Ayan Shafqat – Float to Q1.15: A FizzBuzz for Audio Technical Interview
I don’t enjoy watching candidates squirm through tricky interviews any more than anyone else does. Let’s face it: a job interview is stressful enough! Being judged on every syllable over a video call (or in a room) isn’t exactly fun. And if I’m the interviewer, I’m also under pressure to complete my own work on top of conducting the interview.
It’s counterproductive to throw overly difficult questions at candidates just to see them fail. Instead, I like straightforward “benchmark” questions—much like FizzBuzz. FizzBuzz is trivial to solve in under five minutes, but it still offers a ton of room for improvement and optimization. Don’t believe me? Check out the High throughput FizzBuzz code golf page, where some solutions run nearly as fast as memcpy(3)!
I wanted a similar litmus test for hiring audio programming candidates, and I think I may have found it. Let’s dive into the “Float to Q1.16” challenge: The FizzBuzz of audio programming:
