I argue the contrary case - the interview style is pretty reasonable, but the interviewers screwed up the process (and ultimately, the grading).
"Adding additional requirements which test a candidate's ability to refactor code" is a pretty good exercise. And it's ok to force candidates people down a specific development path. The problem is that the interviewers didn't do this. They let the candidate pick a strategy the interviewers weren't expecting, then were disappointed with the results.
Actually we have no idea why the interviewers rejected the candidate. Maybe they were just as impressed with the solution as I am. Maybe the candidate presented poorly in other ways. Maybe they agonized over hiring this candidate vs someone else who was even more amazing, and could only afford one.
Ghosting the candidate is pretty inexcusable. But maybe it was just old fashioned corporate dysfunction and someone dropped the ball.
You do not need to waste 45 minutes of someone's time on whether they can correctly interpret and execute some joke requirements -- this is absolutely not the case. I interview a lot of people and most are bad programmers, despite having impressive resumes. 45 minutes of a progressively difficult programming exercise is a minimum.
--
All that said, there are red flags that make me question the veracity of the whole thing:
* Author claims to speak English very poorly, but writes incredibly well! Maybe they leaned on LLMs, but this seems pretty good even for an LLM.
* Author says they have 2 years of work experience in a company that doesn't use Typescript, but then proceeds to create a solution ad-hoc that requires incredibly deep knowledge of the type system. Certainly not impossible, but I don't know anyone that could pull this off.
* Author doesn't have a name. There's no contact information. I don't even know if I should write "he" or "she". Here's a viral calling card that would almost guarantee countless interviews (including from my company!) and they aren't capitalizing on it.
* There's nothing else on this domain, no link to a CV, nothing. It's a ghost.
The story is too good. I'm defaulting to skepticism.
> * Author claims to speak English very poorly, but writes incredibly well! Maybe they leaned on LLMs, but this seems pretty good even for an LLM.
The author claims their pronunciation is poor. Writing is a completely different skill. (Especially in English with its insane spelling rules.)
> * Author says they have 2 years of work experience in a company that doesn't use Typescript, but then proceeds to create a solution ad-hoc that requires incredibly deep knowledge of the type system. Certainly not impossible, but I don't know anyone that could pull this off.
Looking up the domain shows that OP's write-up was posted on reddit by a similarly named account with relatively little activity, but history going back a good 8 years. Sometimes people just haven't gotten around to setting up a full website with a portfolio, which is fine.
Been interviewing for over a decade. Tests like this do not really tell you whether someone is a good programmer, they tell you whether a person has spent a lot of time practicing problems like this. The only way to tell if someone is good at the job is to have a conversation with them and pay attention to how they answer your questions. Ask your candidate their opinions on API interface design or whether they favor mono-repos. A good candidate will be able to speak legibly and at length about these things. The problem is that in order to judge those responses you also have to be very knowledgeable. So instead we have stupid little tests designed to let interviewers of varying ability screen candidates.
I've been interviewing people for more than twice that long. I started with the conversational approach, and it worked poorly. There are too many people that are good at talking about technology but bad at actually doing.
My mature interview style is a pair programming session on a specific exercise (the same for everyone). It's inspired by the "RPI" (Rob's Pairing Interview) from Pivotal (well, Pivotal of old days). There are no gotchas to it, it's not hard. But it's definitely programming. Because that's what I'm hiring for. Not talking.
This story reads like concept art poking at our empathy to send us through an emotional journey.
I know my reading journey took me through the sadnesses of so many of the interviews in my life and the dysfunction that gets pushed in our industry. I have wondered whether this is part of psychological positioning and pre-negotiation or simply emotional, psychological, or/and organizational ineptitude.
I don't think any art has only one form or rendering. Certainly not one subject. That said, I am familiar. That one evokes awe and mysticism whereas this one seems more grounded in life and more relatable.
The post actually has a lot of small grammatical errors typical of someone not so fluent in English:
>> My reasoning went as follow: // My reasoning went as follows.
>> Is there any other numbers where this happens? // Are there any other numbers
>> I didn’t had paper at hand // I didn't have (any) paper on hand.
I'm not here to proofread a fun blog post but it's far from incredibly well-written English.
> that requires incredibly deep knowledge of the type system.
I think the solution needed more clever maths than deep knowledge of the type system---the type system knowledge can be self-studied from documentation. The clever maths, one can get used to if you Leetcode properly (you don't even need Leetcode Hard to get exposure to that).
If anything doesn't track in this respect, it's the claim that author doesn't have any kind of formal education. Not even high school? That will be extremely impressive. But maybe something got lost in translation there, or just careless exaggeration.
> Here's a viral calling card that would almost guarantee countless interviews (including from my company!) and they aren't capitalizing on it.
>> I don’t have anything to sell just yet, I am not a tech influencer so all you got was this post about a somewhat challenging FizzBuzz.
Yeah, not everyone is out to sell something, not every blog post is written as an opportunity to self-promote.
The story is definitely rather strange, even without taking into account the language barrier and the general absurdity of most tech interviews, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.
I didn’t even notice the typos when reading it... I did notice how well the text flows, how easy it is to read.
I (not a native speaker either) probably don’t make that many grammatical errors, but I envy their ability to just write. I can’t do that, I struggle with every word in long form writing.
These small errors are easily addressed with a final pass in e.g. DeepL Writer.
> I struggle with every word in long form writing.
So does every good writer. A full workload for a fast fiction writer is ~1000 words a day. That's, like, an aspiration for most full-time professional novelists.
There's a (probably legendary) story about Oscar Wilde telling someone who asked what he'd done that day, "I spent this morning putting a comma in, and this afternoon taking it out again."
Good writing is hard. LLMs may someday be able to write well, but they're nowhere near it yet. (They can write mediocre prose, which is considerably better than the median human, but I expect something like the 80-20 rule will come into play long before they're truly good.)
Anyway, I'm trying to tell you that you write well, and that you shouldn't feel bad (quite the contrary!) that you have to work at it.
"Adding additional requirements which test a candidate's ability to refactor code" is a pretty good exercise. And it's ok to force candidates people down a specific development path. The problem is that the interviewers didn't do this. They let the candidate pick a strategy the interviewers weren't expecting, then were disappointed with the results.
Actually we have no idea why the interviewers rejected the candidate. Maybe they were just as impressed with the solution as I am. Maybe the candidate presented poorly in other ways. Maybe they agonized over hiring this candidate vs someone else who was even more amazing, and could only afford one.
Ghosting the candidate is pretty inexcusable. But maybe it was just old fashioned corporate dysfunction and someone dropped the ball.
You do not need to waste 45 minutes of someone's time on whether they can correctly interpret and execute some joke requirements -- this is absolutely not the case. I interview a lot of people and most are bad programmers, despite having impressive resumes. 45 minutes of a progressively difficult programming exercise is a minimum.
--
All that said, there are red flags that make me question the veracity of the whole thing:
* Author claims to speak English very poorly, but writes incredibly well! Maybe they leaned on LLMs, but this seems pretty good even for an LLM.
* Author says they have 2 years of work experience in a company that doesn't use Typescript, but then proceeds to create a solution ad-hoc that requires incredibly deep knowledge of the type system. Certainly not impossible, but I don't know anyone that could pull this off.
* Author doesn't have a name. There's no contact information. I don't even know if I should write "he" or "she". Here's a viral calling card that would almost guarantee countless interviews (including from my company!) and they aren't capitalizing on it.
* There's nothing else on this domain, no link to a CV, nothing. It's a ghost.
The story is too good. I'm defaulting to skepticism.