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I'm amazed this still works. Like the author i would've thought everyone going for such a job would instantly know what fizzbuzz is and make sure they know it.

Another question i feel works really well in interviews is asking them to show you something they've created, personally or professionally. Its a nice open ended question, gets them talking about something they know and lets you ask many follow up questions about specific parts of the thing they've done which gives you a good feel of what they're capable of.




One of the things I've learned is that almost all introductory blog posts are wasted: The people I'd most like to reach don't read programming blogs, Hacker News, progreasmming.reddit.com, or anything else.

FizzBuzz is famous, but alas it is famous amongst people who could code it without advance knowledge of it.


>> FizzBuzz is famous, but alas it is famous amongst people who could code it without advance knowledge of it.

If that's true, it's still a good screening test. You either have heard of it but could code it even if you hadn't, so you pass, or you haven't heard of it and couldn't code it even if you had, so you fail.


Frankly speaking, would you want such a person working for you if they couldn't loop over a list of numbers and write simple arithmetic without advance preparations?


"i would've thought everyone going for such a job would instantly know what fizzbuzz is and make sure they know it."

The point of FizzBuzz is that it's not something you "know" or need to study. It's such a trivial problem that any developer should be able to write it off the cuff.


Yes, but those who can't could cheat by studying it, and with everybody talking about it...


The kind of person who has heard of FizzBuzz before is someone who cares about their profession and reads about it. They're unlikely to fail the test in the first place.

For it to become common knowledge it would have to be part of a significant percentage of interview screens across the industry. Evidently that hasn't happened, and I wonder if it ever will.


I've wanted to cook up an outlandish solution like this one[0]; but I haven't been confronted with FizzBuzz enough to know I'd ever be able to use it.

[0] http://experthuman.com/programming-with-nothing




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