Maybe I'm weird for this and just thinking about it because of the hello world thread, but one of the things I've honestly found is that in most cases, fizz buzz really is kinda the best tech screen problem out there. Vary it up a little if you want, but if you're looking for the bare minimum "has this person heard of control flow" and "does this person think to ask clarifying questions about requirements" it is the tiniest shell of a problem that doesn't require someone to actually be able to remember algorithms under fire in an interview
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in reply to @aune's post:
Hiring is still incredibly broken and honestly at certain levels just gets into "trial employment is almost the only way to know if this is gonna work" and I'm not smart enough to have solutions to that
Honestly for anything besides a junior level (in which case skills tests are good enough) the programming problem itself matters way less in my view vs how the candidate talks about the problem or code. I tend to favor code review questions over writing code during interviews, because of this. Fizzbuzz isn't really meaty enough for that kind of interview, though, but I think there's plenty of problems that have lots of details to handle but aren't algorithmically complex.
I kinda think "set up a statically-generated site with unit tests for your frontend JS" would be a killer test for a senior or maybe staff engineer just to test you on "do you actually understand the platforms you work on or are they magic black boxes".
Completely agree. I've got a similar test (review, presentation for a toy application) for staff and architect level candidates and it is........ Incredibly telling how few people are past the black box step
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