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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

If the vast majority of people applying for programming jobs can't solve it, then it qualifies as hard by definition.

I agree with your analysis. However I've only ever sat in on a few programmer interviews, and was lucky enough to get only the few that had already made it through several screens and were quite sharp. However, if so many people can't do FizzBuzz, that's baffling. If they can't do that, what can they do? I mean that literally. Do they just have knowledge of certain specific frameworks or something? Can anyone shed light on this?

I know this may be derailing the conversation, and it bothers people, I'll not mind deleting this post.

One issue I've had is that if a question is too easy, I start out thinking "this must be a trick question..." and then tie myself up in knots trying to find the (non-existant) catch...

Of course in an interview, one should presumably just say "hey this seems too easy, is this a trick question?" but ...

That reminds me of when I was first learning to program. I wondered for an embarrasingly long time what the hell 'foo' meant. I knew it must be something really important as it was absolutely everywhere.

It is hard, only in the sense that programming anything is hard, if you don't know how to program. If you can program at all, you can solve it. It definitely wouldn't qualify as 'famously hard'. Things that achieve fame for being hard are usually very very difficult indeed. If anything, in the narrow circles in which it has any fame at all, it is famously easy.

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