Good old FizzBuzz
After doing some harder LeetCode code problems, I decided to do a classic interview problem, FizzBuzz. Up until writing this blog post, I realized that I “never” saw this particular coding problem in my interviews (nor have I actually ever issued this question while conducting interviews) – in fact, I don’t even remember what it is.
I’m glad to say, I completed it very easily, but that got me thinking, why is such a easy question asked in interviews – so I asked around if any developers still use it as a candidate review process. I’m not passing any judgment here, I just wanted to know if it was still used and how.
- FizzBuzz is supposed to be easy. It’s often used as a first line of evaluation to quickly eliminate candidates early on in the process.
- It is used to evaluate if a person knows how to code at a basic level. I.e. using basic language constructs such as loops, if-statements, and primitive operators.
- A warm-up to more challenging questions.
While FizzBuzz may be trivial, it is possible to make simple mistakes, most common being the ordering of the if statements. In addition, the problem becomes immensely more complicated if you have forgotten about the modulo operator.
In my opinion, FizzBuzz should be retired. In today’s tech interviews which utilize take home assignment, coding sessions, and other evaluation methods, using FizzBuzz to immediately eliminate candidates because of a typo is overly harsh.
