It's an ice-breaker. "What, FizzBuzz, do you actually use it for something?" "Yeah, well, it's still useful for article list styling." "Wouldn't CSS be a better

It's an ice-breaker. "What, FizzBuzz, do you actually use it for something?" "Yeah, well, it's still useful for article list styling." "Wouldn't CSS be a better tool for this?" "Whatever works - how would you do it using that?" And voila, you're both engaged in conversation and talking about relevant candidate experience. Being able to do modulo is not quite the point. (Or, you could start with FizzBuzz, bring up own code, and discuss various ways of implementing: iteration, recursion, and the issues of each. Or perhaps something domain-specific: "we have 20 parallel producers, but we still want to tag every 3rd and every 5th item in the aggregate output, now what?") We had a candidate who actually failed this test, but he tried to completely fake any knowledge with self-confidence. (It was an entry-level position, but while people can learn most things for the job, the inability to algorithmize seems to be extremely hard to overcome - had another cow-orker who never tried to understand iteration, always went around asking if someone else could write it instead; gets rather weird twentieth time around)