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Comment by abramN | Hacker News Reader

I actually have the candidates do FizzBuzz! And, it's still amazing how many people can't figure it out, or try and BS their way through it by proposing using a crazy data structure like a B-Tree (true story).

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I have a serious question: what kind of job is that? Like what is the job description? I‘m currently working in academia in geoinformatics (mostly with image data, json files and data frames in general as well as the occasional Spatialite or Postgres database) and have no idea where I’d end up outside of academia. I don’t know how good my programming skills are, I don’t know what kind of job I could/will get and what life would look like for me outside of academia.

That's both amazing and disturbing. If you ask me to write FizzBuzz, I can do that with my eyes closed. If you asked me to write FizzBuzz using a B-Tree, I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to do it.

By the way, after they write FizzBuzz, ask them to modify it so that it prints "Rawr" or something if it's divisible by 7. If they printed "FizzBuzz" if it was divisible by 15, do they change their approach? If not, keep adding more strings for more prime factors until they do, or until they melt.

For me the question would be what to print: do I print "Rawr" for e.g. 105 or do I print "FizzBuzz" now? What do we prioritize? Am I missing something?

You would print "FizzBuzzRawr".

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