I think this depends heavily on your candidate source. A few bits of anecdata: 1. A couple years out of college, I went back to my alma matter to recruit inte

I think this depends heavily on your candidate source. A few bits of anecdata: 1. A couple years out of college, I went back to my alma matter to recruit interns. I stood at a booth at a job fair and chatted with people. Anyone who seemed interesting I invited for a 30-minute interview the next day (9 people). The next day I had all 9 people do fizzbuzz on paper (I know, I know, I was young!) - every single one passed easily and it filtered out no one. 2. More recently, I was recruiting off of workatastartup.com for senior devs. I went through a few dozen first-round interviews and didn't once come across someone who couldn't code. 3. More recently still, I was working with some recruiters who would send resumes my way. I was looking for a specific combo of two common techs and I started out giving a first-round interview to anyone who listed any experience with both. I found that something like 60-80% of these candidates would *not* have, (in my opinion), been able to code fizzbuzz. It was interesting because, until #3, I'd never really believed the "most people cannot program" thing - at least not after my experience with #1. The lesson I took was that it totally depends on your pipeline. If you put a job listing on Indeed.com or whatever, you'll get a lot of people who cannot program. If you use other channels or do any other form of screening (implicit or not), you may get almost none.