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Comment by nodemaker | Hacker News Reader

What exactly do you (or for that matter Google hiring in general) consider fizzbuzz?....Is Pascals's triangle fizzbuzz?...how about an algorithm for calculating the Levenshtein Distance?

It seems like everyone has a pet favorite interview problem that they like to throw at the candidate and in my experience some of them were definitely not fizzbuzz .And then if one interviewer doesn't like you then you dont get hired.All the work you have done is irrelevant if that pet problem is not solved optimally on the whiteboard.But then of course I am probably a little incompetent too.

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One reason that interviewers ask the same question to many candidates (i.e., seem to have a "pet" problem) is because they have calibrated the question. A strong interviewer has asked that question to respected colleagues at various levels, and many tens or even hundreds of candidates. He knows all the ins-and-outs of the question, and more importantly, knows how to judge someone's effectiveness in that topic area based on their answers.

If you asked a different question to every candidate you interviewed, it would be very difficult to get a sense of how they compare to other candidates, or to employees.

Congratulations on marrying the interview process to a single question. I hope that question is very close to the core competency you are hiring for.

Maybe every company is unhappy with built-in string searching operations... :-)

It's a rite of passage I think. Programming interviews remind me of rushing for fraternities in college. And once you get to the on-site, the hazing begins...

They probably ask questions similar to the ones that they were asked... so over time they select people more and more similar to themselves and their culture becomes homogenous and inbred.

What would happen if you just refused to answer the question and asked them for something more practical that would actually demonstrate your skill & experience level?

I've understood that FizzBuzz is the lowest possible requirement for any programming job. It's a trivial programming exercise that doesn't require experience in algorithmic theory or mathematics. It's like going to the driving test and being asked to start the car: anyone who wouldn't know how to do that is likely highly incapable of passing the actual test.

Now, the astonishing issue, for me, is that there apparently are huge loads of people applying for programming positions who actually fail FizzBuzz. In effect, it's akin to applying for the position of a bus driver "coz I once travelled on a bus". I don't get that but apparently it does happen often enough to warrant FizzBuzz.

What's even more astonishing to me than the fact that programming applicants mess it up is the fact that when the problem is introduced to a programming forum or blog there will inevitably be commenters commenting with a solution, and that solution will be wrong. The only car analogy I came up with was a person hearing about someone putting on their spare tire, so they go out to do it on their own car from memory of the account, and they do it wrong, when the instructions were right in the glovebox.

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