I interviewed a 'senior' developer who had been a consultant for several years. When we asked how he implemented past projects, his answers were really vague.

I interviewed a 'senior' developer who had been a consultant for several years. When we asked how he implemented past projects, his answers were really vague. We got suspicious and dropped down to a simple problem like, "write a loop to print the numbers from one to ten." The guy was writing some really weird stuff. When asked to explain, he confidently told us that in C++, every time you reference the iterator variable inside the loop, it gets increased. His solution was something like: for (int i = 1; i <= 10; i++) { printf("%d\n", i); // <== i gets incremented! i--; // need to compensate for the extra increment! } (except I'm pretty sure he didn't get printf right) So, yeah, I see FizzBuzz as a wonderful way to weed out the incompetent right away, allowing you to focus on deciding whether you need capable or exceptional. Incidentally, one of the guys on my senior project team in college didn't understand how variable assignment worked. He would write: int flagsVar = COMMON_BASE_FLAGS; flagsVar = ADDITIONAL_FLAG_I_WANT; CallAPI(flagsVar); // Why doesn't it work?! He graduated.