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Comment by borramakot | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, I tried literally FizzBuzz on a couple of new grad candidates (my job is software, but we attract a lot of computer engineers). About half were able to do it without help. I no longer use FizzBuzz, but I'll use other very trivial questions to end an interview early if I suspect a resume has been significantly exaggerated.

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I work in embedded systems. We mainly write C. We ask candidates to implement strlen() in the phone screen. A surprising number are not able to. It's a very low bar, but still a useful filter.

Wow that is a low bar.

I've also asked similar questions for embedded roles. Lots of candidates can't implement their own strlen function. Most of my coding questions need 3-5 lines of basic C and lots of them struggle even if I give a couple hints.

  > I tried literally FizzBuzz on a couple of new grad candidates
  > About half were able to do it without help

So, one could do it, and one could not?

This is fascinating. How close did the unsuccessful candidates get? Did you give them any hints?

Did you let them run their code to test it, or was it a pure whiteboard exercise?

For the successful ones, what did you ask them next?

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