hailingfreqopen

I attempt that but the line you always get is "well we have to do this so that we can compare all candidates equally".

I've been past that step many times. It only means facing the same thing with multiple people while being stuck in a room with someone demanding to hear what you're thinking as you try to actually think and then hoping you don't freeze up at some point.

At least in my case it's trivial to prove it's my code. (Or possibly I'm _really_ good at photoshopping videos of myself and have also spent a ton of time coming up with elaborate answers to every potential question covering tens of thousands of lines of open source code.) But for any sufficiently large project it's not that hard to figure out if the person actually wrote it just by asking a few questions.

(OP): To be more clear, it's not FizzBuzz per se but the general idea. In reality it's always more complex than the original FizzBuzz problem (I've never actually seen something that simple.) It usually goes "solve this puzzle". "OK, now can you do it faster?" "I see you have a syntax error, what is it?" (Two minutes later, oh crap I forgot a semi-colon.) And then repeat all of that with three other people, each with their own puzzle.

It's easy, for me at least, to freeze up at any time in that process and stop being able to do anything at all, even if in a normal work setting it wouldn't be a problem. It seems rather ridiculous, or at least frustrating, that the job hinges on that process.

> who write lisp compilers for fun, in a weekend

Ironically I've got that one covered in spades. :) But I may or (more likely) may not be able to do your puzzle on a whiteboard in front of you.

It's not that I don't know I'm a good programmer it's why is a coding challenge more important than actual experience?

> a euphemism for abstract coding challenges

Yes. People seem to like to come up with their own "clever" versions.

True but they also seem to enjoy watching you solve puzzles anyways.

It's one thing to have a simple challenge to see if the person can write code but it seems that places put more value on that than anything else technically related.