Everyone I know doing recruiting says that FizzBuzz reliably disqualifies surprisingly large fraction of candidates. Even half of them, even after prefiltering by education or relevant experience.
That is a useless statement unless they followed the rejected candidates for a few more years at least. Otherwise it's just a tautology: They suck because my favorite test says so (i.e. because I say so).
Sure it weeds out "non-programmers" - any programming task (more than "Hello World") does. But how many people who are good programmers and just suck a) under pressure, b) especially when surprised are falsely out-selected?
I once failed to answer what a right join is. I got the (freelancer) job anyway - and of course I knew all along what that is, but when I got that question I had not used any joins in years (doing infrastructure work instead), and under interview pressure I can't think except along narrow lines. I ended up doing most of the complicated SQL queries in the department, with people coming to me because to me that was easy. After failing a very simple interview question on joins.
> That is a useless statement unless they followed the rejected candidates for a few more years at least. Otherwise it's just a tautology: They suck because my favorite test says so (i.e. because I say so).
The same comment could apply to any rejection criteria. At my employer, we do have some data, since we do reinterview candidates after years in-between, especially if they are fresh from college. I can't speak for our organization but yes, basic programming hurdles do reliably weed out bad candidates. This is based on my experience of having done more than 150 technical interviews, all of which were balanced against the feedback of the other interviewers. Failing basic programming problems is a good predictor.
> But how many people who are good programmers and just suck a) under pressure, b) especially when surprised are falsely out-selected?
Any kind of test that is given to candidates has the same risk.
But, let's break it down. Do you want to interview candidates for programming positions and _not_ have them program in some form or fashion during an interview? IMO that's nuts.
