At this point I've conducted dozens of screening interviews at a SV tech company, which is in the ballpark of the ones mentioned here. Interviewees choose the l

At this point I've conducted dozens of screening interviews at a SV tech company, which is in the ballpark of the ones mentioned here. Interviewees choose the language they'd like to work in, and the questions are of the shape "given a list of data and a simple criterion, find an element of the list". This isn't exactly depth-first search: finding elements of collections that meet some criteria is, like, extremely common in day-to-day work. It's really surprising to see how hard people fall down on even the simplest part of this exercise. People with lots of experience, people who work in big-name companies (including the ones mentioned here), you name it. This experience has really caused me to soften my erstwhile stance of "tech hiring is broken and inhumane", because it really makes me suspect that no matter how simple or common the problem is, many people will fall all over themselves attempting to solve it. Even if the problem is nerves, how much can you really ease someone's nerves over a video chat? This is basically the lesson of FizzBuzz.