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Comment by simplotek | Hacker News Reader

> For Christ sake. There was never any need to memorize fizz buzz,

Wrong. Fizzbuzz is the epitome of a hiring test that is gamed by rote learning and adds absolutely nothing in terms of decisive info on wether s candidate is competent or not.

Your argument is like arguing in favour of using hello word in as many languages as possible and then claim that there is no need to memorize them because that's the point of the question.

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FizzBuzz exactly as printed in an example? An easily game-able memorization problem.

The concept of FizzBuzz? If you are a programmer you should be able to write a simple program with arithmetic and string manipulation. There's no reason an interviewer needs to ask exactly the FizzBuzz - but just something a bit like it. Asking the exact question from the blog is pretty lazy anyway.

I have big issues with impractical interview questions that favor interview prep over actually practical skills. That said, anyone who can program should be able to implement fizz buzz in 10-15 minutes given a description of the problem even if they had never heard of it.

hmm interesting... i haven't done a technical interview in 15 years so i just tried fizzbuzz (leetcode was the first thing that popped up on google)... took me about 15 minutes. i was caught a bit off guard, there are a couple of little subtle gotchas that require some actual thought. i'd say it's a pretty good test without requiring knowledge of data structures or CS level algorithms.

that said i would only want to do it on a terminal, not on a whiteboard. i'd probably fuck that up somehow.

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