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The person who invented FizzBuzz [1] did so because he was interviewing senior developers and a consistently high proportion could give really convincing explan

The person who invented FizzBuzz [1] did so because he was interviewing senior developers and a consistently high proportion could give really convincing explanations about their programming skills but, when it came down to it, could not program. And that doesn't just mean they were a bit rusty because they had been focusing on the big picture or managing people etc. Instead, they literally couldn't write a for loop but had jobs because they were good at interviews. That's why FizzBuzz is not done Google-style tree inversion exercise but basically just "please write a for loop". I wouldn't want to work a company that doesn't filter those idiots out. A full blown exercise with real code would be fine but a toy exercise would also totally do. [1] Imran Ghory. He wrote a blog post about it but it now seems to be down, but I know it was him and the reason why he did it because I was working with him at Bloomberg when he came up with it.

whstl 2y ago
I always give an option to either use some online REPL or local environment for FizzBuzz-like tests. It's always good to see how they deal with tools. But the number of candidates that can't run a script locally or on a website and ask if they can put inside their Rails project responding to some query is astounding. For Typescript positions I get better results.
mark-r 2y ago
I'm curious, when was the FizzBuzz problem invented? And how did it get publicized to the wider world? If you can come up with a URL the Internet Archive will probably have a copy.
- eieio 2y ago
  I was really curious reading this. Many years ago I read this blog post (from 2007!) by Jeff Atwood[1] that mentioned FizzBuzz, and I guess I had mentally filed away that Jeff Atwood invented FizzBuzz! But that is not true. Jeff's blog mentions Imran. Jeff's blog is still up, but Imran's isn't! However it is up on the internet archive, and Imran's post is also from 2007[2]. My sense is that Imran wrote a blog in January 2007 mentioning FizzBuzz and that Jeff's post in February 2007 is what made FizzBuzz the meme that it is today. This is probably very obvious to some readers of HN, but Jeff's blog (Coding Horror) has been around for a very long time and was one of the 'big' tech blogs back in that era of blogging (Jeff went on to, among other things, cofound Stack Overflow with Joel Spolsky a year after writing about FizzBuzz). Thanks for asking this - if someone asked me yesterday "who invented FizzBuzz?" I would have pretty confidently said "Jeff Atwood!" and I would have been totally wrong. For completenesses sake, the other really influential interview question blog I remember from this era is Steve Yegge's "five essential phone screen questions," which is even earlier (2005!)[3] I think interviewing discourse on message boards is tricky; folks have strong opinions, and if someone says "this is an essential question" and the question is hard for you, it's hard not to take that personally. In a past life I thought a lot about interviewing (here is a resource on interviewing I helped create for Jane Street back when I worked there[4]). I have never asked a FizzBuzz-style question, but I do think that "explicitly telling the candidate what you want and give them lots of help to get there" is really important. [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20080405225407/http://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080405225407/http://imranontec... [3] https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-phone-screen-questions https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-pho... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8DGdPkBBxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8DGdPkBBxg
  - mark-r 2y ago
    Thanks for digging that up! I'm quite sure that Jeff Atwood's blog is where I first heard about Fizzbuzz, but it never occurred to me that he had attributions.
  - quietbritishjim 2y ago
    Thanks for digging out those links. I think Imran came up with it in 2006 or 2007, he was certainly experimenting with interview questions around that time, so the blog post was not long after. I had no idea at the time he had a blog and didn't see the post myself until a few years after that. In fact, I think I saw Jeff Atwood's first!
    - eieio 2y ago
      Thanks for giving me enough info to start digging! Very cool that you were working with Imran back when this all started
deleted 2y ago
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whstl 2y ago

I always give an option to either use some online REPL or local environment for FizzBuzz-like tests. It's always good to see how they deal with tools. But the number of candidates that can't run a script locally or on a website and ask if they can put inside their Rails project responding to some query is astounding. For Typescript positions I get better results.

mark-r 2y ago

I'm curious, when was the FizzBuzz problem invented? And how did it get publicized to the wider world? If you can come up with a URL the Internet Archive will probably have a copy.

eieio 2y ago
I was really curious reading this. Many years ago I read this blog post (from 2007!) by Jeff Atwood[1] that mentioned FizzBuzz, and I guess I had mentally filed away that Jeff Atwood invented FizzBuzz! But that is not true. Jeff's blog mentions Imran. Jeff's blog is still up, but Imran's isn't! However it is up on the internet archive, and Imran's post is also from 2007[2]. My sense is that Imran wrote a blog in January 2007 mentioning FizzBuzz and that Jeff's post in February 2007 is what made FizzBuzz the meme that it is today. This is probably very obvious to some readers of HN, but Jeff's blog (Coding Horror) has been around for a very long time and was one of the 'big' tech blogs back in that era of blogging (Jeff went on to, among other things, cofound Stack Overflow with Joel Spolsky a year after writing about FizzBuzz). Thanks for asking this - if someone asked me yesterday "who invented FizzBuzz?" I would have pretty confidently said "Jeff Atwood!" and I would have been totally wrong. For completenesses sake, the other really influential interview question blog I remember from this era is Steve Yegge's "five essential phone screen questions," which is even earlier (2005!)[3] I think interviewing discourse on message boards is tricky; folks have strong opinions, and if someone says "this is an essential question" and the question is hard for you, it's hard not to take that personally. In a past life I thought a lot about interviewing (here is a resource on interviewing I helped create for Jane Street back when I worked there[4]). I have never asked a FizzBuzz-style question, but I do think that "explicitly telling the candidate what you want and give them lots of help to get there" is really important. [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20080405225407/http://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080405225407/http://imranontec... [3] https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-phone-screen-questions https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-pho... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8DGdPkBBxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8DGdPkBBxg
- mark-r 2y ago
  Thanks for digging that up! I'm quite sure that Jeff Atwood's blog is where I first heard about Fizzbuzz, but it never occurred to me that he had attributions.
- quietbritishjim 2y ago
  Thanks for digging out those links. I think Imran came up with it in 2006 or 2007, he was certainly experimenting with interview questions around that time, so the blog post was not long after. I had no idea at the time he had a blog and didn't see the post myself until a few years after that. In fact, I think I saw Jeff Atwood's first!
  - eieio 2y ago
    Thanks for giving me enough info to start digging! Very cool that you were working with Imran back when this all started

deleted 2y ago

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