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Comment by mafro | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree with you - being unable to write FizzBuzz is a red flag. However, finishing FizzBuzz under interview conditions does not really prove very much at all about a candidate's likely success on the job.

In the limited time I want to spend interviewing, an hour on FizzBuzz is a massive waste of everyone's time.

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Yes. I definitely should have clarified that I mean "if you can't write FizzBuzz in the first few minutes of the interview..." not as the only question in an hour-long interview. I've used a FizzBuzz-like question as the first question of a phone screen, for example, to determine if more in-depth questions are a waste of everyone's time.

I agree entirely that it doesn't prove anything about a candidate's likely success as a hire, but it is a reasonably strong signal about their likely failure.

EDIT: for the commenters - I agree an hour is too much. Whacking out FizzBuzz in 15 minutes could have its place :)

When I experienced FizzBuzz as a candidate I was coding onto a projected screen, and the test involved writing unit tests and doing a final refactoring step into something "reusable". It took the best part of an hour. The instructions themselves required a good 5-10 minutes of reading/parsing to understand exactly what was expected of you.

FizzBuzz should take 5 minutes for a senior dev (where the python example in the article is essentially the "correct" answer).

If it takes a candidate an hour, something is wrong.

It should take 5 minutes for an entry level dev.

> In the limited time I want to spend interviewing, an hour on FizzBuzz is a massive waste of everyone's time.

How could it possibly take an hour to write fizzbuzz for anyone of reasonable ability?

...an hour? Man, if they couldn't do it in less than 15 minutes I'd stop the interview right there, thus saving everyone's time.

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