4 ms·

I'm the inventor of the fizzbuzz problem and I kept using the question for a long time after it became popular and I didn't see a single candidate (out of maybe

• jacquesm 16y ago
  That's just really sad, that there are people that would be interviewing for a coding position and it turns out they can't even do that in under a minute or so. How do they expect to do their jobs ?
  • starkfist 16y ago
    I got fizzbuzzed in an interview before I knew what fizzbuzz was. It took about a minute for me to think "what? you want me to do what? Why? ... Ok?" So I would say 1-10 minutes is acceptable.
    • jacquesm 16y ago
      I'd have a problem with being interviewed like that because the question is so simple I'd think they're pulling a joke or something. First thing I'd ask is where is the camera :) I can see how for a junior coding position this might be an appropriate question, say people fresh out of school, and then 1 to 10 minutes might be acceptable. But 4 modulo statements (or 3, if you think about the problem a bit longer) and a loop ? 10 minutes ? That's pretty slow. I understand there is a lot more to programming than coding up a simple solution like this but as problems come it is really a very simple one and if someone would take 10 minutes to put this together I'd be a bit worried about throughput, and probably about experience as well.
      • RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
        With regards FizzBuzz, my follow-up goes a bit like this: Now suppose the modulo test is really expensive. Suppose we're doing something complicated with large records on disk and we want to do this is that's true, something else if the other is true, etc, etc, just as in FizzBuzz. How would you restructure your code so it's still obvious to a maintainer what it's doing, but so that it avoids doing more modulo operations than necessary. You see, all these trivial exercises can be used as starting points for deeper conversations about aspects of coding.
        • axod 16y ago
          Or you could just ask "Do you know what a lookup table is", and "Can you write 15 entries into an array and cycle through them" ;) I agree it's a good starting point, but surely it's still just getting rid of the ridiculously bad programmers rather than anything else.
        • jacquesm 16y ago
          Weird example, but fine, we can reduce the number of modulo operations if that is the one with the 'cost', but that's not very realistic given that we're printing stuff to stdout, but if we take your premise as true and we optimize for the cost of the modulo operator you would get silly solutions like this: main() { int i; int ncounters = 2; int counters[2] ; int presets[2] = { 5, 3}; int n; // number of counters that tripped int j; char * strings[2] = { "fizz", "buzz" }; // first time, copy presets to counters for (j=0;j<ncounters;j++) { counters[j] = presets[j]; } for (i=1;i<=100;i++) { n = 0; // reset number of counters that have zeroed for (j=0;j<ncounters;j++) { counters[j] = counters[j] - 1; // output relevant string when counter trips if (counters[j] == 0) { // separate strings by dashes if more than one counter trips if (n != 0) { printf("-"); } n++; counters[j] = presets[j]; printf("%s",strings[j]); } } // no counter tripped, just output the number if (n == 0) { printf("%d",i); } printf("\n"); } } Forgive the lack of comments and the hardcoded number of strings. No modulo operations. By asking the question that way you'd get solutions that you're not really looking for.
          • 16y ago
      • masterj 16y ago
        When I first sat down to write FizzBuzz for kicks I spent a few minutes trying to think of an elegant or clever solution before writing the obvious answer. I think I would be similarly on guard in an interview situation. I'd say 1 to 10 minutes is easily acceptable accounting for over thinking. Now if they are actually struggling for 10 minutes, that's another matter.
  • ig1 16y ago
    I'm guessing a lot of these people end up working by doing a lot of copy & paste and a trial & error approach to coding.