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I am a developer, not HR. But I do play a role in hiring. We already have an "aptitude" style test, and an SQL test. So I wanted to make my addition to be limit

I am a developer, not HR. But I do play a role in hiring. We already have an "aptitude" style test, and an SQL test. So I wanted to make my addition to be limited to 15 minutes. I ask candidates to write Fizz Buzz but with the addition writing at the end the average of Fizz, average of Buzz, and average of FizzBuzz. Pretty much every candidate has "failed" the test. More than half have something incorrect or not quite matching the instructions. But we have hired some of those people and they are great programmers. It actually does give a surprising insight into the developer's style. It's not pleasant to see all of their code stuffed into main(). It's not pleasant to see every single line of code commented. But it is refreshing to see Enumerable.Range(1, 100) instead of C style for loop.

mjevans 7y ago
I could do that on a whiteboard, in a notepad in psudeocode, and possibly for real in a language I'd recently used (so the syntax is in mind) and recognize the output is correct or needs a tweak or two... However I don't think I could do this at all over the phone. I'd also, for a throw away like this, knowing it's a throw away stuff everything in to main / global and use that c-style loop BECAUSE it's portable to literally every language. If you're looking for a FizzBuzz class/object/module specify that. If you've got a specific language with nice features ask for that, BUT don't demerit an individual too much for not knowing the day to day features of the coding environment in your company when they've not been part of it for months.