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Comment by bichiliad | Hacker News Reader

To clarify, I don't think "Fizzbuzz" necessarily means "printing out Fizz on multiples of 3, Buzz on multiples of 5, etc." Fizzbuzz generally refers to a simple programming test to make sure candidates can actually write some amount of code.

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No, it literally means what you said above, and the majority of applicants literally can't do it. It's shocking and sounds ridiculous, but is true.

I've interviewed people for a junior position recently. I gave the FizzBuzz test, verbatim from Wikipedia. Only about 10% were able to do it on a whiteboard, without help.

I can't write any code effectively on a whiteboard in front of an audience. -> I'm a terrible programmer.

TIL I'm a terrible programmer.

An audience of one. What about on a piece of paper? In front of a computer. How would do in code reviews? You can state your concerns to the interviewer to see if they can accommodate.

I've never seen a whiteboard interview with only one interviewer. The smallest was 2.

Whiteboards are for diagramming things more complicated than lines of code. [e.g. Interactions between several web services or paths of control across entire programs]

I've honestly just accepted that by the standards of many people's interviewing processes I'm a bad programmer. :)

Yup. Hell, if you think you can do it, but you're put off by a whiteboard, I'll get you a laptop with a development environment on it and leave the room to let you work on the problem.

Interviews are stressful. Keeping the candidate relaxed should be on the interviewer's mind.

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