There was another great satirical take on FizzBuzz which had something to do with runes and incantation and magical spells...? I sort of remember that the same author maybe even wrote a follow up? to this extremely experienced developer solving FizzBuzz in the most arcane way possible.
I definitely wouldn't want to work on your team, if that's how you interpret such an answer. Perfect interview then -- we've both eliminated the other as a viable employee/employer, so that's a win and we got there from just 1 trivial coding question. There's so much more to say here, but this is no longer timely, plus this isn't great forum for such discussion.
FWIW I have never been asked this question or similar, but since it's so famous I do have my own answer at the ready, which is just slightly more complex than the naive solution, but still well within the realm of production-worthy (maintainable, testable, readable) code. We don't really ever see any discussion of such because of course it isn't "interesting".
> me: It's more of a "I can't believe you're asking me that."
> interviewer: Great, we find that candidates who can't get this right don't do well here.
> me: ...
Shit attitude from that candidate, considering the interviewer is completely correct. I wouldn't hire them since they are obviously a problem employee.
For those that don't know, Fizz Buzz is less an aptitude test and more of an attitude test. That's why this candidate failed and didn't get the job.
> Fizz Buzz is less an aptitude test and more of an attitude test
The amount of (highly credentialed) interviewees that can't 0-shot a correct and fully functional fizzbuzz is also way higher than a lot of people would think. That's where the attitude part also comes in.
> For those that don't know, Fizz Buzz is less an aptitude test and more of an attitude test.
The articles which popularised FizzBuzz as an interview question stated as a categorical fact that most computer science graduates or programmer candidates (one article even said 199/200!![2]) cannot do FizzBuzz[1,2,3] and were absolutely recommending it as an aptitude test.
I personally think this whole thing was simply untrue back in 2007 (or at the very least incredibly overstated) and we are paying the price for it with ridiculous 15-stage interviews as a paranoid response to some urban legend from ~20 years ago.
Does this ring a bell for anyone?
---
Found it!
https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical-intervie...
https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview
https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview
https://aphyr.com/posts/353-rewriting-the-technical-intervie... (the FizzBuzz one)
https://aphyr.com/posts/354-unifying-the-technical-interview
wow.