If you come in in gross clothes and swear, you're not going to fit the company culture.
If you're rude to your interviewer, you're not likely to be less rude to your other coworkers.
etc.
Usually when I dig into a person claiming "can't FizzBuzz is common" the result is I find what they're calling "FizzBuzz" is nothing of the sort, but is actually a more tricky data structures or algorithms problem.
There is definitely a second line above the simple FizzBuzz many more candidates would have a lot more trouble with two nested loops.
But how often do interviewees showing up with gross clothes, swear, or be rude to interviewer?
I'd say almost 0?
"Yes, you have to shower the day of an interview."
"It's never acceptable to pull out your lunch and eat in the middle of the interview, please don't do it again."
"Yes, you have to wear something other than the shirt you slept in."
It's so simple you wouldn't expect people interviewing to fail it, but it still happens.
It's definitely higher than that. It is a pretty easy thing to avoid, you'd think, but some people fail.
Working is getting along in a social environment, not just coding.
EDIT: Just looked it up. Yep. A game. Now compare that to my years of accomplishments and you'll say asking me to write fizzbuzz childish, too.
If you have been programming for 35 years, you'll probably be appalled by how easy it is. Look it up.
It may be easy but you would have to explain it to me if you were interviewing me.
After looking up what it is, as I said I did, yes, I could do it easily but don't ask me to code your game "fizzbuzz" as if I would know what it was.
In an interview, they ask you to print the numbers 0..n to the screen, while replacing numbers divisible by 3 with the string literal fizz, and numbers divisible by 5 with the string literal buzz. The biggest trick or gotcha is that they will also specify that numbers divisible by 15 should be replaced with 'fizzbuzz', but they'll probably say 3 and 5 instead of 15.
If your list of accomplishments is really as impressive as you say, you can write a loop, a conditional, and use the modulus operator. And honestly if someone couldn't figure out modulus, they might still be able to pass. (But I'd be VERY curious about their background)
Fizzbuzz is not a trick question. It's not a difficult question. It's not meant to make you look stupid if you know how to program. It is only meant to check whether you understand conditional logic and looping. It's intentionally chosen to be the lowest of low bars, because there are so many people who literally can't program but apply anyway. All it's meant to do is weed out the people who have never programmed in their life.
The OP said that one should know how to write a fizzbuzz. I said I couldn't cause I don't know what it is. That doesn't mean I couldn't once it was explained to me.
Also, if you have guaranteed years of experience, fizzbuzz isn't for you. However, a suprisingly large number of applicants who can write an impressive looking CV can't write it.
It makes me wonder, though. Has anyone ever just admitted they failed at fizzbuzz here on HN?
I can imagine someone bombing it if they're nervous or if they forgot the modulo operator in their language of choice and got lost doing it an "ugly" error-prone way because they were too embarrassed to change tack once started.
If someone reasonably competent were to spend years working with some limited api's, on a codebase that has hundreds of man-years on it, could they fail at fizzbuzz when asked out of the blue? I think so.
There was another HN thread recently where posters were ardently justifying lying on their resumes.
But the alarming thing is that I've read there are people coming to programming interviews who can't fizzbuzz despite the experience listed in their CV. While rather unbelievable, if it really is true then it only makes sense to ask candidates to write FizzBuzz in the first screen before they waste any more of the teams' time.
