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Comment by iopq | Hacker News Reader

Would you rather get someone who can do fizzbuzz correctly on a board the first time in 7 minutes or someone who can write it in 1 minute on a laptop incorrectly, test it, and fix it in 30 seconds?

I see no value in the "gotcha" of you made a logic mistake since we all make them and there's a reason why we test code

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If they make 1 'logic mistake' on fizzbuzz then it's likely they'll make 10x, or more, 'logic mistakes' on their actual work. Even with a laptop and all the tooling that makes them 10x better, because the real work will be at least 100x more complex.

I made a mistake in fizzbuzz the first time I did it on a whiteboard because I wrote it in "pseudocode"

I wrote if (n % 15) print "fizzbuzz" ...

I got away with it because my interviewer assumed it was some kind of shell which means 0 is true

I should have written n % 15 == 0 to be absolutely clear what I'm doing

note that in Rust this won't even compile:

    3 |     if n % 15 {
      |        ^^^^^^ expected `bool`, found integer

But I don't have the type checker to find mistakes for me when writing on a whiteboard which is not realistic. I can't commit this code because CI wouldn't merge a build failure anyway

Huh? Did you accidentally share private notes?

No, I'm saying I've made a logic mistake in Fizzbuzz in an interview because I forgot to put == 0 in the condition. If you think that makes me a bad programmer, that's your problem, I just don't think whiteboard interviews are representative of the pull requests I do after working for several hours on something

What? It seems like you have the problem?

I don't think I've ever interviewed anyone like this, so far?

The comment is bit too bizarre to puzzle out.

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