It is a way to filter a lot of people with excellent knowledge and experience. Bugs can be easily fixed by carefully checking and testing. It simply takes a bit more patience to make code solid in production. For me this is definitely not a red flag in interviews, especially if candidate can recognize and fix right away. Facebook people: what do you think??
They do? I had a friend that interviewed and accepted an offer that said he wrote quite buggy code. The important point was that he took the right approach to the problem, not that he was off by one, or forgot to initialize something.
I know people getting hired in Facebook for their specific domain knowledge...and not too much stress was put on coding skills
If a candidate can recognize and fix right away that's a plus not a minus. Not knowing you have a bug even after running through a test case with an interviewer is a big minus. Seems fair to me.
Yeah I agree, I don't remember my interview much but I highly doubt I wrote bug free code the first try on all my questions.
Because there are too many candidates
The real answer.
It doesn’t
The people who think Facebook wants perfect, bug-free compilable code straight up are the people whose main tool in college exams was memorization, and who thought the exam wasn't fair if it gave them too many problems that were new, but solvable with the understandings from the class. :P
^ I would expand this to include people who say algo/DS style interviews are “all luck”
My experience with FB is same as described by OP. I went for tech screening onsite in Seattle. Interviewer who was a recent graduate gave me a question which was a variant of word ladder. I solved it well. I also told him edge cases that are missed due to lack of time. I got a rejection. Recruiter told me that I did not declare function correctly. Actually I used C# reference parameter syntax that interviewer was not aware of. Another reason was missing edge case that I have verbally told him.
Explains why nobody wants to join msft over Facebook
Fuck Facebook Fucked me over for single coding mistake That to by someone who has been writing php code his entire life which is 3yrs
Simple answer is there is no way to measure knowledge and experience in a short time frame. And that is assuming interviewer has domain knowledge that you have to test you.