Ironically, yes. Okay, so it was for a DevOps Engineer role and not an SDE role, but we did have one guy who refused. He didn’t feel that he was a good enough

Ironically, yes. Okay, so it was for a DevOps Engineer role and not an SDE role, but we did have one guy who refused. He didn’t feel that he was a good enough programmer to do that on a whiteboard in front of a panel of interviewers, and so he refused. He even refused to talk about the core functions you’d need to make fizzbuzz work. He felt that he could work it out over time outside of the pressure of a hiring situation, but he didn’t feel he could do it on the spot. To be honest, I felt that his recognition of that lack of skill and talent and his refusal to be pushed down that road, that was one of his strongest features for me. He was willing to stand up in front of the whole group and say “I Don’t Know”. I pushed hard for him to be hired, and the guy who had asked the fizzbuzz question didn’t feel as strongly that we shouldn’t hire this person. To this day, I think he was the best hire the company ever made. I don’t know if he ever learned how to do a fizzbuzz program, but he was definitely one of the best DevOps Engineers we had.