[pencilcheck]

I am still skeptical for the effectiveness of FizzBuzz. I wonder if there are actual science experimental result to support this hypothesis where asking FizzBuzz as a filter would actually be effective. I wonder what is the percentage of those candidates who failed this filter are actually the worst kind of candidates, and if those who passed this filter would turns out not be a good fit. I see no correlation between passing FizzBuzz and being a good fit, productive engineer. Most of the proponent of FizzBuzz seems to assume that engineering skills could be accurately form a pyramid, where there are some questions where you need to understand before tackling other higher level questions, and that people who don't understand the "basics" will not be able to grasp or excel in the skills in higher levels. May I ask how many interviews here have taken CS courses and may I ask how many of you find FizzBuzz is relevant to any of the courses you have taken? Do you need to know FizzBuzz in order to tackle the vast problem spaces of Computer Science? Do you need to know FizzBuzz by heart to have experienced working in a large projects with thousands of people? Do you need to know FizzBuzz to implement a binary tree? Do you need to excel in FizzBuzz to code up a language parser?

To me, it is absurd that people believe in FizzBuzz because I see this mindless ritual of asking FizzBuzz question can be best described as Cargo Cult Science as coined by Richard Feynman (http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html), where in this context of hiring, recruiters are hoping that by asking FizzBuzz he will definitely filter out all incompetent programmers/engineers so he won't have to waste time finding out if the candidates are actually suitable for the position and the team.

If FizzBuzz is the ultimate filter for the position he is applying for, or if it should be considered universal, then why wouldn't university teaches them to memorize all possible variations of them in their introductory programming classes? Also wouldn't you think people who are not good programmers would cheat his/her way out by simply memorize the solution? Then aren't you still wasting time asking FizzBuzz questions?