Really? Safer? How about writing things in languages that are more mature instead of hoping on the newest bandwagon.

But then how will you have the latest new toy?

so thats a solid no to open sourcing it?

It's not something I had intended to do, but I could do. That would make it much more manageable to scale because the community could maintain the algorithms, which takes long enough for the 24 sources I already have that I'm hesitant to add more right now.

It's written in C# though, I can see that being a problem.

I dont see it being a problem considering the big pushes that Microsoft has been making in to getting people into their language ecosystem.

is this open source?

I keep a notebook. I use it to take finer grain notes about tasks than can be expressed on a ticket. Also whenever I am going through an unfamiliar codebase I take hand written notes . I know there are a few iPad apps that are effectively an infinite whiteboard but I like to handwrite stuff.

This shows incredible promise for being used as the basis for an Event Store type database system.

I would have given him the job

If that were a real situation, I wouldn't have, he over-engineered the shit out of it and while cool, I prefer devs who can solve simple problems simply; they get more work done for the price.

This is not over-engineering. Defining a couple of functions to solve it would be over-engineering, like offloading Fizz to it's own function, Buzz to another one etc. Anything (deliberately) more is just comedy.

Training a neural network to solve fizzbuzz is over-engineering, fun over-engineering, but over-engineering none the less.

Depends on the position no? If you are looking for a developer sure. But if you are looking for an engineer, creative solutions are a plus.

Sometime it is better to hire for culture, someone who is intelligent but also, and this is critical, can take a joke.

Yeah, I suppose the guy wouldn't feel good in the company anyway. Personally, I wouldn't either. Sense of humour is an essential part of good dev environment, IMO.

Which is why I said if this was for real.

I prefer employers that don't treat me like a baby, so to each their own ;)

Well, when you give a hilariously bad interview question...

It's not a bad interview question, if you think it is, you perhaps haven't had enough experience with candidates applying to programming jobs who talk a good talk but can't program to save their lives.

Well, technically, as a programmer and not enterpreneur you shouldn't be expected to have "experience with candidates applying to programming jobs who talk a good talk but can't program to save their lives".

No one said programmers were expected to; however, not having that experience makes judgement of what is or isn't a bad question baseless. FizzBuzz and all such trivial code tests are fantastic interview questions because most applications can't program, that is exactly the point and purpose of FizzBuzz, weeding out liars of which there are many due to high salaries in comparison to other fields.

Yeah, hopefully this kind of question is handled in a phone screen before bringing them in.

I'm just not understanding why a business would pay 200 bucks a month for this. Even at the cheaper price point this just seems a tad silly to me.

I'm struggling to understand why it's a 'service' at all, as opposed an app that can be purchased, like say http://panic.com/statusboard/

Interesting thought. It would be complicated to pack this into something that you just purchase. Props integrates into Slack, Salesforce, Zendesk, etc.

Maybe we are not communicating the product well on the site.

Oh I'm sorry, I forgot that provider API's are magical, mythical beasts that must be tamed from an intermediary server, never from a client.

It's OK to say "we don't think enough people will pay enough for a one-time purchase to cover development costs". You don't have to invent some kind of technical reason for it to be a service.

But having said that, I cannot believe that companies would pay the amount you're asking for a service either.

Its about recognizing people doing great things in your org. It really has become a part of the culture in the companies that have been using it (and pay) for months now.

You wrote that in 3 seconds huh

To be fair, I think he meant he "solved" it by googling and finding a stack overflow link. He wasn't being literal (I thought he was as well at first).

Maybe he's poking fun at the fact that in 3 seconds of searching he can solve the problem? A problem that would, without prior maze-solving knowledge/experience, have taken far longer than 3 seconds.

"Solved that".

There was nothing about being a new creative and novel solution. And in terms of time gained and effort expended, this "LMGTFY" technique is the best.

Again, I like working on things that aren't on StackExchange.

But then how do you prevent your fate as an individual in the company from being tied to the others? Do you get put on the same team? Do you get promoted together?

The devil you know is better than the one you don't. You'll be joining a team either way.