My experience isn't 199 out of 200 but it's still like 7 out of 8. I ran my own company, we started interviewing people for programming positions. They'd show u

My experience isn't 199 out of 200 but it's still like 7 out of 8. I ran my own company, we started interviewing people for programming positions. They'd show up for the interview and an hour into the interview we'd figure out they can't program. It wasted our time. So, we changed our strategy and started using a couple of fizzbuzz like questions. The moment they walked in the door we'd hand them the test, a pencil, sit them down at a desk and say "take as long as you want". Then we'd go back to work. When they finished we'd look. If they couldn't pass the test we'd kindly show them the door. If they could then the real interview started. I guess I don't see how any one who can truely program couldn't answer fizzbuzz or any similarly simple non-puzzle question. How simple would it have to be before you'd decide they can't do it. If you asked them to make "Hello World" in the language of their choice and they couldn't do it would you give them the benefit of the doubt or show them the door? Also I wouldn't put inverting a binary tree at the same level of fizzbuzz. Fizzbuzz is literally 1 to 6 lines of code depending on your coding style. It's 1 step past "write a loop that counts from 1 to 100". If they can't write a simple loop and check for 2 conditions (or 3 if you think it's 3) they can't code. Really. They can't