Ask HN: What is a better approach to interviewing?
One thing about interviewing that surprises and confuses me is the number of people who seemingly can&#x27;t program despite working as programmers or having a master&#x27;s in CS.<p>My &quot;FizzBuzz&quot; coding question that I ask on phone screens is &quot;Write a function that takes a string and returns a list containing the most frequent character.&quot; It has a few clarifications that are needed and I expect the person to ask about (What if there is no most frequent character like in an empty string (return an empty list), multiple characters equally frequent (each equally frequent character should be in the returned list once), etc) and has some basic logic requirements.<p>I am continuously astounded when people can&#x27;t do this. I encourage them to use the language they&#x27;re most comfortable with. I give them time to think about the problem, encourage them to ask questions etc. If they seem stuck I&#x27;ll ask them to walk me through what they&#x27;re thinking about, etc.<p>I&#x27;ve had multiple people with master&#x27;s degrees in CS or with years of professional programming experience get stumped by this problem and it just makes zero sense to me. I took undergraduate CS courses and this would&#x27;ve been an easy problem in those classes. I was a TA in an undergraduate intro to programming course and I would&#x27;ve expected all of my students to be able to solve this problem in similar circumstances.<p>It seems to me like someone with a Master&#x27;s degree in math has come in and I&#x27;m asking them to &quot;solve for x&quot; in the kind of equation you might give to an eighth grader and they&#x27;re unable to do it.