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There are many HS students who can't answer "What's half of 20?" or factor the number 15. Part of me sees that and immediately thinks "That can't possibly be true". Another part of me reminds the other part that I used to feel the same way about the statement "many working programmers can't write FizzBuzz". And then I was on the interview team for my employer a couple of jobs back, and we routinely asked candidates to write FizzBuzz. And many, including folks with 10, 15+ years of documented coding experience, and/or Masters or PhD degrees in C.S., could not do it. And that's even when they were given a laptop with an IDE open, with the skeleton of the program in place, with strategically located comments saying "your code goes here" and suchlike. I don't know what to think about humanity sometimes. The same race that put people on the moon, helicopters on Mars, Voyagers beyond the edge of the Solar System, invented the Internet, nanotech, lasers, etc. has people who can make it to (and through) high school, and still can't come up with "what's half of 20" or, apparently, write FizzBuzz??? |
If it's any solace, selection bias is a thing. Those applicants that can't Fizz Buzz? They rarely get hired, and are rarely kept on for long when they do get an offer. Spoolsky made the argument like 20 years ago that as a result they flood the zone, and produce a massively biased applicant stream.