5 ms·
FizzBuzz is not a brain puzzle. It's a pass/fail weedout question. It's purpose is to determine if you are worth spending more time interviewing. If you don'
by adamtj 13y ago
FizzBuzz is not a brain puzzle. It's a pass/fail weedout question. It's purpose is to determine if you are worth spending more time interviewing. If you don't know enough math to understand multiples or you don't know enough programming to write a "for" loop then that's the end of the interview. If you pass, you should then get the better and more relevant questions. Writing a Z80 emulator at that stage of the interview is a waste of time, and may itself constitute a fail depending on the interviewer.
- smrtinsert 13y agoIf FizzBuzz is ever considered that humorless, I'd just walk out. Pointless questions deserve pointless but correct answers.
- VLM 13y agoNot entirely pointless, assuming you don't completely screw up FizzBuzz 2.0 or whatever you want to call it, the next question was probably going to be along the lines of "tell me about a problem using recursion other than boring old factorial" or "can you do much of anything with an array" or "show me a data structure more interesting than Int X, like, say, a linked list?" or "Tell me about your time in the 3-d graphics rendering world" or "tell me about memoization and/or caching strategies" or "tell me how to use a library and its API in language XYZ where it could be an arbitrary numerical base library". (edited to add a hilarious one: Using a unit testing framework only permit proper fizzbuzz, then feed with with 10e3 monkeys on typewriters trying to generate Shakespeare technology and trust the testing framework...) I suppose for a low level CRUD app job knowing what modular math is and how to run a loop, aka fizzbuzz, is probably massive skill overkill but there are higher level jobs out there... I'm racking my brain right now trying to think of a "funny" way to do fizzbuzz for a high freq trading interview as in another story on HN today. So to test mod3 you'd submit a buy order followed by two half sized sell orders repetitively all in a couple milliseconds and let the market maker routine clear the market, and orders left over, if any, would tell you if you submitted a multiple of 3 orders so you could print "fizz"?
- ProblemFactory 13y agoI don't think FizzBuzz leads into interesting interview questions. That would be too dependent on the hope that the candidate does implement an overkill solution for fizzbuzz. Much more interesting questions can be derived from the problems the company is actually working on. FizzBuzz is a simple "can you code at all" filter. If you write the obvious solution, you move on to the actual interview. If you write an elegant and amusing solution, you move on to the actual interview. Surprisingly most applicants for programming positions cannot write any code that uses a for loop or an if statement at all, and fizzbuzz is a 3-minute test to prevent everyone from wasting their time.
- mindslight 13y agoecho 1 10 Fizz 100
- etler 13y agoIt's just meant as a joke. If I saw this in an interview, I would find it hilarious and impressive, but I would probably cut it off pretty early.