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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

Of course some people will consider that question to be too hard. But you may not want to hire those people. The point of an interview process is for you to pick the people you want to hire, not to ask questions that everyone agrees aren’t too hard.

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I'm curious to hear the opinions of people who think that the question is too hard (i.e. it's too complex of a question to ask in an interview situation).

Perhaps some people might feel that while they could write code to solve this problem (or similar problems) outside of an interview. However, under the pressure of an interview they would not be able to solve the problem (due to anxiety, stress etc.).

If that was relatively common, then such a question would not be a useful interview question. Or would at least not be giving an accurate estimate of a candidates programming ability. This seems unlikely to me, but I would be interested in hearing different view.

The fizzbuzz test is not entirely about whether someone can do it. It's also about figuring out the style of the programmer. There's a surprising amount of flexibility to fizzbuzz; how is user input handled? Do they use a linter? How are variables managed/named? There's a lot going on, and it can be gamed just like anything else on both ends.

That said, the last time I had a fizzbuzz take-home test, it was infuriating -- my code is online.. what does fizzbuzz prove except to help make a company soc2 compliant?

I guess it depends how you use it. I started hearing about FizzBuzz in the context of "why can't programmers program" [1]. I.e. that many interview candidates can't solve this problem.

It's also my experience interviewing programmers (outside SF) that most candidates can't solve simple FizzBuzz style questions. As a take-home test, I agree I can't really see the value in it.

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

Back when I did phone screens, I went even simpler: Write a program that counts from one to ten, printing each number out followed by your name followed by a newline. Do not print the line for number 4.

It’s astounding how many programming candidates can’t work their way through this.

Also astounding is the number of programmers who program over the phone. Approximately zero.

No, a fizzbuzz test is entirely about whether somebody can do it. That's the definition of a fizzbuzz test. When you hear others talking about a fizzbuzz test, they're not talking about the specific algorithm, they're specifically talking about a simple single-function problem that should take no more than 5 or 10 minutes.

If you're dealing with user input or linting, then that's not a fizzbuzz test. I'm not doubting that maybe somebody asked you to do something larger than that including the fizzbuzz problem, I'm just saying that nobody else here is talking about take-home problems when we talk about fizzbuzz.

a nested for loop is certainly not hard ... however ... they describe the problem as something we thought was a trivial nested for-loop problem which suggests that maybe it wasn't. if the problem was presented in a more abstract fashion, such as print all filenames 'within' a directory, then a candidate may have stalled on which approach to take.

also, someone who has only ever written code using lambda expressions might have difficulty writing a nested for loop

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