>Fizzbizz? Naah. What you want to do is something more like Minesweep.
The whole idea is that fizzbuzz weeds out tons of people who don't know how to do it, plus it's simple to do in a very short meeting for someone who knows programming it's like 30 seconds tops.
So Minesweeper doesn't make sense in this context. Even trying to convey the exact set of rules it will have to follow for the gameplay takes time (and, no, not everybody has "played it before").
I really struggle with the concept that some programmers cannot write FizzBuzz. I'd expect it from someone who has finished their first programming unit.
I'm not sure I even believe you. Maybe you would refuse to do it because you don't want to, but you've spent 25 years as a successful developer and you can't write out fizzbuzz on a whiteboard?
I haven't been a professional developer for anywhere near 25 years, but I could write fizzbuzz while blindfolded, on a wet bar napkin after a couple of drinks, in any one of at least half a dozen languages.
If someone asked you to write down the answer to 3+5 would you struggle with that as well? To me, fizzbuzz is barely a set up in terms of complexity.
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).
Controversial opinion of my own: not being able to solve fizzbuzz doesn't necessarily indicate lack of programming ability. The "trick" there is the modulus operator, and I can easily imagine somebody who was otherwise a good, experienced, effective developer never having come across the modulus operator.
Programming on paper opposite an examiner with a stopwatch is indeed unrealistic. I don't disagree that FizzBuzz is crazy simple as a programming challenge.
I thought the point of the FizzBuzz was that the asker doesn't care about 'clever' (for some definition of clever) answers, but rather, "Can this person actually write something which solves the problem, no matter how brain dead a solution"
Did you call it fizzbuzz or pascals triangle and is that how they were able to google it? If you change the parameters to ducky-fuzz (the drinking game variant) and describe the requirements they shouldn't be able to google an answer, at least not a 100% one.
I've been programming for 35 years and I can't fizzbuzz cause I don't know what it is. Yes, I've heard about it before cause it's mentioned on forums, and I even looked it up once, but I always consider such things childish. (I honestly don't remember anything about it.) Ask me about an algorithm and I'm there but don't play games with me.
EDIT: Just looked it up. Yep. A game. Now compare that to my years of accomplishments and you'll say asking me to write fizzbuzz childish, too.
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