At work, we have been discussing the role of FizzBuzz question during the interview process. We started the discussion in reference to the following blog posts.
Post 1.
Post 2.
I thought I would add my two cents to the mix.
While I think a candidate for a developer position should be able to solve FizzBuzz questions, I don't think FizzBuzz questions are fare during an interview.
I think what is more beneficial is to ask a candidate about their past work projects. Get them to white board, and ask the candidate questions that will show if he/she really understood the business problem and the solution. Question them about why they did A, or if they thought about using B… and so on.
As developers we do have resources (Google, Msdn, Blogs, ...) that we can use to do our jobs, so why would we expect interviewees to know something that could be easily looked up. It is impossible to memorize everything and to judge someone by how fast they come up with an answer to a question is foolish. I know a co-worker even stated that when asked questions like this, usually the first thing he does is try to figure out if it is a trick question and he looks at the problem from a lot of different ways until he decided the easy basic answer is right. It takes him some time to do this but I think this process is better than someone just taking answering the question with the easy basic answer.
So there are my thoughts to it all.
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