This person never said that passing this first question was in any way a positive indicator of skill, though. For better or worse, when you have a lot of people

This person never said that passing this first question was in any way a positive indicator of skill, though. For better or worse, when you have a lot of people coming in, sometimes you need to throw a negative filter in front. Something which you can say "If they can't do this, our conversation is over, and I can stop wasting time right away." As much as I've been frustrated by someone asking me to write FizzBuzz, I greatly sympathize with the people who end up asking it or some variant of a very, very simple coding problem. I hope that at some point, there really will be a better way.