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Imran On Tech
Personal blog · imranontech.comprogrammingcareer
Imran On Tech is a personal blog at imranontech.com about programming and career. Since 2008, 24 different Hacker News readers have linked it 31 times, most often “Using FizzBuzz to Find Developers Who Grok Coding (2007)”. The last post was in 2008, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (26) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Imran On Tech mostly for its 2007 FizzBuzz post on screening programmers, and also for posts on the origin of 'hacker' and on copyright of algorithms.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 26 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Musings on technology, development, and the world in general
Most-linked posts?
- Using FizzBuzz to Find Developers Who Grok Coding (2007)11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2010-03-24
- /2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-11-19
- The Etymology of "Hacker"4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2008-04-01
What Hacker News says?
It is. There are a lot of really bad programmers out there. However, you're probably not looking at the places where such programmers would apply... try an entry-level job here in Uruguay (pay: about U$ 800 / month after taxes), you'll get a lot of people that fail fizz-buzz . The original poster (Imran Ghory) was from the UK, and Reginald is from Canada. Neither are Silicon Valley. http://imranontech.com/2007/01/24…
Comment linking /2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/
on “Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code”Submitted The Etymology of "Hacker" as a story · 5 points
HN discussionWorry not! Your gravitation is well-founded. The earliest documented use of 'hack' is from "AN ABRIDGED DICTIONARY of the TMRC LANGUAGE", written in 1959 by Peter Samson. (TMRC was the Tech Model Railroad Club of MIT.) The definition was itself a playful example of what it was defining: HACK: 1) something done without constructive end; 2) a project undertaken on bad self-advice; 3) an entropy booster; 4) to produce,…
Comment linking /2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/
on “Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp”Submitted Why some companies need superstar developers and others don't as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> You have to make the question very easy to account for nerves. What's funny is that this current madness all started with Joel Spolsky [0] complaining that "199 out of 200 programmers can't code", which ultimately lead to the development of the now famous "FizzBuzz" [1] (is it still famous?) which was meant to be exactly what you're describing: Just a simple test that you can write a program from scratch. It's als…
Comment linking /2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/
on “Live coding interviews measure stress, not coding skills”Submitted Using FizzBuzz to Find Developers Who Grok Coding (2007) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is not a Japanese-only thing. It is a thing so common in America that there is a named test to detect it -- FizzBuzz [+] -- and this test, or one like it, actually catches many people out . [+] c.f. Any of the following and note that they're from the nation of, ahem, conventional engineering culture: http://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-dev... http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmer…
Comment linking /2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/
on “On Secretly Terrible Engineers”Submitted Are algorithms copyrightable? (2006) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionOne comment mentioned "Fizz-Buzz" which I hadn't heard of. Interesting tidbit. http://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-dev...
Comment linking /2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/
on “"Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."”Submitted Using FizzBuzz to Find Developers who Grok Coding as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> For those that don't know, Fizz Buzz is less an aptitude test and more of an attitude test. The articles which popularised FizzBuzz as an interview question stated as a categorical fact that most computer science graduates or programmer candidates (one article even said 199/200!![2]) cannot do FizzBuzz[1,2,3] and were absolutely recommending it as an aptitude test. I personally think this whole thing was simply un…
Comment linking /2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/
on “Solving Fizz Buzz with Cosines”It also says he reads blogs like coding horror. I believe it refers to http://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-dev... (made popular by http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer... ) Fun thing to say on HN... maybe not so good for a conversation with random person trying to hire you ;)
Comment linking /2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/
on “Ask HN: Desperate Python Hacker Seeking Help and Suggestions”> I still don't trust the "Most coders can't do FizzBuzz" meme that generally accompanies the flowery you're-a-special-snowflake-talk. Well of course, such talk misses the point. A "Coder" who can't do Fizzbuzz isn't a coder, or a programmer, or a hacker, or a computer scientist. It's a negative test, if you can't do it, then your not ready for a real programming gig yet. From http://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using…
Comment linking /2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/
on “You Are the Exception to the Rule”I'm going off of the standard treatment of the problem, from people who do a ton of interviews: http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ http://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-dev... My reading is that the scaffolding isn't the problem, writing that loop and conditional, within the margin of error of what compiler errors / an IDE can tell you to fix, is the problem. So essentially…
Comment linking /2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/
on “I worked at Amazon to see if anything's changed”> The entire point of FizzBuzz, as a programming practice, is to ensure the programmer does not try to write this exact code No, the point of FizzBuzz, which is an interview practice is to make sure that the candidate has literally the minimum ability to translate a natural-language problem description into code. There is no point using it for anything else. Not demos of languages or tools, not looking for a particu…
Comment linking /2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/
on “Beads: Computer language and toolchain”http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/studying-for-job-interview...
Comment linking /2008/04/01/studying-for-job-interviews-isnt-cheating/
on “140 Google Interview Questions”Interesting dilemma. I had assumed that re-writing in another language basically meant you were copyright free (as long as you're not literally transcribing or automatically translating), but it appears it's not that simple: http://imranontech.com/2006/12/04/are-algorithms-copyrightab...
Comment linking /2006/12/04/are-algorithms-copyrightable/
on “Seaborn: a high-level Python interface for drawing statistical graphics”Historically fizzbuzz was meant as a sanity check. Can this dev code a simple for loop with some conditionals in it? It was made up because some dev realized that too many poor candidates were making it to late stages of his hiring process. It’s not meant to make candidates stand out, it’s meant to be a practical filter. My personal experience as a dev is that my weakest teamates would visibly deflate anytime a work…
Comment linking /2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/
on “Routing the Technical Interview”> ... can't remember a simple trick like that What "simple trick"? The original point of FizzBuzz is not to check that the interviewee produces hyper-efficient code that avoids repeating the divisibility checks (or, for that matter, to check that they repeat the divisibility checks and are able to defend why that's simpler). It's to check that they can write down any solution at all (within reason [1]). Doing that d…
Comment linking /2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/
on “Coding Interview Preparation Bootcamp”fizzbuzz is an oft cited example of a simple test: Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”. http://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-dev...
Comment linking /2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/
on “How Effective are Technical Interviews?”My experience has been that "grok" as used by coders is synonymous to "understand", with the caveat that it's used to indicate in-group membership in the hacker community. It is rarely used in the original, Heinlein sense. For example, http://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-dev... is titled "Using FizzBuzz to Find Developers who Grok Coding", but at best FizzBuzz can tell if someone had a basic und…
Comment linking /2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/
on “The Mystery of the Deterministic Super Shotgun”It started meaning that. http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/
Comment linking /2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/
on “Change.org Petition: Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'”"cracker" was invented as a derogatory neologism to attack one group of people that called themselves "hackers" by another group of people that called themselves "hackers". That ship sailed approximately with the first documented use of the word "hacker": http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/ This petition is bad and its creator should feel bad.
Comment linking /2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/
on “Change.org Petition: Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'”Earliest recorded usage of the term "hacker" in a technology context: ---- 1963 The Tech (MIT student newspaper) 20 Nov. 1 Many telephone services have been curtailed because of so-called hackers, according to Prof. Carlton Tucker, administrator of the Institute phone system. … The hackers have accomplished such things as tying up all the tie-lines between Harvard and MIT, or making long-distance calls by charging t…
Comment linking /2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/
on “Change.org Petition: Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'”The term "hacker" has multiple meaning, and the use of hacking to manipulate a phone system is not only valid but was also the original use of the term when it originate at MIT in the 1960s. http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/
Comment linking /2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/
on “Most people have no idea what the word hacker means”"the common media use is more ancient than ours" ^ That is by no means a settled debate. Even in the comments section of the link you produce as evidence ( http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/ ) there is plenty of debate on the conclusions. You should have just ended after suggesting that hte debate is pretty much unresolvable. :-D And just to be up front about the whole thing -- I prefer the non-…
Comment linking /2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/
on “Hackers Send Emails to Sony Employees”Let's agree that this semantic debate (previously on HN [1]) is pretty much unresolvable. A word can have multiple meanings, and the common media use is more ancient than ours. [2] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7838663 [2]: http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/
Comment linking /2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/
on “Hackers Send Emails to Sony Employees”send me a list of questions an I'll write a blog post answering them :-) (I'm the author of http://imranontech.com/ and am creating a developer recruitment startup)
Comment linking /
on “So, you need a job? Man, do resumes suck”Apparently, FizzBuzz ( https://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-de... . A nice page about it: https://www.tomdalling.com/blog/software-design/fizzbuzz-in-... ) is a useful test to weed out bad programmers. If so, this can, too.
Comment linking /2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/
on “Most candidates cannot solve this interview problem”Syntax is the easy part. The hard bit is abstraction, as proved by FizzBuzz[1]. The core syntax of a language like Ruby or Python can be learned in a couple of hours. Learning to write useful, maintainable software takes years. How do you create an intuitive, visual representation of recursion? Iteration over an array? The task isn't creating a visual representation of current programming paradigms, it's creating a…
Comment linking /2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/
on “Ask HN: Why has visual programming not caught on?”
