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Comment by jcz_nz | Hacker News Reader

Very clever! Also, I’d steer absolutely clear of any company that does this.

This doesn’t assess anything meaningful, it’s an ego trip for the interviewer. Ugh.

Oh, I guess a few of these additional rules might prove helpful for weeding out people who just memorized FizzBuzz but don't know much more.

However, all of these "don't use the right tools" and "write extremely compact code" rules mostly select for people who are good in code golf, not for people who can solve actual business problems or write maintainable software.

And it seems like this was the only programming challenge in the whole interview?!

This is my takeaway, like maybe 3 extra rules would be worthwhile but by god there is too many, what are you learning here for something so simple as fizzbuzz

I think it's supposed to test refactoring and debugging abilities, but it just didn't work and they didn't know what to do. Anyway trying to argue that 0 is not a multiple of 3 is a big red flag.

Yep. All those extra rules missed the entire point of FizzBuzz - people who have trouble writing code fail at even simple thing like FizzBuzz.

The extra rules presented sequentially and their interactions might have revealed more about both parties, but it's hard to tell without seeing them in person.

Disagree, this is a significant step up from the leetcode-style programming puzzles that other companies do. It doesn't bank on the interviewee knowing the specific trick that makes the puzzle work and instead tries to somewhat test the skills that are more significant for the job at hand like debugging, refactoring and dealing with changing requirements.

That was likely the thought process of the interviewers, however wrong.

FizzBuzz works well enough as a lowest common denominator screening test, but it doesn't scale up. At its core, it's an entirely made up problem with no relevance to anything you may ever do at a job. How do you evaluate requirements for a problem that is not real?

The higher level the skills you want to test, the more realistic your questions have to get.

A real job is often simialar to fizzbuzz in that there is no eligant solutians. There are several solutions but they all have some special case. a real world problem would take you a week to solve though and so we can't give them to you in an hour.

Most leetcode questions are just asking if you can recognize the same 15 core CS algorithms in different situations and pick the right one.

A few have a trick or insight but I haven’t ran across those in interviews.

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