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Comment by thomasjudge | Hacker News Reader

https://joelgrus.com/2016/05/23/fizz-buzz-in-tensorflow/

There was another great satirical take on FizzBuzz which had something to do with runes and incantation and magical spells...? I sort of remember that the same author maybe even wrote a follow up? to this extremely experienced developer solving FizzBuzz in the most arcane way possible.

Does this ring a bell for anyone?

---

Found it!

https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical-intervie...

https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview

https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview

https://aphyr.com/posts/353-rewriting-the-technical-intervie... (the FizzBuzz one)

https://aphyr.com/posts/354-unifying-the-technical-interview

wow.

One of my favorite blog posts of all time: https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview

"Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act"

Does aphyr even have comments, or is it a pure political protest?

That's the first thing that's tempted to break out an ssh tunnel - I can live without the occasional NSFW reddit group.

They do show comments at the bottom of the posts.

Thanks for the memory reminder, I read them when they first came out. They are still highly amusing today!

This would be an offer on the spot from me

> me: It's more of a "I can't believe you're asking me that."

> interviewer: Great, we find that candidates who can't get this right don't do well here.

> me: ...

Shit attitude from that candidate, considering the interviewer is completely correct. I wouldn't hire them since they are obviously a problem employee.

For those that don't know, Fizz Buzz is less an aptitude test and more of an attitude test. That's why this candidate failed and didn't get the job.

For those that don't know even more, this interview never happened and this interviewer doesn't exist. It's a funny joke on the internet.

If the candidate didn't even show up to an interview, they're definitely not worth hiring. :p

> Fizz Buzz is less an aptitude test and more of an attitude test

The amount of (highly credentialed) interviewees that can't 0-shot a correct and fully functional fizzbuzz is also way higher than a lot of people would think. That's where the attitude part also comes in.

> For those that don't know, Fizz Buzz is less an aptitude test and more of an attitude test.

The articles which popularised FizzBuzz as an interview question stated as a categorical fact that most computer science graduates or programmer candidates (one article even said 199/200!![2]) cannot do FizzBuzz[1,2,3] and were absolutely recommending it as an aptitude test.

I personally think this whole thing was simply untrue back in 2007 (or at the very least incredibly overstated) and we are paying the price for it with ridiculous 15-stage interviews as a paranoid response to some urban legend from ~20 years ago.

[1]: https://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-de... [2]: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/01/dont-overthink-fizzbuzz.... [3]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

A massively over-engineered, incorrect solution?

A candidate that appreciates the value of the question, yet won't subject themselves to the absurdity of demonstrating compliance.

Yes, very much yes.

I'd worry about them over-complicating solutions at work as well.

I definitely wouldn't want to work on your team, if that's how you interpret such an answer. Perfect interview then -- we've both eliminated the other as a viable employee/employer, so that's a win and we got there from just 1 trivial coding question. There's so much more to say here, but this is no longer timely, plus this isn't great forum for such discussion.

FWIW I have never been asked this question or similar, but since it's so famous I do have my own answer at the ready, which is just slightly more complex than the naive solution, but still well within the realm of production-worthy (maintainable, testable, readable) code. We don't really ever see any discussion of such because of course it isn't "interesting".

Along that line, an over-engineered fizzBuzz using lazy list operations:

https://github.com/taolson/Admiran/blob/main/examples/fizzBu...

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