It's not mindless. There's a catch where with 3/5/15, where if you can't think about the condition at 15, it won't work. There are some other tests like reversi

It's not mindless. There's a catch where with 3/5/15, where if you can't think about the condition at 15, it won't work. There are some other tests like reversing a linked list, which may be more challenging, but it's a worse indicator of fundamental coding ability. I taught a bootcamp and we'd try to get them to FizzBuzz by the first or second weekend. So it's not a terrible test. Also you have to look back at the history of it. There used to be a lot of degrees that taught nothing but theory, and would output someone who couldn't code at all. I actually did a FizzBuzz level test for my first interview (10 years ago), and the interviewer was impressed that I could do it so fast. These days, it's the opposite. Most graduates could probably code a singleton or something that finds prime numbers, but don't know how to normalize tables. These tests are there to weed out the people who specialize in scoring interviews, but still don't have the basic ability to do the job. Much of the time you don't even want a great programmer, just some code monkey who can retrieve something from an API, combine it with some inputs, and save the results to another API.