By "fizzbuzz" I wasn't referring to the "divide by 3 and 5" one that seems common, but something much worse. I once interviewed at a place where they presented

By "fizzbuzz" I wasn't referring to the "divide by 3 and 5" one that seems common, but something much worse. I once interviewed at a place where they presented a jumble of characters, and about 8 rules, and I was on the phone being watched (after an hour of successfully troubleshooting a broken AWS instance with a bunch of quirky Linux issues). The 8 or so rules involved something like, "You must print each line with one character longer than the last / c must never come right before vowel / x's must be on alternate rows / f's and z's ... " while parsing all of this stuff, I had 10 minutes total since we were almost out of time when we started the questioning. The interviewer said, "Don't worry, just do it in pseudocode." That's bad interviewing. I can do the problem easily without someone looking over my shoulder, and I need more than 10 minutes just to think about the 8 or whatever rules he gave me. He failed me, and I ended up working there anyway a year later after the guy quit (true story).