[FundThrowaway]

> and there's more genuine fear of hiring someone who can't fizzbuzz.

I always hear this fear proclaimed but have never heard an actual story of a candidate failing to fizzbuzz, would love to hear an anecdote or two from anyone who has one.

[jogjayr]

I have both once failed fizzbuzz in an interview and gotten offers from FAANG companies (different interviews, obviously). At the time I failed the fizzbuzz, I even knew it was a fizzbuzz question i.e. I'd read Jeff Atwood or Joel Spolsky's blogpost introducing the concept. I just got very very nervous. I work at Google now.

There's not much to say really. I think people for like me who get very nervous at live coding interviews, the variation between best and worst performance can be massive.

[skewart]

I've never asked anyone fizzbuzz, but I have seen people badly flub very easy algorithm questions that are basically at the same level.

In every case it was because they over-complicated things. They came up with elaborate logic that they didn't need and then got lost and didn't quite get to a working implementation. Picture, say, starting to implement fizzbuzz using two tries and an associative array.

I would guess that a lot of the people I've seen bomb these kind of interview questions are actually good, capable programmers, but they just got overwhelmed by interview nerves and got lost.

[Aeolun]

Not a candidate, someone we had already hired through an agency. Two someone’s actually. Never again.

They were great people, but couldn’t distinguish a string from an int.

[FundThrowaway]

That's pretty crazy, how do these people exist and get jobs? What kind of development were they supposed to be doing?

[kajmagnusmobile]

And what's the reason they were asked to do the fizzbugz test?

[Aeolun]

They weren’t asked until we had some internal hackathon where we were trying to implement tested fizz buzz in new languages we were working with.

[Aeolun]

Full stack Webdevelopment. Had 2 years of experience.

[scarface74]

Yes it happens. I’ve interviewed people who couldn’t psuedocode an isOdd function after making sure they knew what an odd number is.