Who's Fizz Buzzin' Who?
Posted August 24, 2018
I came face-to-face with the ultimate developer filtering question and failed. But that doesn't mean my dreams of coding are doomed.
(In case you missed it, today's post is a tribute to the late, great, Aretha Franklin's iconic 80's sass anthem "Who's Zoomin' Who?" If you find the track stuck in your head, just grab your leg warmers and click that 80s-ified image above. You're welcome.)
Consider me filtered
According to this random code nerd wiki, the Fizz Buzz test is "designed to help filter out the 99.5% of programming job candidates who can't seem to program their way out of a wet paper bag." We covered it in my coding program, and I never got it to work. Apparently, I've met my white whale, and it has a lot of Zs in it.
The guy who wrote that wiki admits he never took the test. How do I know the author's sex? Because women developers aren't smug enough to use the royal "we," as in: "We can't understand why so many people "fail" the Fizz-Buzz test unless we understand why it is "hard" (for them)." So while he's right about the weeding-out factor, he can't honestly explain "this is how I conquered it in a 'no resources allowed' test when I had a million new concepts in my head and still relied on Google to refresh my memory when I hadn't thought about one in awhile."
As a neophyte developer, I can say that such insights would be infinitely more helpful than an ever-scrolling page of the solutions all the cool developers already know. If there really is a developer "community," it can't be a veterans-only organization. And its elders need to remember that belittling and sarcasm are not conducive to learning in any environment.
A note to my future savvy developer self
As a wise Successory poster once said, "If you never fail, it's because you never tried." In other words, this little setback won't stop you from landing a developer role because you've worked too hard to prepare for it and you've already come so far. But on that future day when you, too, can articulate Fizz-Buzz logic as though it's as simple as drawing breath, remember that day — so long ago — when Question 1 on your coding test prompted you to mutter under your breath "You've got to be $#%^*& kidding me!"
And one more thing, future awesome developer self: When it comes to coding knowledge, never forget to pay it forward. After all, behind every great developer are instructors, mentors, TAs, tutorial writers, or just nerdy friends who knew more than you and shared their knowledge rather than lauding it over you. And when you write something out to help new developers grasp a concept, never — and I mean NEVER — refer to yourself as "we."