Interviewing can be really hard and stressful. You need to make a decision about how well someone will fit into your organization. That in and of itself is hard enough; combined with the fact that you aren't given anywhere near the amount of time you need to assess their skill level and personally makes it even more difficult.
The best way to assess skill level is to ask questions that give the candidate questions that allow them to demonstrate their knowledge. But what kind of questions should you ask? Given that 199 of out 200 applicants can barely code, it makes sense to ask a question to weed out the 199. FizzBuzz is just the type of question to do this.
FizzBuzz, if you aren't, is a question that asks the candidate to write a simple program. Typically it's proposed similar to the following:
Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print Fizz instead of the number and for the multiples of five print Buzz . For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print FizzBuzz .
This question is specifically targets problem solving skills; something that all good programmers need to have. It also has the advantaged of targeting the 3 most fundamental concepts in computation: sequence, selection, and iteration. That is, it has loops, conditionals and the sequence of them matters to the output.
The way in which the question is asked usually trips people up too. Implementing the program exactly as it's specified will end up working incorrectly. Why? Have a look at this JavaScript implementation:
for (var i=1; i<=100; i++) {
if (i % 3 === 0 )
print("Fizz");
else if (i % 5 === 0)
print("Buzz");
else if (i % 3 === 0 && i % 5 === 0)
print("FizzBuzz");
}
Anything strike you as odd? The last condition is in the wrong place. If the value is divisible by 3 or 5 the if/else construct would have been broken out of in the first 2 conditions.
Whether or not someone gets the correct answer doesn't really matter. What's really being tested is the candidate's ability to convert a problem description into the language of logic in a reasonable amount of time. What's reasonable? Accounting for nerves I'd say it shouldn't take longer than 10 minutes. A good programmer should be able to solve inside of 5.
