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When it came time for a technical interview with the lead developer, I felt pretty confident. Except for JavaScript “engineering” and anything related to algorithms, my technical skills are sharp. We begin with a great talk about style guides, Sass, the designer/developer phenomenon, atomic design, content, all those awesome things that get me super stoked. Then came the coding portion. I was anticipating questions about nitty-gritty positioning, semantics, maybe some UI based JS stuff, and development workflow. The first question was:
Interviewer: Are you familiar with FizzBuzz?
Me: Um, to be honest, no.
Interviewer: Ok, well, you have to write a program where 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’. So it would look like ‘1, 2, Fizz, 4, Buzz, Fizz, 7, 8, Fizz, Buzz, 11, Fizz, 13, 14, Fizz Buzz’ -
Me: (OMG MATH. I tried to talk through it a bit, but then said:)
Me: Ok, again to be honest, my JS knowledge is more regarding UI/UX based tasks. And I don’t really understand the point of the question. Like, what’s the use case? When would this come up in the role?
(Only after recounting this interaction to a friend did I realize you should not ask “why are you asking me this?” in a job interview.)
Interviewer: Well, it’s an exercise in programmatic thinking. No worries, let’s move on to the next question. Write a function that takes a timecode string and turns it into seconds. -
Again I started talking through it, but it was impossible for me to figure it out with someone watching. I needed to do some serious Googling. He said I could email back my solutions. I toyed with the idea of calling up and saying, “forget it, this isn’t for me” but I decided to stick it out. After spending a few hours coming up with something that semi-worked, I found the solution on StackOverflow and, in my honesty, linked to it in the code.
Unsurprisingly, a few days after I sent my solutions I got a “you don’t have enough experience for the position, but we’d like to keep your resume on file”. In my impostor-prone state, I felt called out as a just-good-at-Googling-and-maybe-jQuery developer. I was embarrassed. -
After letting this self-doubt dissipate, a new emotion settled in: anger. FizzBuzz is a way to filter out fake programmers. I am fully aware that I am not a programmer, at least “programmer” in the sense of algorithms, data modeling, etc.
Who is writing these descriptions? I’m sure these companies find a perfect match now and again. But I have a feeling that’s not the norm. It’s more likely that many of these companies just don’t know what they need so they look for everything. A recruiter or HR person whips something up and puts it out there to see who bites. Maybe they’ll catch a unicorn!
What’s more, based on my (albeit minimal) job application experience, who knows what will happen in the interview? I imagine you’d talk to a real designer or developer with a much better idea of the situation, and who knows how well that matches the job description, let alone the interviewee’s skillset? -
@dooter I don't really get why they ask interview questions targeted at programmers when they are looking for a "UX Engineer / Interaction Designer" which is barely about programming, as far as I know.
I’ve been self-employed for the past three years. Though I did spend my first year out of college working for a three person, now-defunct startup, I’ve never had a typical 9-5 (or more like 10-8 nowadays) and to be honest, never really wanted one. Lara Schenck, LLC is a profitable business, and every day I do work that is enjoyable and challenging. I make my own hours, take vacations when I want to, and run everything on my terms.
While that’s all awesome, what you don’t get from working independently is the team experience. I base my work on teaching technical literacy to non-technical designers and content producers so that they can better communicate with developers. The theory is that if a designer understands why it’s a bad idea to request 18 fonts, and if content producers know why it’s not trivial to edit the titles of a set of related posts, life will be easier for everyone. At least that’s my theory, and the assumption on which I’ve developed my business.
Lately though, in a bout of the good ‘ol impostor syndrome, I’ve been feeling like, wait, how can I be telling people how to work on teams if I’ve never really worked on one? I’ve always been the ‘Lead UI/UX/Visual/Web/Front-end Designer-person-thing’, and have never worked for a larger company with separate teams for product, UX, marketing, content, frontend, backend, etc.
So I felt the urge to look for a job, and a seemingly perfect one fell into my lap. It was for an awesome company, and it sounded right up my alley skill-wise. The title was ‘UX Engineer/Interaction Designer’. I usually balk at the the term “engineer” (perhaps for good reason) but considering the presence of “designer” and the nature of the job post, I wasn’t too bothered.
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