to see it go.
9 things Westworld can teach us about software engineering
Watching Westworld recently, I couldn’t stop seeing parallels with software engineering. In particular, the series is rife with cautionary tales about how not to do software development. In this article, I’ll share 9 lessons we can take from the show to improve the effectiveness of software engineering teams – and hopefully prevent them from going “full Westworld”…
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